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Sean Hier, Good moral panics? Normative ambivalence, social reaction, and coexisting responsibilities in everyday life, Curr Sociology (July 4, 2016)

Abstract

This article breaks the silence on the politically progressive characteristics of a moral panic. In contrast to the tacit scholarly consensus that moral panics entail regressively conservative social reactions to putative harms, moral panics are alternatively conceptualized as normatively ambivalent operations of power. The article builds on continuing efforts to conceptualize moral panic as a form of moral regulation by explaining how moral panics are capable of perpetuating as well as disrupting and potentially even reversing the norms of intelligibility that buttress hegemonic understandings of, and moral responsiveness to, violence, injustice, suffering, and harm.

Good moral panics?

Theoretically there can be ‘negative’ moral panics (the traditional ones that criminologists so readily detect, expose, and criticize) but also ‘positive’ ones where we approve the values behind the ‘panic’ but not the label itself. It sounds considerably more sensible to talk of an ‘approved crusade’ than an ‘approved panic’. But this would lose precisely the particular connotation of ‘panic’ that one wants to retain! (Cohen, 2011: 241)

Can moral panics be politically progressive and desirable – using Cohen’s (2011) terminology, can they be ‘good’? For those activists who sociologists disapprovingly classify as moral entrepreneurs, ostensible moral panics are intrinsically virtuous: they draw attention to, and mobilize social reactions against, immanent threats to societal values and interests. To be sure, claims-making activities that are commonly recognized by sociologists as self-evident examples of a moral panic appear otherwise to moral entrepreneurs as legitimate social reactions to putative harms. Beyond the truism that so-labeled moral entrepreneurs genuinely believe in and emotionally identify with the righteousness of their grievances, the proposition that a moral panic can be good poses an important set of challenges to the conceptual assumptions and normative motivations that underscore both conventional and reconstructed approaches to studies in moral panic.

It was none other than Stanley Cohen (1999, 2003, 2011) himself who provoked speculation about the prospect that a moral panic can be ‘good.’ Cohen’s juxtaposition of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ moral panics represents a sociological vernacular denoting the implicit value judgments underscoring the bulk of research on moral panics. By labeling a set of activities as a moral panic, says Cohen, sociologists selectively denounce claims about putative problems as exaggerated representations that hide more than they reveal about actually existing threats. This style of argumentation is problematic, Jenkins (2009) explains, because the left-liberal consensus that prevails among social scientists masks an ideological bias towards conceptualizing moral panics as regressively conservative social reactions that only propagate and reinforce existing divisions and social inequalities. One of the ironies of conceptualizing moral panics exclusively in terms of hegemonic control functions is that it ignores how panics also operate as a mystifying form of political correctness with a left-political bent (Cohen, 2011).

In his later attempts to re-conceptualize moral panics in terms of more common political struggles linked to the means of cultural (re)production, Cohen (2003) continued to acknowledge that moral panic is a value-laden concept. At the same time, he insisted that moral panics denote a fundamentally undifferentiated sentiment that ‘something should be done,’ regardless of whether that something is ‘malignant (those that result in more harm than good), benign (those that result in more social good), or simply a waste of time’ (Cohen, 1999: 589). Cohen was especially interested in how the dynamics of what sociologists commonly assume to be ‘bad’ moral panics could be harnessed to subvert the silences contributing towards the persistence of human cruelty and suffering. He therefore stressed the ethical importance of encouraging ‘good’ moral panics – for Cohen, a human rights imperative oriented towards exposing, disrupting, and reversing the cognitive, emotional, and cultural mechanisms of denial that thwart unfettered recognition of violence, atrocity, suffering, and injustice (and see Cohen, 2001).

Despite the political and ethical exigencies associated with developing an analytical framework for empirically investigating if not intentionally cultivating moral panics that implicitly derive from and reinforce sociology’s liberal consensus, Cohen’s occasional musings have not penetrated the imaginations of moral panic scholars very deeply. Observers have increasingly commented on the possibility that moral panics can be cultivated on the political left – for instance, by feminists, anti-racists, climate change activities, and anti-denial movements (e.g., David et al., 2011; Garland, 2008; Hunt, 2011; Rohloff, 2011). At least one criminologist has also deliberately sidestepped moral panic to explore the cultural mechanisms of denial contributing towards human rights violations in post-9/11 America (Welch, 2006). Besides much more than a passing intellectual curiosity, however, a studied silence characterizes speculation that moral panics can be oriented towards benevolent ends.

The contrarian analysis developed over the pages that follow breaks the silence on the politically progressive characteristics of a moral panic. In contrast to the tacit scholarly consensus that moral panics singularly consist of conservative social reactions, sometimes exaggerating and distorting actual threats to human safety and wellbeing, panics are conceptualized as normatively ambivalent operations of power. By conceptualizing moral panics as normatively ambivalent operations of power, the article explains how panics are not only capable of perpetuating but also disrupting and potentially even reversing the norms of intelligibility that buttress hegemonic understandings of, and moral responsiveness to, violence, injustice, suffering, and harm.

