Good moral panics? Normative ambivalence,social reaction,and coexisting responsibilities in everyday life

Abstract

This article breaks the silence on the politically progressive characteristics of a moral panic. In contrast to the tacit scholarly consensus that moral panics entail regressively conservative social reactions to putative harms, moral panics are alternatively conceptualized as normatively ambivalent operations of power. The article builds on continuing efforts to conceptualize moral panic as a form of moral regulation by explaining how moral panics are capable of perpetuating as well as disrupting and potentially even reversing the norms of intelligibility that buttress hegemonic understandings of, and moral responsiveness to, violence, injustice, suffering, and harm.