Donald Black's Moral Time

In Donald Black’s Moral Time, the author seeks to scientifically explain conflict, which he describes as a “clash of right and wrong” (3). This clash, Black theorizes, is rooted in social changes. He terms these changes as “social time” (8). Social time can be further delineated into three subcategories including relational time, vertical time, and cultural time. Relational time describes the “degree of participation in the life of someone else” (21). Vertical time outlines stratification, which is the distance between people in terms of factors such as “wealth, power, or performance” (59). Cultural time details the “expressive dimension of social life” that include “language, religion, and ideas…” (101). Hence, all conflicts arise from the

This form of conflict can materialize either through oversuperiority or overinferiority. In both cases, there is an inverse relationship between the degree of stratification between people and the severity of conflict. Put differently, overstratification causes more conflict among people who are more similar to begin with. Oversuperiority occurs when a superior gains more status than before. During my interview day for medical school, the Dean of Admissions made it a point to let us know that the school has a distinctively collaborative environment. She told us that if we were overly competitive or gunners, this was not the place for us. Dean Zehnder implicitly warned us to not pursue oversuperiority over others, knowing that this would conflict among students. Overinferiority similarly generates conflict when inferiors lose status. When the fraction of those who become impoverished increases, so do the rates of burglary and robbery (74). Likewise, many embezzlers steal money “from their employers after suffering financial problems” (75). These examples illustrate that when stratification increases due to a fall in inferior status, conflict