The article is presented in three parts. The first part situates the proposition that moral panics can be ‘good’ in the context of ongoing debates about the deconstruction and reconstruction of conventional moral panic studies. Emphasis is placed on the most developed (and defended) post-conventional framework that conceptualizes moral panic as a short-term expression of routine moral regulation processes in everyday life – especially but not exclusively regulatory discourses that are transmitted through claims about risk, harm, and personal responsibility. This first section illustrates how conceptualizing moral panics in relation to risk-based problems and the contemporary norms of individual responsibility contributes towards a more analytically defensible framework for investigating many current day episodes of moral panics. It does so by explaining how individual responsibilization techniques can cultivate and reinforce political subjectivities that impede moral sensibilities and ethical responsiveness to care for, coexist with, and assist others (cf. Gilson, 2014) when normative codes for the responsible care of the self are temporary transposed into collective forms of defensive risk management.

Notwithstanding the explanatory advantages conferred by reconstructing the conventional focus of analysis, the second part of the article explains how the regulatory perspective remains unnecessarily bound to a reductively negative understanding of moral panic. It does so by virtue of its asymmetrical normative value orientation (i.e., that panics are regressively hegemonic) and its selectively instrumental emphasis on individual responsibility as the single (hegemonic) norm against which all other forms of social and community (re)action are measured against. To move beyond the reductively negative suppositions that condition the common sense of moral panic studies, this second section provides two contemporary examples of audience reactions to witnessing violence and injustice – animal poaching and racially motivated police violence – to demonstrate how caring relations and social obligations represent coexisting forms of responsibility that complement, compete with, and potentially contradict forms of entrepreneurial subjectivity.

By conceptualizing moral panics as social reactions that are cultivated on the political right as well as the left, the article problematizes the curious lack of analytical attention that has been devoted to normativity in moral panic studies. Despite more than 30 years of criticism about normative bias in moral panic research, remarkably little attention has been focused on how norms operate. The article does not advance a non-normative theory of moral panic. On the contrary, it is argued that all human actions are inflected by norms. What the article encourages, then, is an explicit conceptualization of normativity as an ambivalent operation of power, whereby moral panics are explained in terms of a particular style of claims-making that does not derive a priori from a definitive political standpoint.

To widen the discussion of normativity in the sociology of moral panic, the final part of the article draws on Judith Butler’s theorization on the ramifying ambivalence of the regulatory and constitutive effects of norms. The purpose of using Butler’s arguments about primary vulnerability is not to represent the entirety of her complicated framework. The aim, rather, is to develop deeper insights into the relationship between normativity and responsibility as a way to begin thinking beyond the reductively negative suppositions that inform conventional and contemporary studies in moral panic. In doing so, the tacit normative assumption that cuts across studies in moral panic – that is, the notion that ‘right thinking’ people (Cohen, 2003) invoke a singular set of hegemonic norms to exploit the vulnerabilities of disenfranchised groups – is replaced with an explanation of norms as both enabling and constraining moral action through their diverse instantiations and reiterations. Moral panics are thus conceptualized as normatively ambivalent operations of power that derive both from conservatively regressive social reactions to putative harms and liberally progressive relations of compassion, care, and social obligation that can be both fleeting and circumscribed.

Moral panic studies

Tracing back to the 1970s, a conventional set of assumptions has conditioned the ways in which sociologists conceptualize and investigate episodes of moral panic. The central aim of conventional studies in moral panic is to show how people in positions of power construct packages of claims that amplify deviance in a manner that is disproportionate to actual threats. Conceptualized through a conventional lens, moral panics are commonly understood as conservative social reactions that obstruct the ability of vulnerable groups to equally participate in social life.

Although conventional frameworks continue to inform a growing body of moral panic research, deconstructionist studies dating to the 1980s have firmly established a set of empirical critiques that invalidate conventional explanatory assumptions (e.g., McRobbie and Thornton, 1995; Ungar, 2001; Waddington, 1986). The paramount critique concerns analytical problems associated with relying on negative normative judgments about proportional representation and motivational rationality as baseline measurement criteria (Hunt, 1999; Rohloff and Wright, 2010). Critics charge that in the absence of a clear understanding about what constitutes proportional representation or what a measured response might look like, it is analytically indefensible to haphazardly differentiate moral panics from seemingly legitimate fields of political contestation and resistance (e.g., social problem frames about environmental dumping, corporate and financial crimes, gun control legislation, climate change).

Moreover, encouraged by the changing dynamics of media platforms, political communications, claims-making activities, and social control processes, critics charge that when negative normative judgments are made about social reactions to putative problems, analysts rely on an additional set of unsustainable behavioral criteria to demonstrate that a panic has in fact happened (Hier, 2016). Rather than exploring the ways that moral panics cultivate contemporary identities and strengthen political agendas, conventionally oriented panic scholars exploit a narrow range of normatively laden measurement criteria to either aver that a set of claims equates to a moral panic or to rhetorically debunk selective problem frames. In both cases, the result is a reductively negative understanding of moral panic by virtue of its definitional criteria and its underlying normative value orientation (cf., Gilson, 2014).

Reconstructing moral panic studies

Beginning in the early 2000s, a growing number of studies has advanced beyond deconstructionist contributions by reconstructing the conventional focus of analysis (e.g., Carlson, 2015; Rohloff, 2011; Wright, 2015). The most developed (and defended) post-conventional framework conceptualizes moral panics as short-term expression of ongoing moral regulation processes (Hier, 2002a2002b, 2008, 2011a, 2015, 2016). As Hunt explains, moral regulation is an important form of politics in everyday life that is transmitted through dialectical practices of signification, whereby ‘some people act to problematise the conduct, values or culture of others and seek to impose regulation upon them’ (1999: 1). Ranging from nineteenth-century narratives on character development to twenty-first-century cultural tropes promoting personal responsibility, moral regulation discourses not only problematize the conduct of others but also affirm the conduct of oneself. In this way, the moralization of certain identities, subjectivities, and ways of living can be understood to operate proactively through a moral economy of conduct (Hier, 2002a). The latter consists of various attempts, both within and beyond the state domain, to encourage, invite, and/or persuade others to manage their own comportment through various modalities of social discipline (e.g., institutional rules, lifestyle advice, public courtesies, mutual obligations).

