Prisons, human vibrations, and the case for moral social scholarship

Abstract Chapter 1 introduces the book, sets out the background, and outlines its main themes. It explores four ideas: the prison as an unexpected location of moral experience; the crucial role of human vibrations in our lives; the amenability of moral values to empirical study; and the case for moral social scholarship—a term the author prefers to an older, albeit recently rehabilitated label, ‘moral science’. She shows how moral life can be studied systematically, it can have an empirical basis, and it can be grounded in detailed intellectual work. The task in this book is to demonstrate, by exploring what goes on in prison in depth, the meaning and relevance of being human: non-mechanical persons with complex inner lives, capacities, and relationships with others. Drawing on insights from the work of George Eliot, and philosopher Iris Murdoch, the author shows how the special conditions of prison provide a kind of intensification of processes that are ordinary, but morally-inflected. She describes her work in prisons as ‘a phenomenology of moral experience’. Research carried out in prison tells us much about ordinary human needs and the absence or presence of the virtues. It shows us their effects. Prisoners undergoing long prison sentences in particular gain clear insight into the density of moral experience and the significance of relationships. They often come to see, more clearly than those outside prison, that our very conception of what it is to be human is flawed.