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This paper provides a critical comparison of two leading exponents of the relationship between morality and selfhood: Charles Taylor and George Herbert Mead. Specifically, it seeks to provide an assessment of the contribution each approach is able to make to a social theory of morality that has the self at its heart. Ultimately, it is argued that Taylor's phenomenological account neglects the significance of interaction and social relations in his conceptualisation of the relationship between morality and self, which undermines the capacity of his framework to explain how moral understandings and dialogic moral subjectivity develop in a world of shared meaning. I then argue that Mead's pragmatist interactionist approach overcomes many of the flaws in Taylor's framework, and offers a grounded conceptualisation of the relationship between self and morality that is able to provide a basis for a properly social account of moral subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

George Herbert Mead argues that human society is comprised of six basic institutions—language, family, economics, religion, polity, and science. I do not believe that he can be criticized for making institutions the cornerstones of a society, but he can definitely be criticized for his explanation of how our basic institutions originate, how these institutions operate in society after their inception, and how they later change, modifying society in the process. The problem with Mead's explanation of these three critical matters is that he based them on his principle of “sociality” rather than on the principle of “domination.” If Mead's principle of sociality is replaced by the principle of domination and his notion of the “generalized other” is replaced by the notion of the “phantom community,” then most of these problems can be largely solved. Thus, in this paper, I will not only point out the key problems in Mead's theory of society, but I will also offer solutions to them based on the notions of domination and the “phantom community.” The end product is a “radical interactionism” that surpasses Mead's original interactionism in identifying the part that both domination and the composite “other” play in every known human society—big and small, and past and present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]