Since moral panics emerge from and impinge on processes of moral regulation in everyday life, they, too, are transmitted through a dialectical set of signifying practices that link the conduct of others to the conduct of oneself. Despite the empirical overlap, however, moral panics can be analytically differentiated from moral regulation; panics do not proactively democratize responsibility for managing the self by encouraging people to act on their own ethical conduct. As volatile disturbances in the moral regulation of everyday life, whereby ongoing regulatory activities are perceived to be failing, panics operate reactively to constrain rather than inculcate particular identities, subjectivities, behaviors, and/or life ways. In contrast to moral regulation discourses, which democratize responsibility for the ethical management of the self by expressing the dominant cultural norms against which individuals are invited to measure or align their own conduct, moral panics entail volatile individualizing attributions of harm that compartmentalize social problem frames by assigning causality for moral transgression(s) to specific others. Moral panics are, therefore, conceptualized as defensive social reactions aimed at isolating, controlling, and/or excluding threatening others by appealing to a moral economy of harm (Hier, 2002a).

Risk, harm, and personal responsibility

Notwithstanding the generic conceptual foundation(s) shared by otherwise empirically and historically diverse processes of moral regulation, important developments have occurred in the ways in which contemporary regulatory discourses – and therefore moral panic ones – are communicated and acted upon. Although morality was a fairly clear genre in the nineteenth century, the cultural boundary separating morality from immorality has since blurred (Hunt, 1999). Rather than operating on the basis of dialectical moralizing judgments that sharply distinguish right from wrong ways of living, contemporary moral regulation discourses are routinely communicated in a dialectical form that is indexed to a liberal conception of morality valuing individual and community rights to freedom from harm (see Hier, 2011a). What this means empirically is that moral regulation discourses embody judgments about right and wrong ways of living, but they are commonly transmitted indirectly through the proxies of risk, harm, and personal responsibility.

Risk-based problems in everyday life assume a common conceptual structure that allows for regulatory processes to be analytically (and empirically) distinguished from moral panics. The problematization of myriad risks in the moral regulation of everyday life is frequently addressed to entrepreneurial citizen-subjects who are assumed to be rationally motivated to take personal responsibility for managing risk and avoiding harm. Because risk-based problems in everyday life offer individuals a set of opportunities to proactively manage the emotional uncertainties and inherent vulnerabilities of everyday living (Rose, 1999), they encourage forms of subjectivity that can abnegate collective responsibilities to ensure the wellbeing of others by individualizing responsibility for risk management and harm reduction. Not only does the active cultivation of invulnerability against the contingencies of everyday life derive from a reductively negative understanding of vulnerability as an undesirable condition to be avoided (i.e., harm), it also reinforces a concomitant normative understanding of vulnerability as a bad character trait or moral failing brought about through irresponsible self-management (Gilson, 2014). It is for this reason that contemporary moral regulation discourses are commonly transmitted through dialectical modes of address that individualize responsibility for the management of risk in relation to generalized representations of (irresponsibly induced) harm to be avoided.

The ideological effects associated with risk-based problems in everyday life are found at the point where individuals are able to identify with discourses calling for prudent forms of individual risk management, sometimes provoking ethical and material changes in the ways in which people think about and act on themselves and others. Although the problematization of risk in everyday life encourages certain ways of being human, it does not impose an absolute prescription on how to live one’s life (Hunt, 1999). Moral panic discourses do not offer opportunities to manage positively coded risks on an individual level because responsibility for transgression/harm is allocated to irresponsible others: those who are perceived as failing to internalize and embrace prudent forms of risk management, thereby threatening the sense of invulnerability that is cultivated among self-regulating, autonomous, and responsible citizen-subjects.

It follows that moral panics represent a form of volatile complaint based on the real or perceived normative transgressions of others. They do not only conjure up emotions that are associated with potential victimhood (e.g., fear, worry, insecurity), but also ones connected to grievances levied against the putative harms that have come about through the irresponsible actions of imprudent others (e.g., anger, frustration, outrage, disgust). As a temporary interruption in ongoing moral regulation processes, moral panics are commonly expressed through normative configurations of risk, harm, and personal responsibility. The difference is that the dynamics of risk-based problems in everyday life are reversed during panic episodes; thus panics are routinely expressed as negatively coded risks to be avoided. During a moral panic, harm is individualized to specific folk devils and risk management becomes a collective activity. Moral panics are therefore aptly conceptualized in terms of grievance- rather than risk-based problems that are transmitted through discourses that individualize blame for transgression and harm to specific and identifiable others in the interest of fostering a sense of existential safety, security, and/or community wellbeing.

