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How Values come in to the Social Sciences
In my experience, social scientists are just as confused and confusing on the topic of ethics today as they ever were. I will give some examples of this later in the chapter. What I want to do first is to explain what I take to be some of the key problems with the way this issue has been formulated under the influence of Weber and before that, the English philosopher, David Hume, whom Weber follows. In the middle of the chapter I will talk about some examples of works of social science and show how they deal with ethical issues in relation to a set of genre conventions for social science that have grown out of this tradition.
Weber on Values and the Social Sciences
Weber is undoubtedly a founding father [!] of the social sciences and what he has said about this topic has had a profound influence, as I shall argue in detail. But this is not just because he said it; his view of ethics is one that is widely shared in intellectual discourse and is originally stated most persuasively by Hume, who is often referred to this day as closing the debate on these topics. It is a shame that social scientists have not always paid more attention to the implications of Marx’s views on ethics!
A common device these days is to try to separate “ethics” from “values”. I will be keeping an open mind about whether this makes sense and will concentrate instead on Weber’s use of the term “value judgement” and explore the way he uses it. Weber argues that value judgements should not be included in the social sciences and yet they must inevitably guide social science.
David Hume – and other writers since – have argued that the real meaning of value statements is to express a relationship between the speaker and the thing being evaluated (Hume 1965; see also Nelsen 1967; Hare 1952). In this view:
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When Weber is writing about evaluations or value judgements, he uses these interpretations from Hume. Mostly he sees value statements as being about what you would choose. For example he claims that the investigator should separate their establishment of the empirical facts and their “own practical evaluations, i.e. [their] evaluations of these facts as satisfactory or unsatisfactory” (Weber 1949: 11). So evaluations say something about the writer – their estimation of the situation as satisfactory or not. The term “practical” implies this is about choice – that which is negatively evaluated is what we would like to see changed. This is further suggested by the statement that value judgements are about the satisfactory or unsatisfactory character “of phenomena subject to our influence” (Weber 1949: 1, 52).
Weber also refers to the other two possibilities mentioned above. The sources of value standpoints, he says, are not concepts “but rather a thoroughly concrete, highly individually structured and constituted ‘feeling’ and ‘preference’ (Weber 1949: 50). He claims that a value judgement is a kind of expression of one’s feelings (Weber 1949: 2, 15). Other than sympathy or antipathy another kind of feeling that they can express is that of being bound to a norm of some kind “the consciousness of a certain, and here again, concrete, kind of imperative” (Weber 1949: 50).
So in all three meanings given to evaluative statements, an evaluation expresses an attitude of the speaker to a situation – what the speaker would choose; whether the speaker likes the situation or not; whether the speaker feels bound to act in a certain way.
In theories of value of this kind a distinction is made between the outward form of evaluations and their real meaning or logic. Some evaluative statements wear their hearts on their sleeve, there is nothing misleading about them. “I would like the government to give the refugees citizenship” or “I am very sorry things have turned out like this” or “I feel I must avoid this”. The relationship between what the speaker says and their own feelings is obvious. However where this becomes really tricky – and relevant to the social sciences – is that it is claimed that some statements disguise this content with a misleading form. They appear to be making a factual claim about a situation rather than a statement about the feelings of the author. So if a person says “It is very good that things are turning out this way”, the statement may appear to describe the situation but is actually doing something else – conveying the feelings of approval of the speaker.
This kind of misleading form has been characterized by the English philosopher Austin as a “speech act”. The statement appears to say something about the situation but what is actually taking place is that the statement just presents the attitude of the speaker. It is like a “smile”, which is a non-verbal speech act which communicates information about the feelings of the person smiling. So in a like fashion, it is claimed that a statement that something is “good” does not really tell you anything about that situation at all. What it does instead is convey some information about the feelings of the speaker.
In much of what Weber says, it is not clear whether he is speaking about value judgements that are open statements of preference or value judgements that have the form of a factual statement about a situation. He remarks that “every teacher has observed that the faces of his students light up and they become more attentive when he begins to set forth his personal evaluations” (Weber 1949: 9). That suggests either that he is talking about lecturers making an open statement of their own preference or more likely that he is talking about situations where a lecturer uses some kind of moral term. In such cases, Weber thinks that what they are really doing is making a statement about their own personal preference. He also refers to situations where value statements have been eliminated and yet the author is suggesting “such preferences with especial force by simply ‘letting the facts speak for themselves’” (Weber 1949: 9-10). Such a characterization could refer to cases where moral claims have a factual form or to cases where values are suggested by the kinds of empirical (for Weber = non-evaluative) facts that are being revealed. He remarks that the personal element of value judgements can be concealed if they are delivered with “cool dispassionateness” (Weber 1949: 2). Here, we could well believe that it is the misleading factual form of moral statements that can allow personal preferences to be hidden with what appears to be a factual statement.
Weber certainly does believe that ethical statements – about what things are good and what are bad – are a kind of value judgement, and because of that an expression of personal preference. This is implied in his re-telling of Hume’s argument against the “naturalistic fallacy”, of which I shall have more to say later. For example, Weber claims an economic argument may begin with statements about what is the case and leap to the conclusion that something should be the case – that it would be good if something were to happen. He claims this as an instance in which an attempt is being made to “derive value-judgements” from purely factual statements (Weber 1949: 36). The implication is that statements about what should happen – or in other words about what would be good – are value judgements and because of that they are not factual statements, because what they express is a feeling of the speaker, not any real factual description of the situation referred to. So they can never be derived from a set of factual statements about a situation. No list of such statements could ever imply that the speaker felt a certain way about what they were talking about. If the reader feels a bit mystified by all this, be patient, it will be explained with examples later in the chapter.
