Abstract
In the debate over the nature of contemporary morality there are some who refer to the end of traditional morality and others to its aestheticisation, and still others who speak of its privatisation, its chaotic state or its lack of grounding and liquidity. Rarely, however, has the current situation been related to the social structure of advanced societies.
In this article the author, inspired by both the historical analysis of the birth of purgatory and the concept of cultural allodoxy of the middle classes, develops a Durkheimian argument that the stratification of modern mass society has its analogy in the stratification of contemporary moral space. He argues that the binary categories of good and evil have been pushed into extreme positions and therefore they cover only a small part of the human action, while for the majority of normative evaluation, reference is made to an intermediate category of normalcy.
The presented argument is an attempt to create a cultural sociology that would not partition cultural meanings and social-structural effects into two autonomous spheres of causality. It offers the perspective from which it is possible to present morality in a wider socio-cultural context, and which would take into account both the symbolic.