Rethinking responsibilities, social obligations, and relations of care

Reconstructing moral panic as a form of moral regulation provides at least two explanatory advantages beyond conventional frameworks. First, by deriving the representational dynamics of moral panics analytically rather than inductively from historically and culturally specific case studies, a stronger understanding of the conceptual components shared by all moral panics is realized. Second, by widening and reconstructing the focus of analysis beyond the parameters of otherwise discrete claims-making episodes, and by specifically conceptualizing panics in relation to the disciplinary norms of individual responsibility, not only is a fuller theoretical account of the conditions of emergence for many contemporary panic episodes realized. Deeper analytical insights are also gleaned into the political dynamics that condition the unique discursive form of moral panics and the normative codes for contemporary living that panic episodes both derive from and contribute towards.

Setting aside these well-established explanatory advantages, the regulatory perspective has not fully shed the lure of conceptualizing moral panics as a sequence of reductively negative social reactions. The regulatory perspective has generated a set of conceptual and theoretical resources to clearly demarcate, and explicate the political significance of, episodes of moral panic. Yet the purpose of reconstructing moral panic as a form of moral regulation, primarily but not exclusively through the theoretical lens of neoliberal governmentality, has been hitherto reactively oriented towards increasing the reliability of empirical investigation. It has not been proactively oriented towards conceptualizing panics as normatively ambivalent operations of power based on their representational – rather than negatively coded – characteristics. Put differently, although important theoretical and conceptual correctives have been introduced into moral panic studies by linking moral panic to both a (generic) regulatory and (specific) responsibilization framework, underlying conventional problems associated with reductively negative value judgments have not been fully expunged from investigation.

Nor has the regulatory perspective fully engaged with the range of overlapping subjectivities, social obligations, and relations of care that are cultivated in the intermediary spaces between contemporary discourses of individual and collective responsibilities. Given that the regulatory perspective was designed to provide a viable explanatory alternative to remedy the poverty of conventional frameworks, it has inadvertently fostered an overly mechanical understanding of how moral panics flow a priori from putative disruptions in the otherwise routine course of individualized self-conduct. The regulatory perspective has, therefore, not only simplified the ways in which responsibilization strategies interpellate citizen-subjects in a singularly reductive, and possibly deterministic, fashion. It has also bracketed out the myriad of ways that contemporary responsibilities are imagined and enacted on the basis of several ethical domains that can contradict, complement, and/or coexist with neoliberal modes of entrepreneurial subjectification.

Relations of care: Non-human animal suffering

An extensive literature has demonstrated how discourses promoting individual responsibility fail to interpellate citizen-subjects in a predictably deterministic manner. Studies ranging from the responsibility transfer strategies that people use to externalize blame for environmental and technological risks (Bickerstaff et al., 2008) to justifications provided by gay and bisexual men for engaging in unprotected sexual practices (Adam, 2005) have shown how coexisting modes of responsibility give rise to a variety of ambivalences, resistances, and new forms of governance. To be sure, empirical inquiry into multiple modes and levels of responsibilization describes the ways in which individualized responsibility can function as a cultural burden that suppresses moral sensitivities by closing people off from other modes of experience and engagement (Gilson, 2014). At the same time, empirical inquiry also shows how responsibility entails a more complex set of obligations and relations of care that can simultaneously cultivate forms of acknowledging, recognizing, and attending to the suffering of vulnerable others – not all of whom are human others.

Indeed, the volatile international indignation expressed in response to the trophy killing of Cecil-the-lion (so-called Cecil-gate) in the summer of 2015 provides an instructive example of the ways in which responsibility is imagined and enacted through relations of caring for and attending to the needless suffering of (non-human) others. Cecil was a 13-year-old radio-collared lion living in Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe. He was both popular with tourists and part of a longitudinal study at Oxford University’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit. In July 2015, an American dentist and hunting client, Walter Palmer, paid US$54 000 for a permit to poach a lion on the outskirts of the game reserve (Walsh and Stahl, 2015). On 1 July, Cecil was illegally lured out of the park and onto an adjacent private farm, shot with an arrow, tracked for 40 hours, and finally killed with a bullet. The lion was subsequently beheaded and skinned by a hunter who accompanied Palmer.

News of Cecil’s killing broke on 28 July when the UK’s Daily Telegraph reported that an American hunter had shot and killed the lion (Alexander et al., 2015). On the same day, hundreds of thousands of people contributed towards the public shaming of Palmer as the news item went viral on Twitter and Facebook. Walter’s professional Yelp Page was flooded with threats (including a range of vitriol), almost 200 000 people signed a petition on Petitionsite.com to condemn the incident (more that a million signatories by 4 August 2015), and small stuffed lions appeared outside Walter’s dental office to signify the normative disruption of moral codes of humanitarian compassion and animal ethics (Walsh and Stahl, 2015). Within days, the US Fish and Wildlife Service had opened an investigation, protests were staged outside the office of Walter’s suspended dental practice, Zimbabwe’s Environment Minister called for the extradition of Palmer, and the American comedian Jimmy Kimmel delivered a teary-eyed lament on US television (and across multiple YouTube channels).

The social reaction to the killing of Cecil-the-lion represents a poignant example of what Wicks (2011) characterizes as uninvited information on a single site of animal suffering (i.e., hunting/poaching). Not only have contributions to critical animal studies demonstrated how myriad forms of deliberate institutionalized non-human suffering remain ‘invisible in plain sight,’ specific information on the pervasiveness of international poaching is also readily available in popular culture. The African and World Wildlife Foundations, for example, provide clear print and web-based information on the extent of poaching within and beyond Africa. Documentaries such as Gambling on Extinction (2015), Virunga (2014), and Flight of the Rhino (2013) chronicle the threat of extinction facing elephants, rhinos, and mountain gorillas. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) engages in a range of public promotional efforts to bring awareness to and encourage social (re)action against hunting and poaching. Finally, we are only beginning to understand how social media are impacting on conservation efforts and patterns of audience mobilization (see Buscher, 2016). Thus, it is reasonable to surmise that the million-plus audience members who publicly reacted to the killing of Cecil with moral indignation were already aware of poaching practices around the world.

