Different moral values emerge as people belong to different social networks, hold different values, and represent different codes of conduct (Parvaresh & Tayebi, 2018). Therefore, competing moral values give rise to conflict (Bergmann, 1998). This conflict may trigger individuals to fall back on aggressive or impolite language for what has violated their perceptions of right and wrong. Once the conflict arises, the morally-loaded nature of moral order makes morality a part of all interactions (Bergmann, 1998). As Kádár et al. (2019) put it, “there are conflicts that trigger strong moral reactions … Violations of the interactional moral order, which are perceived negatively (e.g. causing harm to others) may trigger conflict and subsequent moral evaluations” (p.10). Accordingly, studying moral order is a worthwhile attempt to examine how competing moral orders can lead to aggression and impoliteness. This study, therefore, aims to examine how conflict is addressed when interactants in different communities of interest face clashes of expectation regarding moral orders. Therefore, attempts were made to examine the relationship between the concepts of moral order and impoliteness by uncovering how underlying moral values, evaluations, and judgments generate an impolite discourse. Through a number of cases, it was illustrated how notions of moral order (Haidt & Kesebir, 2010), drawn from the field of moral psychology, can be applied to explain the impoliteness observed on social media. To this aim, two sets of authentic data were used: a) Instagram posts/comments, and b) everyday conversations. As such, a number of Instagram comments addressed to controversial posts, which featured a number of current trends, were pulled out to see how waves of impoliteness are occasioned by situated moral judgment in the context of Persian speakers in Iran. As the analysis of the data reveals, in contexts of controversy, the interactants’ moral order as instantiated in their moral evalu