Weber considered that the aim of the social sciences is to discover facts and causal connections:
… the investigator and the teacher should keep unconditionally separate the establishment of empirical facts (including the ‘value-oriented’ conduct of the empirical individual whom [they are] investigating), and [their] own practical evaluations, i.e. [their] evaluations of these facts as satisfactory or unsatisfactory … these two things are logically different. (Weber 1949: 11)
The worst kind of sin, according to Weber, is to present evaluative judgements in a factual form. To convey value judgements by “letting the facts speak for themselves” is “of all abuses the most abhorrent”, “particularly from the standpoint of the separation of fact from judgements of value” (Weber 1949: 10). One wonders whether Weber’s statement that this is abhorrent is a factual claim! It cannot be on his theory of ethics – it is a statement that merely expresses Weber’s feelings of repugnance. Something which it is nice to know about but is hardly a convincing argument! It is no more convincing than his preference for vegemite over marmite. Marmite lovers unite.
A scale of abhorrence seems likely. Worst is to make a set of factual claims that lead the reader to an evaluative position similar to that of the author. Next would be the use of moral terms such as “good” or “harsh” or whatever, which seem to describe a situation and yet, within this perspective, merely mask an expression of preference as a factual claim. Less serious might be terms such as “ought” or “should” which we at least refer to situations in the future rather than claiming to present facts as they stand now. Least noxious would be clear statements of preference expressed in the first person. The latter seems to be an option for social scientists that is not entirely “abhorrent” but “it is poor taste to mix personal questions with specialized factual analysis” (Weber 1949: 5).
Weber explains this set of stipulations in terms of his understanding of value judgements. There is an unbridgeable distinction between arguments that appeal to our capacity to “become enthusiastic”, in other words, arguments which are about the “validity of ethical norms” and “those arguments which appeal to our capacity and need for analytically ordering empirical reality in a manner which lays claim to validity as empirical truth” (Weber 1949: 58). If history was to deal with questions of evaluation it would “suspend its character as empirical science” (Weber 1949: 123).
This all makes a certain amount of sense within Weber’s framework. I will explain his argument as follows. Value statements are particularly confusing for the social sciences because they appear to be factual claims about situations. In this way they are a kind of lie when used in social sciences, because they gain authority by their association with the real factual claims made by social science. Yet this authority is totally spurious since all they really tell us about is the attitude of the author to the facts being presented. The reader may easily agree that the facts are as described and yet approach them with an entirely different attitude. Yet this possibility is masked by the factual form of value judgements. The form of a value judgement – this is good – does not sound any different from the form of a factual statement – this is purple.
In all this Weber follows Hume exactly. Hume writes that to make a moral statement is to “excite passions, and produce or prevent actions”. These passions in themselves do not admit of truth or falsehood, since they are not susceptible to agreement or disagreement with reality, “being facts and realities complete in themselves, and implying no reference to other passions, volitions, or actions” (Hume 1965, 458). What Hume means by this is that a statement like “this is good” merely lets the reader know that the author approves of this situation. Yet this approval is neither true nor false, it is just a fact about the way the author is, and does not convey any true or false information about the situation being referred to.
As I have explained above, Weber also follows Hume in arguing that we cannot derive evaluative statements from statements of fact. Weber castigates the economist, Professor Liefmann for his “leap from the ‘is’ category to the ‘ought’ category” (Weber 1949: 36). His comment makes perfect sense within this framework. No facts about a situation can “imply” that we must feel about it a certain way. We could be given knowledge which might have an impact on our feelings, but as Hume argues, only because we have certain feelings to begin with that can be influenced as we come to know certain facts. We discover that food subsidies in Europe are starving the rural poor in Africa and because we already abhor the starvation of the rural poor, we come to dislike food subsidies in Europe. But this is not implied. Someone else who hears that food subsidies in Europe are starving the poor could accept this fact but go on hoping that the poor all starve as soon as possible and remove themselves from the planet.
Can we purge social science of evaluations?
Before I really present another way of looking at these issues, let us think for a minute about whether this program of Weber’s is really achievable. It is certainly achievable up to a point. Statements of personal feeling can certainly be removed from social science writing. I will argue later that this is a genre convention of the social sciences and does represent the tradition that the social sciences are concerned to describe situations factually. A second kind of statement that is usually taken out of social science writing is a clear ethical statement. Social scientists tend not to say that a situation they are describing is good or bad. They do not “moralize” by making moral claims. In my view this convention of social science genre reflects the influence of Weber’s argument.
Yet what is actually extremely difficult is to prune the statements that Weber is most opposed to – those that suggest a value judgement by “letting the facts speak for themselves”. There are a lot of ethical words in use that do not exactly cry from the rooftops that they are evaluative. For example if we were to write – “It was a hard winter for Napoleon’s troops as they approached Moscow” – the reader would not immediately seize on the term “hard” and assume that the author was talking about their own feelings. On the other hand the term really means that it was not “good” for Napoleon’s troops. What is worse, explaining in detail what facts were meant to be conveyed by this term would only compound the offence in Weber’s eyes. You could go on to talk about starvation and frostbite and death. Well, that would really purge the evaluative element straight away and we would know we had moved into the realm of social science and pure facts in a trice, with no danger that readers might be led into mistaken evaluative conclusions!
In one sense this is absolutely correct. As a supporter of the Russian people one might well welcome the defeat of Napoleon’s army and take a perverse personal joy in their suffering. The fact that the winter was “bad” for Napoleon’s troops would not imply that you felt a certain way about this scenario. But what is absolutely problematic for Weber’s program is that there is no doubt that the statement that it was a hard winter for Napoleon’s troops is an evaluative or ethical statement and is also a factual statement; there is no doubt that it is backed up by and explicated in terms of facts which are properly the domain of social science and there is no way whatsoever to purge social science from these kinds of evaluative statements. They are part and parcel of factual descriptions of human societies.