The brief moment of knowing about the horrors of poaching poses an important set of challenges to the arguments that (a) individual responsibilization represents the single normative logic informing contemporary political (re)action, (b) moral panics are exclusively regressive or ‘bad,’ and (c) contemporary moral panics can be explained in terms of defensive social reactions (i.e., apparatuses of security) to putative breakdowns in codes of conduct that are indexed to the responsible care of the self. To the first challenge, the volatile social reaction set off by the mass mediation of poaching can be explained in terms of care and compassion towards a vulnerable non-human other. The cognitive, emotional, and cultural mechanisms of denial that otherwise contribute towards thwarting recognition of animal suffering and exploitation were briefly disrupted when they came into conflict with a competing if not contradictory set of ethical responsibilities to care for the welfare of vulnerable (non-human) others. In contrast to the argument that individual responsibility represents the dominant norm against which other forms of social and community (re)action are measured against, the volatile indignation expressed in response to Cecil-the-lion shows how people can ‘move between different moral, ethical, and affective valences of what it means to be “responsible” subjects’ (Trnka and Trundle, 2014: 141).

Yet, to the second challenge, the discursive dynamics characterizing the global social reaction(s) to Cecil’s killing conform to the general conceptual dynamics of a moral panic. The interruption of otherwise routine forms of animal exploitation manifested in a volatile set of victim-centered grievances that assumed the discursive form of collective or shared defensive reactions for managing the risks facing vulnerable animals situated in dialectical opposition to an individual allocation of blame/harm (Palmer, the quintessential American poacher in Africa). In this way, the normative responsibility to care about the needless killing of animals in distant countries poses a challenge to the liberal capacity for individual autonomous action by socializing individual choice (Hier, 2011a). Rather than accounting for the contemporary norms of individual responsibility in an explanatory vacuum, sealed from all other logics and motivations for action, techniques necessary for responsible self-conduct are better understood as appearing in the transitional spaces between one’s obligation to oneself and one’s obligation to (human and non-human) others (Rose, 1999). Subverting the tacit understanding of moral panics as resolutely ‘bad,’ then, the indignant social reaction to Cecil’s killing derived from a set of benevolent caring relations to defend the wellbeing of vulnerable non-human others.

It follows, therefore and to the third challenge, that the volatile social reaction to Cecil’s poaching did not derive from a volatile breakdown in irresponsible self-care of others (Palmer/poachers) that posed a putative threat to personal and group safety of otherwise self-regulating entrepreneurial subjects, as the panic-as-regulation model has hitherto stipulated. Conversely, the indignation that followed from Cecil’s killing stemmed from a sense of caring relations to protect vulnerable non-human others from unnecessary violence. This implies neither that a moral responsibility to attend to the wellbeing of human and non-human others always represents an enduring set of relations nor that the duty to care always supersedes other modes and logics of governance (Trnka and Trundle, 2014). What it does illustrate is that relations of compassion and care for the wellbeing of self and (non-human) others are powerful modes of engagement that cannot be reduced sui generis to the logic of neoliberal responsibilization.

Social obligations: Racially motivated police violence

The volatile social reaction to the poaching of Cecil-the-lion illustrates how (distant) relations of compassion and care can provoke international social (re)actions that exist alongside individual responsibilization techniques. Not only have moral panic scholars largely ignored the explanatory importance of moral imperatives to care for the wellbeing of human and non-human others. They have also remained more or less oblivious to the ways that responsibilities can derive from and operate in recognition of social obligations stemming from violations of social contract ideologies. As Trnka and Trundle (2014) explain, social contracts rest on relations of reciprocity and interdependencies that exist in the transitional spaces between individual and collective responsibilities (e.g., rights, protections, normative codes of fair and equal treatment). Whereas relations of care primarily derive from asymmetrical dependencies and the concomitant duty to respond to injury and injustice with compassion and acknowledgment, social contract ideologies are driven by ideological commitments of reciprocity and mutual obligation. Although social contracts intersect with and are conditioned by relations of care, they stem from collective responsibilities to protect and defend both the cultural and cosmopolitan rights of individuals to live free of unnecessary harms brought about through the deliberate or unintentional actions of others.

The recent sequence of volatile social reactions to lethal police violence in the United States illustrates how reiterations of social contract ideologies derive from a set of mutual responsibilities to protect the rights of vulnerable communities. Cultivated in response to the (inter)national outcry against racially motivated police violence in Sanford (FL), Ferguson (MO), Baltimore (MD), and New York City (NY) – indignation, moreover, that is stoked by the injury and insult resulting from racially-motivated gun violence in Charleston (SC) and excess police violence in McKinney (TX) – networked (re)activist movements have staged protests, marches, die-ins, and teaching interventions. Resembling other popular contemporary social reactions, ranging from the Arab Spring to the Occupy Movement (Harris, 2015), the claim-making activities of (re)activist networks such as Black Lives Matter, Hands Up United, Say Her Name, and #FergusonSyllabus have articulated a volatile set of victim-centered grievances that assumed the discursive form of community defensive reactions for managing risk situated in dialectical opposition to the specific harm posed by racism in America.

