Morris Ginsberg FBA (14 May 1889 – 31 August 1970) was a British sociologist, who played a key role in the development of the discipline.

He was born in Kelmė, a small town in the Kovno Governorate in Lithuania (at the time part of the Russian Empire).

He was given an education considered good according to the standards adopted by a small, isolated and intensely religious Jewish community.

About this time there was a revival of Hebrew literature and an attempt was made by many Jewish writers to introduce the learning of the Western peoples to the Jews of Russia.

His father had previously emigrated to Liverpool, England and established a tobacco factory, and at the age of 15 he rejoined him together with his mother and sisters.

As a result, he was awarded the Martin White Scholarship in Sociology which enabled him to study at University College London for two years.

Ginsberg incidentally acquired a good working knowledge of French and German, and outside his main sphere of studies, he took courses in biology, chemistry and physics.

During World War I the London School of Economics requested that his military service be postponed as he was standing in to give the courses which had previously been given by R.H. Tawney, Clement Attlee and Charles Mostyn Lloyd.

He criticised the traditional view, widely propagated from Aristotle through Hume to Bertrand Russell, that the main functions of reason in human affairs lie in the clarification, systematisation and control of impulse and feeling, and the discovery of means to their fulfilment.

We may conceive of it rather as that in our personality which strives for integration, deeper than conscious thought, but the more effective the more it uses thought, working within and through the basic impulses and interests and deriving its energy from them".~ from: "Is Reason the Slave of the Passions" – in The Plain View, Feb. 1955 [4]Morris Ginsberg was continually preoccupied with examining the role of reason in ethics.

He charted and analysed the diversity of morals among societies, and between groups and individuals, but made a clear distinction between that recognition and assumption that ethics must be entirely relative.

In consequence he was ready to take issue with those who propounded emotive theories of ethics, and those who were influenced, for example, by the work of cultural anthropologists to adopt the relativistic standpoint.

He was inevitably also concerned with the nature of Justice and its relationship to equality, and the associated question of Law as an increasingly important agent of social change and reform.

The ethics of punishment and the complex nature of individual moral freedom and its involvement with legal compulsion is examined in "On Justice in Society" (1965), where he concludes as follows:- 'Three questions have to be asked (a) Is the use of force necessary or can the end aimed at be secured by suasion or voluntary agreement?