Another way of looking at this
To explain what may be going on here, let me suggest a very different reading of “evaluative” concepts. When evaluations are explicit statements about one’s own feelings, they are clearly not about the social situation you are describing and no one has any problem with this. It might be genre convention to remove them but they cannot possibly mislead a reader. However when evaluations are ethical statements about situations, they are actually factual statements and do convey certain kinds of information. In my view, statements that things are good or bad for a particular group are statements about whether the situations being described satisfy or frustrate the desires which are central to human nature. I shall take these desires to be autonomy, creativity, social pleasures, sexual pleasure, physical comfort and health. In other words, that is my own list of what are the basic desires of human nature; though clearly other authors may defend a different list. So for me, when we say the winter was hard for Napoleon’s troops we are talking mostly about their comfort and health and probably also about their lack of autonomy in so far as they would have rather been somewhere else. I can call this a “humanist” ethics because it refers ethics back to ideas about human nature. I will explore this sketch in more detail in following chapters.
But for now, the implications of this humanist perspective are as follows.
On the one hand, the exclusion of moral claims from social science is mainly a matter of genre. It is not a necessary aspect of social science as science. The genre convention is that when moral claims are made at all they are usually conveyed through terms that stand in for ethical terms – as in the example above where the term “hard” does not scream out at the reader that it is inappropriate for social science writing because it is an ethical term. As well, moral claims, however they are conveyed, are usually just an opening statement or a summary that precedes or follows from a much more detailed account. These detailed accounts make it clear how the situation being described satisfies or frustrates these central desires of human nature.
The second implication of my view is that accounts that do not explicitly use any general ethical terms also describe things in ways that make an ethical reading possible – because they talk about events which can be clearly seen to be relevant to the satisfaction or frustration of the people you are writing about – the way what is happening impacts on the desires and drives that make up their human nature. This is why “letting the facts speak for themselves” is both common and totally unavoidable in the social sciences. We can talk of these facts about situations as “ethical facts”. The only way in which letting the facts speak for themselves to convey an ethical claim is any kind of a problem is when the author intentionally misleads the reader by describing some ethical facts accurately and leaving others out of the picture. In so far as Weber has any real problem in mind that one might “abhor”, this is it.
So what of terms like “ought” and “should”? These are even more rarely used in social science writing. But they are often implied. From my point of view, these are statements about what would be good if it happened. If my reading of ethics is correct these are predictions (inevitable in the social sciences) and claims about how a certain state of affairs will affect the well being of a particular group you are talking about, a factual question. A statement that “you ought” to do something is a statement that this action would lead to good outcomes – for a specific group that you have in mind. A statement that this “should” happen is a statement that the outcomes of this action would be good. While writers in social science rarely present these statements as explicit “shoulds” and “oughts”, there is no doubt that they manage to convey that meaning. For example Pusey’s book can be seen as an argument for greater restriction of the labour market through legislation. This is what should be done to avoid the damaging consequences that his research reveals.
Going back to Hume
As I have said, Weber’s account of this relies very heavily on Hume, who has had a huge influence, and not just in the social sciences. So let us now return to Hume’s well-known claim about facts and values, which has since been dubbed his critique of the “naturalistic fallacy”.
Hume remarks that in every system of morality he has met with, “the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning … when of a sudden I am surpriz’d to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought or ought not”. It is altogether inconceivable, “how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it” (Hume 1965, 469). This argument has been refuted a number of times by more recent English philosophers (e.g. Searle, Black, Mitchell) but still seems to have a stranglehold on much writing about ethics in the social sciences.
Let me return to what has been suggested before. When we say that an action “ought” to happen we mean that it would be “good” for that action to take place. I am taking this to be a definition of what is meant by the term “ought”. Further, I am arguing that when we say something is “good” we mean that it satisfies the desires basic to human nature of the people we are talking about. Again, I am suggesting this as a definition. Finally, we shall frequently find in the social sciences, descriptions about what is taking place which have something to say about the way events satisfy or frustrate commonly understood aspects of human nature. We can link all these ideas together to come up with a set of propositions that produces the kinds of transitions Hume claims to be impossible viz:
What ought to be done is that which is good (definition).
What is good is that which best satisfies the human nature of the people in question (another definition).
This is the set of actions that is most likely to bring about the greatest satisfaction of the basic desires of the people in question (a factual claim about how certain actions are likely to bring about a particular situation in the future).
Therefore: It is this set of actions that ought to be done.
The conclusion is a statement containing an “ought” while the premises are statements joined by the “is” copula, which define the meaning of “ought” and also make factual claims of one sort or another.
My view is that social scientists are frequently making this kind of argument but are rarely explicit about it. It is much more common in social science to make these arguments without explicit use of moral terms. Events are explained in ways that make their relevance to central desires of humans quite apparent. As well, outcomes from certain courses of action are predicted and described in ways that make their benefits or disadvantages apparent. Nothing more needs to be said and it is not genre convention to do so. I will give some examples at the end of this chapter, which will explore the way social scientists write ethics into their analyses.
Humanist ethics in our culture today
It may be that the reader is finding this analysis of values, moral statements and ethics very puzzling and quite different from what they are used to. I would certainly agree that it is just one philosophy of ethics among others. But I would also suggest that it is a lot more familiar than the reader may imagine. It is just the language in which I present it which is unusual. Talk of human nature, of basic desires, of that which is good or bad, sounds clunky and old fashioned. I use this terminology intentionally to remind readers of what is really being claimed in the most everyday examples of social science. The term “humanist”, which I am using for this ethical framework is misleading to the extent that it suggests a certain kind of content for this ethics. We would not usually hear Hobbes referred to as a humanist because his view of human nature is so dark. However, as shall be shown in the next chapter, this is a structure of reasoning about ethics, a way of understanding what it is we are doing when we make ethical claims. Yet the actual ethical understandings that come out of it depend completely on the analysis of human nature that one makes. While that is certainly an empirical question it is not one that is easily resolved.
So why is this kind of ethics out of fashion and rarely explicit?
