In public discourses, the ethical capacity of marginalised groups is often invoked to depict them as unethical actors, who are responsible for perpetuating the hardship while also compromising the moral character of the public at large (Samanani, 2022)

Several influential works have strongly criticised determinist understandings of culturem structure and power (Laidlaw, 2013; Robbins, 2013; Mattingly, 2014)

Cultural determinism encompasses the believe that culture in which we are raised determines who we are socially and behaviourly (Samanani, 2022)

Das (2010, 395-96) highlights how determinist theories overlook the 'adjacent' self which embodies a 'slow flowering' of new possibility.

Poverty and joblesness as well as the culture of Britain's poor and working classses were reimagined in policy and in popular media as markers of ethical failure and as threats to the moral integrity of the nation (Rose, 1999)

IZ: Often, crime, marginality and poverty are seen as environments lacking ethical agency (see Rose, 1999), but several studies have indicated how groups that are involved in crime also ethically reflect (Samanani, 2022; Hansen, 1999)

Several authors defined what determinism is missing - an internal self that strives for something better than social ideas of what it means to be good (see Samanani, 2022)

People's ethics are explained by culture and the missing piece is an internal dialogue, which encompasses a sense of possibility and hope for a better future (Samanani, 2022).

Leisure interactions - moments for 'moral ludus', which are opportunities for rather serious reflective work, in which a person moves from reflectiveness to play, performance or practice and tries out different roles to see ho wthey fit (Hefner, 2019)

Environmental disruption could also be considered as a 'moral ludus', where a person tries elements of certain roles and see how they feel. These moments form opportunities for rather serious reflective work where an individual is removed from reflectiveness to action. However, where Hefner focuses on play by religious girls, this article focuses on youth action during environmental and spatial disruption.

Jean Brigg's moral play (1998) is the pedagogical momentsof dramatising 'moral dilemmas'. Moral ludus is different as it focuses on oral decision making at a subjective level.

Moral ludus - choices around issues of dress and television. In these moments of fun-seeking and relaxation, young Muslim women are confronted with ethical choices and position themselves arally in weighing religious principles. These form 'moments of reflective freedom'. (Hefner, 2019)

Some theorisations make a distinction between norm-governed morality and distinct moments of ethical liberation (e.g. Robbins, 2007; Ziggon, 2008; Hefner, 2019).

Winkel-Reid (2016), based on her research on friendship between school girls, illustrates how girls form ethical personhoods through ordinary interactions with friends, including bitching and judging.

Samanani (2022) illustrates marginalised youth's living i Caldwell (England), and who are involved in crime, their ethical capacity and their capacity to cultivate a life worth living,

Some ethnographers have emphasized that these moments for ethical reflection most frequently arise during instances of disruption (Robbins 2007 ), moral breakdown (Zigon 2009 ), perceived moral failures (Beekers&Kloos 2018 ; Kloos 2018), or ethical incompatibility

As Samuli Schielke (2009b ) rightly points out in his critique of SabaMahmood’s work with Egyptian pietists (2005 ), her study of Islamic ethical subject formation tends to focus on the success stories of piety and rarely on life beyond the study circle, the mosque, or the prayer hall. Mahmood’s rich theoretical analysis reifies the role of a particular form of Islamic piety (namely that of reformist Islam) among the diverse variety of moral registers available to even the most piety-minded of Muslims.

Fechter (2014, p. 148) has highlighted the value of ordinary ethics, which can train our attention on the ways in which the ethical becomes manifest in the banal and unspectacular sites of growing up and micro-contestations between peers.

Two broad trends mark the emerging anthropology of morality. One, following Durkheim, sees all routine, normative social action as moral. The other, in direct opposition to this, defines an action as moral only when actors understand themselves to perform it on the basis of free choices they have made. I argue that both approaches capture aspects of the social experience of morality. (Robbins, 2007)

A key question becomes how to explain why in any given society some cultural domains are dominated by Durkheimian moralities of reproduction while others encourage people to construe moral action in terms of freedom and choice. argue
that a model of cultures as structured by values can help us explain why cultural domains differ in this way and that the study of situations of radical cultural change reveals this with great clarity, as I show with data from Papua New Guinea. (Robbin, 2007)

Laidlaw (2002) makes this point not by way of adopting a Kantian model of
morality (in which freedom is ultimately defined too narrowly in relation to reason), but in order to point out that everything people do is not undertaken as a moral action, but only those things they do with reflective consciousness of having chosen to act in the way they have.