Carlson’s (2015) recent analysis of race, crime, and news reporting on George Zimmerman’s claim to self-defense in the shooting of Trayvon Martin helps to clarify the ways in which competing narratives of responsibility and mutual obligation correspond to the general conceptual dynamics of a (good) moral panic – or what she somewhat uneasily conceptualizes as a ‘moral breach.’ According to Carlson, a moral breach represents a ‘theoretical device for analyzing moments of “pitched” concern in which conflicting value systems … clash’ (2015: 5). ‘If moral panic facilitates a retrenchment of hegemonic order,’ writes Carlson (2015: 5), ‘a moral breach opens up the opportunity for an irruption of this order.’ In the same way that moral panics generically articulate a moment of problematization (i.e., blame allocation) and solution (i.e., opportunities to achieve closure) (Hier, 2002a: 330), moral breaches center on the politicization of harm and suffering through competing (rather than complementary) discourses about the worthiness of victims.

For Carlson, however, distinguishing between ‘bad’ moral panics and ‘good’ moral breaches hinges on a more fundamental difference between hegemonic moral panics and counter-hegemonic moral breaches. Whereas (bad) moral panics represent hegemonic discourses that articulate the defense of widespread societal values in relation to a clearly identifiable dimension of harm (i.e., the conventional image of the folk devil), (good) moral breaches represent counter-hegemonic discourses that articulate the defense of vulnerable communities that are susceptible to the harmful effects that flow from the instantiation of hegemonic norms (‘a panic about a moral panic’ [Carlson, 2015: 5]). In contrast to the dynamics of conventional moral panics, then, counter-hegemonic breaches are, for Carlson, a central defining component of competing narratives centering on injury and injustice that accentuate harm to communities rather than hegemonic social order; that encourage audience members to acknowledge harm rather that punish folk devils; and that harness changes to the ways in which panics articulate in multi-mediated social worlds by reframing conventional folk devils as victims.

Applied to Travyon Martin’s shooting, and throwing into relief many of the guiding analytical assumptions that underscore conventional moral panic studies about race and crime, Carlson finds that George Zimmerman’s claim to self-defense was met with competing, divisive narratives in the Orlando Sentinel. In contrast to news reporting in The New York Times on Bernard Goetz’s claim to self-defense in the 1980s, competing discourses in the Zimmerman case eschewed a hegemonic master narrative of racialized crime by inconsistently (and in a fragmented way) allocating blame to both Zimmerman and racism facing black American communities. Whereas Zimmerman was depicted in a heterogeneous manner as a racist murderer, good Samaritan, overeager, and a wannabe cop, Carlson explains, the harm confronting vulnerable black communities in America was overwhelmingly articulated in terms of a mutual obligation to engage in national dialogue to acknowledge the violence that had occurred. Hence demands for better communications, acknowledgment, and recognition of black (male) victimization by police emerged from a set of mutual social obligations to protect or defend the rights of black communities. Rather than displacing hegemonic norms that propagate structural racism in America, however, Carlson concludes her study on a sobering note by arguing that counter-hegemonic narrative breaches disrupted the hegemonic racial order in a volatile manner, thereby compartmentalizing the social problem of racism in American policing and, paradoxically, narrowing the impact of counter-hegemonic framing.

Witnessing vulnerability and harm

Carlson’s insights into counter-hegemonic breaches move us closer towards understanding the dynamics of a good moral panic. By empirically documenting the ways in which competing news narratives involve indeterminate configurations of folk devils and moral culpability – a narrative structure resembling the foraging dynamics of late modern claims-making about risk and blame more than the social ordering practices commonly attributed to conventional moral panics (Ungar, 2001) – Carlson convincingly demonstrates that contemporary claims-making about race and crime is more complicated than moral panic analysts have recognized. Essentially, though, Carlson’s findings reinforce what moral panic scholars have recognized since McRobbie and Thornton’s (1995) seminal deconstruction of conventional perspectives, albeit with provocative insights into the ways that counter-hegemonic discourses can disrupt hegemonic ones.

Still, the generalizability of Carlson’s arguments about race and crime in Sanford is limited by the long-recognized methodological problem in moral panic studies of relying on one print news outlet as a surrogate to infer public concern and engagement (cf., Ungar, 2001). Carlson has in effect examined discourses appearing in one Orlando daily to make broader inferences about moral responsiveness, audience reactivity, and, ultimately, the longer-term cultural implications of Zimmerman’s acquittal vis-a-vis the compartmentalization of social problem frames appearing in a single newspaper.

The recent surge in research on media witnessing and its concomitants, audience reactivity and distant suffering, provides a number of conceptual resources to address the analytical limitations associated with relying on mainstream news media texts, let alone a single news outlet, to generalize about patterns of audience engagement and political subjectivity across millions of people, across time, and across space and place. Media witnessing denotes a particular kind of mediated relationship, whereby audience members engage with a range of narrative crises on the basis of (a) their affective connections to human and non-human vulnerabilities and (b) their cultural connections to a set of competing responsibilities (Kyriakidou, 2015). Media witnessing involves uncomfortable, sometimes painful emotional knowledge and an accompanying sense of urgency to attend to suffering and harm (Ellis, 2000). More than just seeing or viewing (i.e., spectatorship), media witnessing is indexed to social obligations and relations of care that at once represent powerful forms of moral engagement and that imply ways of knowing about injury and injustice that are both vicarious and fleeting (Peters, 2001).