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Partly because the mistaken arguments of Hume still resonate profoundly with a dominant culture of scientific cynicism about values. We believe that values are arbitrary conventions, different in every culture and there can be no factual debate about them. While this is in fact a cynical and masculinist position, it sounds tolerant and suggests respect for cultural diversity.
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The other reason is that many religious thinkers do not want to root values in any kind of fact. They want to retain the freedom to stipulate a set of values based in old sacred texts. They are worried that their sacred text may be seen to be just one kind of religious belief among others – a set of ethical ideas that may or may not stand up to evidence based factual argument. They see a danger in the way humanist theories of ethics can dissolve the authority of sacred texts. For example, some Christians today are happy to take ideas from the Bible which they think are backed up by what we know about ethics today, while discarding other texts which have an outdated view of ethics. To many in the Churches, this is the thin end of the wedge leading to secularism.
Despite these two sources of antipathy to humanist ethics, the kind of ethics I am describing is also present as a strong and living tradition of our culture. For example, as I shall show in the next chapter, it is inherent in the ethical understandings of otherwise diverse classic writers such as Aristotle, Hobbes and Marx. It is a stock in trade of the personal growth movement and such popular writers as the psychologist Maslow with his “hierarchy of human needs”. It is implicit in much of the writing on popular therapy, such as that of Stephanie Dowrick. These writers are also correct to link it to aspects of Buddhist teaching. An ethics of the kind I am writing about here is even to be found in popular accounts of biology and evolution. Consider the following passage from Dennett’s account of the origin of consciousness. Considering the situation in which consciousness first evolved Dennett represents early organisms as developing interests through which circumstances were ethically defined:
… we, peering back from our godlike vantage point at their early days, can nonarbitrarily assign them certain interests – generated by their defining “interest” in self-replication … If these simple replicators are to survive and replicate, thus persisting in the face of increasing entropy, their environment must meet certain conditions: conditions conducive to replication must be present or at least frequent. Put more anthropomorphically, if these simple replicators want to continue to replicate, they should hope and strive for various things; they should avoid the “bad” things and seek the “good” things. When an entity arrives on the scene capable of behavior that staves off, however primitively, its own dissolution and decomposition, it brings with it into the world its “good”. That is to say, it creates a point of view from which the world’s events can be roughly partitioned into the favorable, the unfavorable, and the neutral. (Dennett1993: 173-4)
Weber’s second argument on values
As is well known, recommending the exclusion of values from social science accounts is just one aspect of Weber’s writing on social science and values so we should in all fairness consider the other aspect. Weber argues that even though values can have no rational foundations and are only feelings, we nevertheless have to use them to guide our research in the social sciences. All kinds of knowledge select, analyze and organize the material of their area of interest for expository purposes. Without this they would not be knowledge, and in view of the great number of events that a science could deal with, any other course of action is impossible.
According to Weber, the criteria in terms of which events are selected as being significant to the cultural sciences and in terms of which degrees of significance are judged is their relevance to values. As he remarks, prostitution, religions and money are “cultural phenomena only because and only in so far as their existence and the form which they historically take touch directly or indirectly on our cultural interests and arouse our striving for knowledge concerning problems brought into focus by the evaluative ideas which give significance to the fragment of reality analyzed by these concepts” (Weber 1949: 81). For example, the significance of the Persian wars was that they decided between the development of a theocratic-religious culture, on the one hand, and the “triumph of the free Hellenic circle of ideas, oriented towards this world” on the other. It is only because we value the Hellenic ideas highly that we find the Persian wars interesting and significant (Weber 1949: 171). In relation to Weber’s analysis of values, as described above, what this means is that the material selected by the social scientist should be relevant to things that the author feels deeply about; to things they would strongly advise and things they would choose.
A problem with this account is that it leaves us no room to criticize a social science text as biased because it uses the wrong criteria of importance and leaves something important out of the picture. Weber has a reply to one version of this critique. Let us imagine a writer on the first Gulf War who failed to talk about the way the US armed forces torched thousands of retreating Iraqi soldiers, burned alive in their vehicles. The writer could argue that they valued the American involvement and only wanted to report things relevant to that. Weber claims this is a misunderstanding of his position. We must include the things that are negatively valued as well as those which are positively valued.
… we hope that we will not be subject to crude misunderstandings such as the opinion that cultural significance should be attributed only to valuable phenomena, (Weber 1949: 81).
I am not sure that this argument really works. The author who fails to mention the Iraqi soldiers might say that in their own system of values Iraqi deaths were unimportant and so it was not worth mentioning them. Their critic would have to acknowledge this unusual (!) value framework and admit that they had made no mistake as a social scientist. Their description of the war was quite an accurate one in that what they did find important they had described truthfully. Within Weber’s viewpoint, we could never say that the account was biased because it did not describe all the significant and relevant events.
These issues are relatively easy to resolve if we adopt the kind of naturalistic (humanist) ethics I have outlined above. The most important elements of a social situation are those which are most closely related to those powers which we call human nature – it is the satisfaction or frustration of these desires which constitutes good and evil. Weber’s sensible view that the social sciences deal with what is valuable to people can in this way be tied closely to the more obvious point that the area of interest of the social sciences is people and their powers; to explain how social objects arise from the combinations of people and the actions of their human powers.
Weber’s influence today – an example
The ways of thinking about ethics laid down by Hume and applied to the social sciences by Weber still exercise immense influence on discussion of these issues today; although as I shall indicate these discussions are generally reserved for explicit consideration of ethical issues, while a whole set of other practices continues in real social science writing.
In a useful text for social science students, Geoff and Judy Payne use the topic “Objectivity” to consider ethical issues in the social sciences. Objectivity, they say, is a matter of how we orient ourselves to our research data and interpret our data. Readers prefer objectivity because they want “to feel confident that researchers have constrained their personal prejudices” (Payne & Payne 2004: 153). Findings should not depend on who did the research, and their particular prejudices but what “was there to be found” (Payne & Payne 2004: 153). This is related in the next paragraph to the views of early sociologists, like Comte and Durkheim, who argued for the “scientific” nature of sociology. “Social science’s task is to discover what is, not what ought to be. Conviction statements – ‘oughts’ or ‘shoulds’ – are value judgements, which cannot be subjected to scientific test. Value judgements belong in personal life, religion, morals or politics. In scientific research, they must be excluded ” (Payne & Payne 2004: 153).
