Living through institutions

The question for this week concerns Robert Bellah's notion that “we live through institutions” and in particular, what this means in relation to ethics, both "personal" and "social."

My approach to this question comes from the perspective of someone who is much more interested in social issues than "personal" ethics.  Moral issues focused on the private sphere and our personal lives (including those relating to personal relationships, sexuality, reproduction, etc.) seem to receive more attention than those that are explicitly social and political.  This is in part because of the high level of individualism in American culture, and Bellah and his colleagues discuss in their book Habits of the Heart.  Their point is that this individualism sometimes gives us an illusion of being more isolated from others, and more self-sufficient, than we really are.  Humans are social animals, and every aspect of our lives is influenced by our relations to other people and by our embeddedness in social, economic, and political institutions. This means that even when we think a moral issue is private or personal in nature, there are often larger implications.  If we are to do good moral analysis and come to good ethical decisions, we need to see this larger picture.

Good examples might be abortion and pornography, both of which were mentioned by students in last week's discussions.  Both are often portrayed as purely private choices or activities, but both are also the subject of much heated debate.  Sometimes people argue that there is debate not because these are in fact not private but rather because some people want to "dictate" their private morality to others. 

Bellah's quotation offers a different way to view this.  There are countless institutions -- from schools and families to insurance companies and legislatures -- that shape people's experiences of sex, pregnancy, childbirth, abortion, and childrearing.  Similarly, some of the same institutions (as well as others) shape the way people think about and experience pornography.  Each one of us comes to our personal experiences and opinions of these issues as a result of being shaped by institutions.  Our moral opinions never emerge in a vacuum, in other words, and they are never something we just thought up all by ourselves. 

Bellah helps to make a point that I think is important:  since we are social animals by nature, maybe all ethics is social ethics.  What do you think?