Ethical Differentiation and the Sociological Canon. The topic of this paper is a critical reading of the sociological canon (Durkheim, Weber, Simmel) from the perspective of what knowledge is produced of the ethical dimensions of social relations. The reading is inspired by a current discussion on the basic feature of social interaction: competition or cooperation. With the concept of ethical differentiation I try to describe the multiple ethical positions signifying the classical sociologists as a consequence of their distinction between distant and close social relations.