Moving forward with the idea of an operational access to moral grammars

Following the exploratory work on moral grammars and its iterative application during the January and May 2026 field session in Vietnam, I am sharing here some key takeaway, that will be at the core of several PREFER paper.

Moral grammars and the Principle–Value–Ethics framework

The concept of moral grammar that I am developing in PREFER has progressively moved away from the idea of a culturally specific catalogue of values or norms. It is better understood as a patterned way in which people make sense of what matters, what is owed, what deserves protection, what may be sacrificed, and what constitutes an appropriate response in a particular situation. A moral grammar is therefore neither a formal moral code nor a coherent system shared equally by everyone. It is a repertoire of distinctions, expectations, relationships and forms of judgement through which people navigate situations in which something important is at stake.

The Principle–Value–Ethics (P–V–E) framework that I have been developing provides a way of making this grammar analytically visible.

A principle identifies or brings into view something that is considered worthy of normative attention: what ought to count, what cannot simply be disregarded, or what establishes an obligation or a legitimate concern.

A value concerns the relative importance attributed to things, persons, relationships or possible courses of action: it is through valuation that priorities are established and choices become possible.

Ethics, finally, concerns the situated enactment of these principles and valuations in practice: the judgement, compromise, obligation, hesitation or action through which a person responds to a concrete situation. These are not three successive stages. They are analytically distinguishable dimensions of an ongoing process of practical judgement.

The Vietnamese material has been particularly important in clarifying this point. Terms and formulations encountered in the ethnography - including hiếu, công ơn, tình cảm, nghĩa, giữ gốc, gia đình, đạo làm con, kính trên nhường dưới, thờ cúng tổ tiên, hòa khí, thể diện, and trọng nam - should not simply be translated into a corresponding list of Western “values”. Their significance lies partly in the relationships and situations in which they become consequential.

Hiếu, for instance, may articulate an obligation towards parents and ancestors, but its practical meaning is inseparable from relationships, life trajectories and expectations concerning what a son or daughter should do (see Ha et al. in preparation, tentative Abstract here). Likewise, migration does not necessarily appear simply as an individual economic choice opposed to local belonging. In the material from the Mekong Delta, migration can be understood through a grammar in which family continuity, gratitude, obligation, care and the reproduction of relationships across distance are simultaneously at stake. What looks externally like mobility can therefore be ethically understood by those involved as a way of maintaining rather than abandoning particular forms of belonging. (same source)

This is where the notion of grammar becomes useful. The relevant question is not simply which values do people hold?, but how do particular principles and valuations become mobilised together when people have to decide what to do? The same principle may generate different valuations in different circumstances; values may conflict; and an ethical response may require compromise rather than the consistent application of a rule. Moral grammars are consequently best understood as structured but open repertoires of practical reasoning.

How did I get there (read read read!)

There are useful affinities here with several established approaches, without making P–V–E reducible to any of them. Boltanski and Thévenot’s notion of orders of worth is important because it treats justification as drawing upon culturally available principles of worth and, crucially, shows that different principles may become relevant in situations of disagreement. PREFER, however, is interested in a somewhat broader field than justification in disputes: the ethnography also concerns obligations, attachments, relationships and forms of ordinary action that need not become explicit arguments.

The connection with Michael Lambek’s work on ordinary ethics is perhaps even closer. Lambek treats ethics not primarily as a system of explicit rules but as something intrinsic to action and practical judgement, including the ways people discern and carry through what they consider right, good or meaningful. His more recent formulation of ethical life explicitly includes perplexity and situations in which no available response is entirely adequate. This helps locate P–V–E at the level where the ethnographic material actually operates: not in abstract declarations of morality, but in the difficult work of deciding what one should do.

Sen provides another, complementary connection. His emphasis on what people have reason to value, and on public reasoning rather than a predetermined universal list, is useful for thinking about the epistemic and normative status of locally articulated valuations. P–V–E nevertheless differs from the capability approach: its primary purpose is not to establish a theory of justice or a list of valuable capabilities, but to provide an empirical and comparative language for reconstructing how normative worlds are organised and enacted.

Back to the now almost stabilised Principle–Value–Ethics framework

The conceptual move that now seems most important in the face of terminal situations is therefore from “What values do people have?” to “What moral grammar allows people to make a situation morally intelligible and to act within it?” Principles identify what calls for attention; values establish relative worth and priority; ethics is the situated work of responding. Together they provide a way of studying how people confront situations in which established ways of living, relationships, identities or futures may be threatened — without assuming in advance either what matters or what a morally appropriate response must be.

In this sense, P–V–E is not intended as a universal moral theory. It is an analytic framework for making different moral worlds empirically comparable without first reducing them to a common normative vocabulary.