In all this the equation of moral statements with personal feelings that we find in Weber and Hume is re-stated. Also seen as a problem is the possibility that an author may be influenced by their personal feelings to describe the facts in a way that does not represent them adequately. Since moral judgements are a kind of personal feeling, the presence of these in a scientific work is a dead giveaway that the author has allowed their personal feelings to influence the presentation of their findings and to misrepresent their own personal feeling about something as an accurate factual account.
But Payne and Payne are also aware that this scientistic and positivist view has many critics and an engaged and morally activist social science is also promoted by many social scientists – especially of course feminists and left wing writers. So they put the case against the above recommendations as well.
This perspective loses the sense that researchers are human, over-optimistically seeing regulated protocols as a complete method of control. But sociologists are not technicians repairing a machine. Their feelings and evaluations are an integral part of their make-up, and cannot be neatly compartmentalized. (Payne & Payne 2004: 153-4)
This statement fits with Weber’s second argument about ethics and values – values determine what the social scientist takes to be important and worth study. What is fascinating in the Paynes’ endorsement of this is that they continue the equation between personal feelings and moral statements. Yes, science is about the statement of facts but we cannot believe that people stating facts are not influenced by their personal feelings.
Like Weber, they go on to allow a place for “evaluation” in deciding what things are to be researched.
Without a clear set of values, it is impossible to define what is socially problematic, and what might be ‘better”. For example ‘the rule of law’ or ‘social equality’ are not the same as ‘injustice’ or ‘inequality’. Values help to show what should be researched, rather than preventing researchers from being rigorous in their research. (Payne & Payne 2004: 154)
This is a puzzling passage. It comes close to allowing that there are such things as ethical facts that are inevitably discussed in social science. For example do social scientists regard it as a “fact” that there is social inequality? Is it a “fact” that social inequality is a “bad” thing, at least for those on the receiving end of inequality? Listing it as something which is relevant to values certainly suggests that it is evaluated negatively. But any such interpretation of their position – as allowing that there could be ethical facts – is closed off in their next statements. What authors should do is to be “honest and open about their values” so the readers can take this into account “in evaluating findings”. Here we are firmly reminded that an author’s values are a matter of personal preference and if our own values are not the same we should discount their statements accordingly. Well, you say that this is social inequality but I understand that you favour a redistribution of wealth and I do not; so I must discount your statement by 20% and conclude that there is less social inequality than you claim. Is this a sensible argument?
Another approach to ethics in the social sciences
In this second section of the chapter, I am intending to review some actual writings in the social sciences in recent years and see how issues of values and ethics are actually treated. I am intending to make two points. Firstly, that what is going on can be very well understood and represented using the humanist framework that I have outlined. Secondly, that the genre conventions of social science have been heavily influenced by the perspective inherited from Weber’s writings and re-presented in works such as that of the Paynes.
A Popular text in social sciences – breaking genre
To give the reader an idea of what I am talking about let me quote from Jeffrey Sachs’ book on global poverty, a text of popular social science. Early in the book he tries to give the reader a sense of what global poverty means for the poor:
The margin of survival is extraordinarily narrow; sometimes it closes entirely. One woman we meet in front of her mud hut has fifteen orphaned grandchildren, as shown in photograph 1. As she begins to explain her situation to us, she first points to the withered crops that have died in the fields next to her hut. Her small plot, perhaps half a hectare (a little more than an acre) in all, would be too small even if the rains had been plentiful. The problems of small farm size and drought are compounded by yet another problem: the soil nutrients have been depleted so significantly in this part of Malawi that crop yields reach only about one ton of maize per hectare with good rains … She reaches into her apron and pulls out a handful of semirotten, bug infested millet, which will be the basis for the gruel she will prepare for the meal that evening. It will be the one meal the children have that day. I ask her about the health of the children. She points to a child of about four and says that the small girl contracted malaria the week before. The woman had carried her grandchild on her back for the ten kilometers or so to the local hospital. When they got there, there was no quinine, the antimalarial medicine, available that day. With the child in high fever, the grandmother and grandchild were sent home and told to return the next day. (Sachs 2005: 6)
This is a set of statements about the situation in Malawi. There is no single clear ethical term used in the whole account (good, bad, should, ought etc). Yet it would be hard to deny that it is an evaluative description of this situation that indicates that this is a “bad” situation for the grandmother and her children. It would also be a fairly reasonable assumption that Sachs is not personally happy with the way things are here. Nevertheless I would argue that this is not logically implied. He could be a heartless bastard who is merely writing such stuff to make a reputation. There is nothing in this description that states what Sachs himself feels about it.
So let us assume that he is personally unhappy with what he describes. What if he had stated outright that he is not happy about the situation? If we were to do what the Paynes advise we should clearly adjust our reading to take this bias into account. So what parts of the above account should we dismiss because Sachs’ personal feelings have led to him write this account? Perhaps he knew that the grandmother was hiding another handful of maggoty millet in her other pocket. Perhaps the grandmother told him that this event took place last year and he changed the account to create a better story by saying that it took place last week. Clearly any such misrepresentations would be misleading the reader about matters of fact. If he is misleading us at all it is about the facts of the situation. Yet these are ethical facts. If they are true they enable us to conclude that the situation described is not a good situation.
Because this is a popular social science book, Sachs goes on to break genre convention in the academic social sciences by including some explicit ethical statements:
More than one million African children, and perhaps as many as three million, succumb to malaria each year. This horrific catastrophe occurs despite the fact that the disease is partly preventable … There is simply no conceivable excuse for this disease to be taking millions of lives each year. (Sachs 2005: 7)
The ethical terms are “horrific” and “no conceivable excuse”.
