Temporal Horizons and the Reorganization of Moral Life

Daphne Fietz, Yale University

This paper argues that temporal horizon is a missing axis of moral ecology: a constitutive dimension of how moral grammars operate, and one whose destabilization generates distinctive forms of moral disorientation and reorganization. While the sociology of morality has mapped how moral frameworks are shaped by cultural traditions, institutional contexts, and material environments, it has largely treated time as context rather than as a structural feature. Equally, the sociology of time has demonstrated that actors actively construct and coordinate temporal horizons, but has not theorized how those horizons are presupposed by the temporal logics embedded in moral grammars. The paper develops a framework that brings these two literatures together. Moral grammars, I argue, contain implicit temporal arcs that specify whether worth accumulates toward a future outcome, is enacted in present practice, or is sustained through ongoing adherence to obligation. These arcs presuppose specific temporal horizons, and when those horizons shift, actors experience moral-temporal misalignment: a condition in which the grammar's criteria of worth, its arc of obligation, and its account of what counts as progress no longer connect to available futures. Actors can respond through temporal work, disengagement, or moral reorganization, the least theorized of the three, in which the temporal architecture of the grammar itself is reanchored through the mobilization of latent moral-temporal repertoires. Four cases illustrate this mechanism across different contexts, temporal scales, and degrees of repertoire distance: a German climate resistance group navigating political foreclosure, medical trainees in Malawi sustaining vocation under structural scarcity, Salvadoran insurgents reorganizing as horizons opened rather than closed, and MSF in Baghdad as a case of failed reanchoring and fragmentation. Together they show that moral reorganization is neither abandonment nor preservation of moral commitment, but its creative transformation under pressure.

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 Presented in Session 64. Theorizing and Morality in Historical Social Science II: Time, Space, and Process