The Logic of Opportunity and Its Normative (Dis)contents

Abstract

What legal, social and cultural norms are being destroyed, preserved, or generated anew in the current, high-speed dynamics of global social order? What normative processes are at work in the structural and cultural landscape of this new world? In other words, how ‘unbound’ is social morphogenesis going to be from normativity, its prompts and restraints? This chapter revolves around these crucial questions. More precisely, it examines both the implications of intensified social morphogenesis for social normativity and, conversely, the role played by normativity in social morphogenesis. The former deals with how morphogenesis is affecting normativity, causing both its disruption (de-normativization, anomie) and regeneration. The latter aspect addresses the ways in which social morphogenesis is being regulated (or not) in the current global predicament. In Sect. 5.1, the general approach is clarified. In Sect. 5.2 an outline of the main challenges and the related responses, characterizing the relationship between the morphogenic society and the normative sphere, is developed. I subsequently discuss two issues which are bound to be of crucial importance to the whole normative and symbolical landscape of the emerging societal formation. In Sect. 5.3, the argument is focussed upon the specific problems concerning personal ontology, while Sect. 5.4 deals with emergent norm-creating processes which tend to produce innovative forms of universalism in the global arena.