The first term “horrific” sums up the situation described by using a synonym for “bad”. Given the facts as he presents them – the deaths, which could be prevented if only a little money were spent – this situation is bad. My point is that we do not need him to make explicit use of this ethical term for us to know that the set of facts he lays out imply that this is a bad situation. In terms of information; the ethical term “horrific” is at best a summary of what he has already described and even one might say redundant in terms of information. That is because the facts that he has already revealed tell us that this is a bad situation – they are ethical facts. We can also note that this synonym for bad invokes an emotional state – being horrified. In a sense the statement tells the reader that this is a bad situation and also informs the reader that their personal reaction is likely to be a feeling of horror. Well, yes, this must be seen as a persuasive rhetorical device of the kind that worries Weber. But we can make two points. One is that you could read all of this account and yet not be moved in this way – you might think there are too many of the poor and this is just nature’s way of controlling an excessive population. The other is that this emotional reaction of horror is just as likely to be produced by reading the detailed account – without the inclusion of any such clearly sentimental and ethical terms.
The second ethical phrase – “no conceivable excuse” – means again that the situation described is bad or immoral and also implies that those who could do something about this (the rich) should do something about it. This is elaborated by Sachs at greater length in other parts of the book so I am not jumping to conclusions in explaining his statement like this. In terms of my definitions above it means that it would be good if they were to do something to prevent this along the lines he suggests (bed nets, insect sprays). This is a prediction of benefit based on his social science and medical analysis.
Also implied is that the personal cost to the rich (their excuse) is of small account compared to the suffering that takes place in the absence of their action. This is a weighing of goods across two groups on the world scene – small harms to the rich in their hip pocket versus great goods to a very large number of African children who will otherwise die (a very bad thing for people) at a young age. Again we can imagine a way in which he could make this ethical claim without using explicit ethical terms. For example. It would cost the rich very little of their personal fortune to save these lives. These children would live if the rich devoted a small part of their fortune to saving them and as things stand now they will die of malaria. The terms “no conceivable excuse” sum up a set of factual claims that would have the same ethical implications if these summary ethical terms were not being used.
What we absolutely could say about Sachs’ prose in this second set of statements is that it breaks genre conventions in the social sciences by including explicit ethical statements. However what I am arguing is that it is no less (or more) a factual account than the statement in the first excerpt, which fits social science genre conventions more closely. It is these explicit ethical judgements in the second statement which make Sachs’ work a “popular” and in terms of genre conventions an “unscientific” work.
As argued above, the way I understand the meaning of ethical facts and explain their inclusion in the social sciences is as follows. Statements about what is good and bad are statements about what is in the interests of some specified group of people. These interests are defined in terms of ideas about human nature – what is “good” is what best suits human nature – desires and drives that are shared by all members of the human species. As a result, every kind of social science description of society makes comments about whether things are good or bad – even if these ethical words are not used. This is because it has to present events which realize or frustrate these needs that humans share – this is inevitable. For example to stay alive, to be fed when you are hungry, to have your desires realized in autonomous action and so on. In the first piece of prose, which passes muster as social science, Sachs describes events which frustrate the desire of the grandmother to care for those she loves by preventing them from dying of hunger and malaria. In the second piece of prose he broadens out this picture to include the malaria deaths of a great number of African children and by implication compares this frustration of human desires to live with the small discomforts that might be suffered by the rich if they were to do something about this. This is an ethical calculation of benefit across two groups of people and by implication considers each person as equally valuable in this summation – what is the greatest good that could be achieved for this whole group (African children and millionaires) if we considered their interests in combination?
Two examples from scientific writing in the social sciences
Since Geoffrey Sachs is an obvious popularist, we might well discount him as an example of good social science practice. I will now consider how these issues are handled in more academically respectable texts
The first is a text for social workers by a Canadian proponent of engaged critical social work.
One way to avoid the appearance of making an ethical claim is to invite your readers to share your value position. Such a technique can seem to fit the requirements of a social science adapted to Weber’s stipulations. It says to the reader, given that the choice of value positions is a matter of feeling and principle rather than any part of the scientific findings of social science, let me invite you to make the arbitrary choice to agree with the values that inform my work.
A good example of the strategy of inviting readers to share your values is the following statement:
This changing context of social work practice poses many dilemmas and contradictions for social workers … Social workers often find themselves in unfriendly and hostile practical environments for people who sincerely believe that the role of social work is to make the world a better place for larger numbers of people and to further the cause of social justice by helping disadvantaged groups to empower themselves. (Mullaly )
Here Mullaly treats the preference for social justice as a personal value that the reader and many social workers may share with the author. Given that preference, we can talk about the difficulties encountered. He does not say “The role of social work is to empower the disadvantaged; this is what social workers should be doing”. Nevertheless the reader is left in little doubt that this is what he thinks. The actual phrasing quoted above removes the possibility that this belief is being put forward as any kind of empirical claim; instead it is a statement of personal preference.
It is interesting to note the way in which this kind of guarded phrasing does not actually allow Mullaly to avoid a much more factual engagement with ethical claims. He refers to the way in which right wing commentators present social work as an intrusion into people’s freedoms:
For social workers who may have thought that their work was actually improving individual well-being and an overall quality of life for society, it is a cruel irony to be labeled as ‘villains’ or ‘wimps’ rather than as heroes in the struggle for a just and fair society. (Mullaly )
Again, Mullaly begins by reassuring the reader that we are treating values as a matter of personal preference – a belief on the part of social workers that they are doing good. However the issues raised by this debate force him to treat ethical statements as factual statements that can be debated with the tools of social science. Is it true or false that social workers are improving individual well-being? Are their actions doing more harm than good? These issues become important topics for later detailed discussion in his text.
