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.

The purpose of this chapter is to investigate, out of three examples, the possible formation of a societal ethics upon the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and how these examples relate necessarily to the societal dimension. For an ethics to qualify as a societal ethics it has to be derived from a practice and be related to or address social problems in this practice (Cortese, 2004). The three examples are: Maurice Hamington’s (2004) attempt to form an ethics upon embodiment; Michael Yeo’s (1992) ethics beyond the philosophy of identity; and Simone de Beauvoir’s (1948) ethics of ambiguity. Out of the three, Hamington’s attempt is the most successful one, since it is based on the encounter with the Other and includes a consideration of the influence of social institutions on the encounter. Yeo’s and de Beauvoir’s attempts lack a genuine societal dimension.