Applied to the (good) moral panic about animal poaching in Zimbabwe, the social reaction to Cecil-the-lion resembles what Kyriakidou (2015) conceptualizes in her typology of audience engagement as a form of affective witnessing. Affective witnessing is characterized by ‘an intense emotional involvement with the [non]human pain witnessed “through” the media, empathetic identification with the suffering witnessed “in” the media, but also a conditionality of this involvement on the sensational nature of the witnessing “by” the media’ (2015: 220). Affective witnessing is cultivated through a narrative structure that singles out and personalizes innocent sufferers. By teasing worthy victims apart from the masses of sufferers, however, the social reactions cultivated through affective witnessing are in effect delimited through their connection to particular images of suffering and the excessive sentimentality of the viewers. In a similar manner to other contemporary examples of affective media witnessing, such as the social reactions to the #BringBackOurGirls campaign that was ignited following the kidnapping of 276 Nigerian schoolgirls in April 2014, reactions to Cecil-the-lion developed from cultural relations of care even if they encouraged sentimentality over reflection on the broader, enduring condition of institutionalized animal abuse.

By contrast, the social reactions to lethal police violence in America resemble what Kyriakidou (2015) conceptualizes as a form of politicized witnessing. Politicized witnessing is characterized by inequitable power differentials on a local and global scale. It entails a form of audience engagement, whereby witnessing texts are understood within a political rather than (or in addition to) sentimental discourse. Unlike affective witnessing, politicized witnessing entails a shift from specific, personalized sufferers to a more detached, reflective focus on political narratives that allocate blame and interrogate the reasons why suffering occurs. In a similar manner to other contemporary examples of politicized witnessing, such as the social reactions to images of three-year-old Alan Kurdi’s body washed up on a Turkish beach in September 2015, mobilization against racially motivated police violence developed from disruptions of social contract ideologies that are indexed to protecting the rights of black Americans. Although the witnessing of racially motivated police violence might have tended towards a compartmentalized narrative structure in the newspaper texts analyzed by Carlson, the politicization of witnessing texts has since been abstracted from the specific circumstances leading to the deaths of the iconic victims of lethal police violence – Freddie Gray, Travyon Martin, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown – and rearticulated in relation to a broader political discourse about power, inequality, and social justice in America.

Indeed, since 2012 racially motivated police violence has not only provoked a succession of volatile claims-making episodes (e.g., protests, social media texts) articulated in the discursive form of community defense against specific dimensions of harm. The volatile reactions to violations of social contract ideologies have also mushroomed into a multifaceted national (re)activist movement against anti-black racism that reaches well beyond the temporal dimensions of moral panic episodes. The Black Lives Matter movement that developed as a social media/hashtag reaction to the 2012 Zimmerman verdict (#blacklivesmatter) is the most visible example. Far from a fleeting reaction to the insult and injury of police violence in Sanford and, subsequently, Ferguson, the increasing number of activists identifying with Black Lives Matter has been refocusing their attention on how police violence affects the lives of black women, the poor, the elderly, and gay and transsexual people (Chatelain, 2015). In dozens of American cities, multiracial protesters have campaigned under the slogan ‘shut it down!’ by disrupting traffic, railways, shopping malls, sporting events, city facilities, and most recently at the time of writing, a rally for presidential hopeful Donald Trump. As one of the largest public protests and expressions of activism since the Civil Rights Movement (Moore et al., 2016), the expansion of Black Lives Matter serves as a potent reminder that moral panics, however trivial or malevolent they may be, not only derive from but also act on the normative structures and moral universes that condition everyday life (Hier, 2008) – be it formally in the institutional realm or informally in the attitudinal one (Goode and Ben-Yehuda, 2013 [2009]).

Moral panic as a normatively ambivalent operation of power

The volatile social reactions to animal poaching and racially motivated police violence demonstrate how moral indignation deriving from duties and obligations to care for and attend to the exploitation of vulnerable others represents a powerful source of motivation for audience engagement. In contrast to the tacit understanding that moral panics are singularly composed of conservative social reactions to protect the self from threatening others, the examples show how moral panics can also derive from positive relations of care and social obligation. The challenge that remains is to generate an alternative set of explanations to account for why (rather than only how) coexisting responsibilities complement, compete with, and potentially contradict techniques of individualization.

Judith Butler’s (2004a, 2004b, 2005, 2009) theorization on the ramifying ambivalence of the regulatory and constitutive effects of norms provides a provocative framework from which to begin supplementing if not moving beyond the reductively negative suppositions that characterize conventional and reconstructed approaches to moral panic. They also help to explain the kinds of benevolent social obligations and ethical responsibilities that underscore the cultivation of ‘good’ moral panics.

Butler begins from a non-sovereign understanding of the subject whose social existence is conceived of and maintained in and through mutual ties of dependency on others. From the beginning, says Butler, we are all tied to others and to social norms for our very constitution as subjects. There is, in other words, no subjectivity that exists outside the normative regimes of signification that constitute our social existence.

