Hunt RQ
1. What is the difference between a moral panic and moral regulation according to the author? What are their traditions and paths?
A moral panic according to Stanley Cohen's (1972) Folk Devils and Moral Panics is an episode whereby a condition, person, or group of persons is constructed and presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media, enacted as a threat to societal values and interests, and attended to by a social, legal, and/or political control culture. In other words, moral panics are typically undesirable responses to addressing social issues that involve some exaggeration and disproportional representation between the harm claimed and the remedy pursued. On the other hand, moral regulation studies focus on the ways that discourses/practices are deployed to act on the conduct of self and other. "Moral regulation involves the deployment of distinctively moral discourse that construct a moralized subject and an object or target that is acted on by means of moralizing practices (Hunt 54). These two main approaches to moralization are different in ways however, they can also be harmonized to make complementary contributions to the field of moral politics.Â
The moral panic approach begins with the identification of heightened concern about some social issue. Next, it sets out to explain the dynamic of how the action of social agents stimulates and amplifies a panic that is conceived in terms of some combination of exaggeration and disproportionality between the harm claimed and the remedy pursued. In contrast, the moral regulation approach focuses on a process in which moralizing discourses, techniques, and practices are brought to bear in order to regulate the social groups or practices deemed to be the potential cause of social harm.
2. What problems does the author have with the moral panic concept?
Hunt believes that the moral panic approach entails many problems. Hunt mentions temporal narrowness and claims that this concept does not account for panics that do not have a folk devil, or in other words, smaller social anxieties that do not become an official panic. Hunt also finds the moral panic approach to be biased and limited. He makes it out as if "liberal-left intellectuals" have all the say in what becomes a moral panic. Also, he mentions that most of the literature about moral panics is hostile towards moral entrepreneurs. This hostility comes from the a perceived link between the production of anxiety and profit. Lastly, Hunt feels as though the disproportionality is hard to sell as a characteristic of moral panic. In other words, the extent of a social anxiety account cannot be measured in any satisfactory quantitative manner.Â