In a later passage Mullaly adopts the strategy of detailing ethical claims and not using explicit ethical terms to convey ethical facts. This genre convention of academic social science can reassure the reader that the work in question is not “evaluative” and merely states the facts – there are no ethical terms being used:
The net effect is that it is now impossible to address the economic and social needs of increasing numbers of people in a meaningful way – particularly the poor, the disadvantaged, and the most exploited, which include women, immigrants, people of colour, and the unemployed. (Mullaly )
Here, as before the reader is invited to be part of the project to “address” economic and social needs. Given that we may share this project, what is the current situation? The phrase “economic and social needs” implies something empirical rather than ethical. These are facts about people; it is a matter of science rather than ethics that can tell us what people “need”. The ethical term “exploitation” is tied to specific social groups and by implication to a range of empirical facts about their situation that allow us to use the term “exploitation” scientifically. As I have indicated above, these issues are in fact at the heart of ethical claims because human needs are just what ethics is about. The prose does not actually avoid making ethical factual claims but it expresses these claims in a way that is consonant with social science genre.
Mullaly’s text is a good example of how far it is possible to go and still remain in social science genre. It is on the edge of being a “popularist” rather than a scientific text – which is perhaps allowable because it is a textbook.
A second example is a report commissioned for a government agency concerned with transmission of blood borne viruses within the drug subculture of Australia (Southgate & Weatherall 2003). The report examines the drug subculture of Kings Cross to talk about the ways in which risky practices in injecting drugs arise out of the culture and circumstances of drug users. As a report to a government agency it is expected to come up with recommendations for action. So how are ethical claims and statements handled in this context?
The chapter introduces the project by noting the way the concept of “risk” is used to refer to risks of “harm”. To that extent the ethical implications of the term are made clear to begin with. However the prose distances the authors from any absolute claims about “harm”, saying:
In popular and public health discourse, risk is most often associated with harm, danger, threat or hazard. (Southgate & Weatherall 2003: 20)
In other words, “risk” is a term which has meaning in popular and governmental circles and in these circles the terms is defined within an ethical perspective which as social scientists we can note but do not necessarily endorse.
The introduction goes on to outline their own research in a way that stresses a cause effect model:
This chapter primarily uses a socio-cultural approach to document and interpret risks for blood-borne virus transmission among injecting drug users in Kings Cross, Sydney, Australia. (Southgate & Weatherall 2003: 21)
The research aims to make use of medical understandings of risk but to also understand how risk is defined by those involved and the cultural circumstances in which their risky behaviour takes place. While the authors do not commit themselves to a project of reducing risk to the benefit of those concerned, this goal is assumed in statements that make it clear that continued risky behaviour is a problem, a bad thing which the authors (and readers) would like to reduce:
The Kings Cross study posed questions regarding the continuation of risk practice in an environment where free, sterile injecting equipment is fairly available ... (Southgate & Weatherall 2003: 24)
The reader is reassured in the methodology section that the selection of evidence cannot be biased by personal prejudices on the part of the authors:
The authors of this chapter then re-read data noting any aspects, including disconfirming evidence, not identified during the group analysis process. (Southgate & Weatherall 2003: 26)
The intention of the authors to give you an account of the facts, rather than sentiments and feelings is made clear:
Our analysis aims to offer insights into some of the collectively experienced social factors that are implicated in risk practice. (Southgate & Weatherall 2003: 27).
So clearly in the body of the text an effort is made to reassure the reader that what they are seeing is a factual account of a social situation. Ethical terms – mostly “risk” are used in a way that renders them as scientific as possible. Mostly, risk is portrayed as the possibility of contracting an infection, something which is clearly within the realm of the science of medicine.
Nevertheless, there is a great deal in the body of the account that confirms the view espoused here that ethical facts are an inevitable aspect of social science descriptions. The following quotes are a few good examples of the way a description of people’s lives is also an account of the good and evil that they experience. In all of these examples specific ethical terms are absent, but ethical facts are certainly conveyed through detailed discussion of situations that are relevant to human desires and interests. Sometimes ways of describing the situations that have ethical terms embedded are put in quote marks as excerpts from the transcript – for example ‘ripped off’, ‘stood over’ and so on:
Group injecting can be a hectic experience. This is especially true when there is pressure to inject, as in public settings where there is a fear of being caught by the public or police. Pressure may also be induced by ‘stand-over merchants’ who rob other users or demand a share of the drug mix, and by people who are severely ‘hanging out’ (suffering withdrawal). (Southgate & Weatherall 2003: 32)
Interview transcripts are peppered with accounts of ‘desperadoes’ and ‘junkies’. In one of these accounts a desperate man uses the blood-filled syringe of an acquaintance he knows has tuberculosis. In other stories, injectors frantically search for old needles in garden beds, toilets and streets. (Southgate & Weatherall 2003: 37)
Desperate actions are associated with: ‘hanging out’ or feeling withdrawal effects; contingent circumstances such as being offered an immediate gift of drugs and being forced to rush their injecting procedure; being ‘ripped off’ by those who offer pre-loaded syringe deals rather than heroin or cocaine in powder form; or being ‘stood over’ in injecting situations where intimidation precludes negotiating safer injecting. (Southgate & Weatherall 2003: 38)
Health risks are increased by the unhygienic conditions in which public injecting occurs. Dirt, faeces and urine are present in many public and semi-public settings. Blood is sometimes visible. (Southgate & Weatherall 2003: 40)
‘Spoon men’ is a term used to describe homeless men who collect discarded bags, spoons and cottons, rinsing them out to form a wash-down drug mix … Spoon men are situated at the bottom of the user hierarchy. They have little means of generating the income needed to buy drugs, even when their meagre financial resources are pooled. They are chronically homeless, living for years on the street, and must therefore always inject in public or semi-public spaces. Their long-term homelessness and drug dependency leave them exposed to police attention, street violence and a range of health problems of which BBVI is simply one ... spoon men know they are taking risks. Health risks are, however, only one aspect of an exceedingly precarious existence. (Southgate & Weatherall 2003: 43)