Owing to the fact that we are given over to others in our self-constitution through social norms, every human being is confronted with a primary vulnerability to violence, grief, and loss. The mere fact of embodiment, says Butler, leaves each one of us exposed to physical and symbolic injury and insult. In this regard, norms play a double role in constituting subjectivity. On the one hand, norms set the conditions of intelligibility for what we aspire to be. On the other hand, norms constrain the conditions of intelligibility for life, thereby doing violence to us. Butler is clearly aware of the fact that our mutual ties to others through a myriad of regulatory discursive regimes pose differential social and political effects (e.g., norms of racial and gender signification). Her argument, however, is not that some norms provide ethical ideals to which we should aspire and others operate as constraining regulatory standards that we should resist. Rather, what Butler is arguing is that norms operate both ways simultaneously: they enable moral responsiveness to the suffering of others and at the same time we are vulnerable to the physical and symbolic losses that can be exacted by them (Gilson, 2014).

It is at the intersection of corporal vulnerability as a universal feature of existence and the specific ways that injuries and injustices are inflicted on precarious populations that Butler locates the possibility of and imperatives for progressive social obligations. It is not because we are individually vulnerable to the contingencies of everyday living that leaves us attentive to the suffering of others (an existential condition). Indeed, we have seen that awareness of individual vulnerability tends to have the opposite effect of disavowing vulnerability through the cultivation of entrepreneurial forms of self-care. It is, rather, apprehension of a common human vulnerability, the fact that we can be substituted for another at any time, which grounds the duties to care for and attend to the suffering of others (an ontological condition). In other words, the ontological condition of being bound to others through substitutability makes our normative existence possible and at the same time renders each individual’s existence precarious.

Again, the importance of Butler’s conceptualization of vulnerability (precariousness) as a common condition of life is not that the recognition of a shared vulnerability automatically leads to the instantiation of social obligations to attend to suffering and losses of others (states of precarity). The importance of her argument, rather, is that the functioning of norms, as a constitutive feature of human subjectivity, is only possible because we are vulnerable (to impression, persuasion, manipulation, socialization) in the first place. It is our susceptibility to the influences of norms that enables them to operate as they do. Paradoxically, norms also render us vulnerable to various forms of injury and insult. Finally, and perhaps most tellingly, because norms play a double role, both constituting and regulating subjectivity, they are vulnerable themselves to subversion through their multiple instantiations and reiterations in everyday life. For this reason, moral panics are better understood as normatively ambivalent operations of power that are capable of perpetuating, disrupting, and even reversing the norms of intelligibility that buttress hegemonic understandings of, and moral responsiveness to, violence, injustice, suffering, and harm.

Conclusion

The violence that regulatory norms exact on vulnerable social groups has been the predominant focus of studies in moral panic. When vulnerability is understood exclusively as susceptibility to the harmful effects of regulatory norms, however, not only are the constitutive potential of corporeal vulnerability and the contingencies of reiteration ignored. The immediate political-academic response is also to critique putatively problematic norms that contribute towards excluding, marginalizing, or delimiting the aspirations of vulnerable populations. Indeed, the imperative to debunk hegemonic regulatory norms represents the underlying motivations behind Wright’s (2015), Dandoy’s (2014), and Critcher’s (2009) defense of conventional explanatory criteria such as disproportional representation. However laudable efforts to demystify hegemonic norms might be, they hinge on a reductively negative understanding of norms as a form of exposure to harm.

The continuing reliance on a reductively negative framework not only ignores the ways that norms enable progressive political mobilization (including scholarly critique), it also poses a broader set of interlocking theoretical, methodological, and empirical challenges to the ongoing reconstruction of contemporary moral panic studies. The most immediate, theoretical challenge is that moral panic scholars require a more complete understanding of norms. One of the main motivations behind moral panic research is not simply to critique the application of problematic regulatory norms but also to cultivate an alternative set of normative relations that do not so readily lend themselves to exacting physical and symbolic violence on precarious populations. The latter, following Butler, requires a theoretical process of imagining the ways in which hegemonic forms of representation can be disrupted, the kinds of social subjectivity that enable critique of problematic norms, and how our understandings of vulnerability (precariousness) both enable and constrain responsiveness to the suffering of others.

It follows that moral panic scholars must break their methodological reliance on normatively inflected value judgments (e.g., disproportionality) that condition a concomitant dependency on indefensible measurement criteria (e.g., concern, consensus, hostility). The conceptualization of moral panic as a form of moral regulation has avoided falling back on negative normative judgments about discrete claims-making episodes to diagnose panics by working with a set of concepts that have been derived analytically and applied and defended systematically. The revisions to the panic-as-regulation framework introduced in this article explicate the common conceptual dimensions shared across different episodes of moral panic – be they politically progressive, regressive, or indistinct – but they make no attempt to reveal anything about the specific empirical features of different panic episodes. In this way, the empirical diversity of panic episodes remains analytically grounded in a conceptual framework that enables a degree of transferability across divergent claims-making activities.

Finally, it is incumbent on moral panic scholars to continue to uncover the different empirical ways in which moral panics operate as a hegemonic operation of power. At the same time, the critical bent that runs through moral panic studies is not a zero-sum game. Over the past decade, several non-conventional topics have been identified as moral panics (e.g., corporate crime, climate change, sexual violence). What we require is an alternative way to conceptualize moral panic that is not rooted in the sense of ontological certainty that characterizes conventional understandings of the relationship between fear/threat and regressive social reaction. The latter, as Stanley Cohen repeatedly observed, stands as a hitherto untapped political resource for a counter-hegemonic politics.

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