Kindness in Australia: an empirical critique of moral decline sociology Daphne Habibis, Nicholas Hookway and Anthea Vreugdenhil Abstract A new sociological agenda is emerging that interrogates how morality can be established in the absence of the moral certainties of the past but there is a short- age of empirical work on this topic. This article establishes a theoretical frame- work for the empirical analysis of everyday morality drawing on the work of theorists including Ahmed, Bauman and Taylor. It uses the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes to assess the state and shape of contemporary moralities by ask- ing how kind are Australians, how is its expression socially distributed, and what are the motivations for kindness. The findings demonstrate that Australians exhibit a strong attachment and commitment to kindness as a moral value that is primarily motivated by interiorized sources of moral authority. We argue these findings support the work of theorists such as Ahmed and Taylor who argue authenticity and embodied emotion are legitimate sources of morality in today’s secular societies. The research also provides new evidence that generational changes are shaping understandings and practices of kindness in unexpected ways. Keywords: Authenticity; care; ethics; individualization; kindness; morality Introduction We are in a state of moral decline in the modern West – or so we are told. From popular anxieties concerning the vision of a world overrun by drugs, crime and civic disorder, to academic disquiet about the corrosive impacts of individualism, consumerism and neo-liberalism, the world today is often imag- ined as less kind, friendly or giving than it used to be (Fevre 2000; Tester 1997). Westerners are supposedly morally cut adrift as the old moral anchors and cer- tainties become merely choices and we are left to bicker and fumble over what Habibis, Hookway, and Vreugdenhil (School of Social Sciences, University of Tasmania) (Corresponding author email: d.habibis@utas.edu.au) V C London School of Economics and Political Science 2016 ISSN 0007-1315 print/1468-4446 online. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA on behalf of the LSE. DOI: 10.1111/1468-4446.12194 The British Journal of Sociology 2016