They are rules ‘actors are less obliged than encouraged to realize’ and thus ones that provide people with some room for choice (Faubion 2001: 90). In Laidlaw’s scheme it is precisely in the room
cultures leave for reflective choice-making that freedom comes to exist and that the moral domain takes shape

To be fair, Laidlaw is careful, following Foucault, not to define freedom in naively western terms — as everywhere consisting,
for example, in the liberation of a human nature simply waiting to be set free to follow the path of reason or pursue material self-interest — but rather as something constructed out of the role given to choice in various cultures and in various domains within specific cultures (Laidlaw 2002: 323).

Robbins (2007): When there is a conflict of values in culture and societal structure, that is when people experience reflective freedom.

Narotzky & Besnier (2014): The context of a breakdown of expectations of material and emotional resources that the global crisis has produced in many regions of the world has reconfigured values and reshuffeld the frameworks of moral obligation. We are particularly concerned with what
ordinary people understand by “a life worth living” and what
they do to strive toward that goal, particularly under conditions
of radical uncertainty (“crisis”).

Nabrotzky & Besnier (2014): We are particularly concerned with what
ordinary people understand by “a life worth living” and what
they do to strive toward that goal, particularly under conditions
of radical uncertainty (“crisis”).

Narotzky & Besnier (2014): In times of
crisis, people operate with coping strategies that enable them
to locate increasingly elusive resources. These strategies may
include relations of trust and care, economies of affect, networks
of reciprocity encompassing both tangible and intangible
resources, and material and emotional transfers that are
supported by moral obligations. Many consist of unregulated
activities or activities that cannot be regulated (Hart 1973;
Humphrey 2002; Lomnitz 1975; Procoli 2004; Smart and
Smart 1993; Stack 1974). But these strategies can also have
the effect of defining and marginalizing categories of people
(e.g., on grounds of ethnicity, gender, or race) whose access
to resources will be violently curtailed (Li 2001; Sider 1996;
Smith 2011).

Laidlaw (2013) - Drawing on Foucault (1996), Laidlaw argues instead for the importance of attending to ethical dimensions of human existence, and people’s ‘reflective freedom’, defined as a capacity to evaluate and act upon the self. In explicating this idea, Laidlaw writes: “We become responsible for our character not to the extent that we form it but to the extent that we selectively identify with some of our attitudes and dispositions more or less wholeheartedly and in that sense make them our own” (Laidlaw 2013: 24). Laidlaw notes that reflexive freedom in this sense is ‘socially contextualised’ and ethical evaluations are especially likely to occur when value conflicts arise for people, for example when specific personal goals related to the acquisition of knowledge conflict with religious norms (see Laidlaw’s (2013: 211-213) discussion of the work of Marsden (2007).

Montgomery (2014) - Due to rules about familial obligations coupled with marginalisation, the ability to support the family financially can supersede the ethical issues with pursuing a criminal employment, or even pushing your children into a criminal and damaging employment.

Laidlaw (2013) - notes that, “a key ethnographic question is whether and when do value conflicts arise for participants”, an issue linked to the wider question of the relative intensity and nature of reflexive ethical evaluation at different points of time. Moreover, at points in his analysis Laidlaw suggests that a particularly important dimension of this question concerns people’s tendency to engage in ethical evaluations of the self and the linked occurrence of ‘value conflicts’, may vary across the lifecourse. For example, Laidlaw approvingly quotes the work of Samuli Schielke (2010) in Egypt who uncovered people’s ‘fragmented biographies’ characterized by renewed attempts to align themselves with broader religious tenets only for those efforts at conformity to break down during periods of intense reflexivity.