The hepatitis C virus needs to be situated within the raft of health, welfare and social concerns experienced by marginalised injecting drug users. The majority of participants in this study experienced a range of health problems including collapsed veins, abscesses, overdose, septicaemia and ‘dirty hits’ … These numerous health concerns nested themselves within the gamut of everyday worries that accompanied being poor and drug-dependent. Everyday concerns involve finding money, drug acquisition, avoiding street and domestic violence, making it to the methadone clinic on time, maintaining relationships with partners and friends, and, for many, finding somewhere safe to sleep. (Southgate & Weatherall 2003: 49)
The concluding remarks to this chapter are a good example of how “shoulds” are handled in social science literature. As noted it is usual to begin such claims by addressing the reader as someone who can be presumed to share the value predilections of the authors:
Addressing blood-borne virus prevention within the syndemic context of the Kings Cross injecting scene is challenging. As Aggleton (n.d.) argues, there are no magic bullet solutions within the differing local contexts of epidemics Rather, coherent health and welfare programming at several different levels is necessary to support risk reduction at a collective as well as an individual level. (Southgate & Weatherall 2003: 50)
The opening sentence defines a goal which the reader is invited to share. Within that context the term “solution” which can be considered an ethical term meaning “a good outcome” is glossed as being about the achievement of a specified goal that actors may wish to accomplish. Given that goal, social science allows us to specify likely interventions which may cause the desired effect – interventions which are necessary to “support” risk reduction. A range of micro strategies is then specified – such as educating about the risks of needle sharing for couples and friends. Following this there are intermediate strategies – such as preventing homelessness and providing accommodation. Finally there are recommendations for changes in legislation to allow injectable opioids for those who continue to inject while being treated. Changes in police behaviour are also advised:
Increasing NSP [needle provision] access times to when users are most active – that is, late at night – would be beneficial. However, the benefits derived from increased NSP hours are likely to be offset by zero-tolerance policing, including the use of sniffer dogs. There is ample evidence that suggests this type of policing increases the potential for individual and public health harms. The ill-fit between public health initiatives and certain styles of policing deserves serious consideration at a policy and practical level. (Southgate & Weatherall 2003: 50)
It is typical of social science genre in this field of practical policy discussion that the ethical terms end up being used in the second last paragraph of the whole chapter. There are “benefits” in later NSP hours. The ill-fit “deserves” consideration – in other words, this should be considered and by implication the policing policy should be changed. But again, this use of ethical terms is contextualized in relation to an overarching hypothetical – the challenging problem of preventing blood borne virus infection. If we want to see a reduction in risky strategies for drug users then the following policies are necessary. This is a claim about cause and effect with the ethical premise – that we share a desire to reduce risky behaviour – put as a hypothetical that lies outside the factual description. In other words, if you share this value premise (something which is of course totally arbitrary and personal, as Weber says), then you will agree that these measures seem the most likely to work and therefore should be implemented.
Clearly I am suggesting that we could read this chapter as establishing a set of ethical facts as part of a description of a social situation and as making an analysis of what should be done in terms of a social scientific finding of cause and effect. Yet what I have been also interested in showing is the way this chapter achieves this task without seeming to contradict very typical statements about values and ethics made by Payne and Payne and clearly derived from Weber’s and Hume’s analysis. As I have made clear, these dominant readings of social science have it that ethical statements are statements which convey no factual information – but merely function to convey the likes and dislikes of authors. As such, ethical statements are not really part of the business of social scientists.
What I want to suggest is that much writing in the social sciences is made acceptable by framing it up in relation to a set of genre conventions that make the account seem to fit with the Weberian perspective on ethics and the social sciences. This is by purging certain kinds of ethical terminology and phrasing from almost all of the account. It is by suggesting in so many ways that the ethical recommendations are offered in the context of a cause and effect model which is the main and central part of the analysis as social science. It is by posing any clearly ethical statements as following from a postulated desire to make certain changes. This desire stands outside the analysis as a hypothetical premise. It is set up to look as though it is not strictly speaking part of the factual account being offered. Consequently the ethical claims themselves come to be presented as though they are not really a central part of the analysis as “social science”.
Summarising genre conventions
What I have been arguing so far are two things. Firstly, Weber’s program to remove ethics and values from social science writing is strictly speaking impossible. Ethical facts are an intrinsic part of any description of human society. Secondly, the rationale for removing ethical and value statements from social science is based on a mistaken view of ethics. It assumes that ethical statements are a misleading form in which people express a personal preference or antipathy for the situation described. This is incorrect. Ethical statements are, at least in part, statements of fact that make claims about whether a situation serves or does not serve the interests that make up human nature. Ethical conclusions can also be drawn from statements that describe events in ways that make their relevance to these interests apparent. Explicit ethical claims are just one way in which these factual claims can be conveyed. There are a whole host of less than ethical synonyms for ethical claims as well as ways of describing things that reveal ethical facts.
The dominance of Hume and Webers’ perspective on ethics and facts has led to a set of genre conventions in social science that allow authors to deal with an impossible situation in a way that can allow ethical information to be imparted without appearing to transgress the norms set down by this false theory of ethics.
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Social scientists avoid ethical terms that also convey something about the feeling of the author and urge a similar emotional state in the reader. These are synonyms for “bad” such as “appalling”. “horrifying”, “disgusting” or for “good” such as “attractive”, “appealing” and so on.
All these strategies work on the idea that evaluative statements are really speech acts which convey information about feelings rather than anything factual about the situation. The strategies purge clearly ethical terms as part of description. They remove any terms that seem to be about the feelings (or values) of the author or urge the reader to have a particular feeling.
This strategy presents the social scientist as social engineer, rather than ethicist. If you want to build a bridge that will withstand 10 tonnes of traffic, then let me explain how this can be done.
An attempt to deal with these issues – Flyvbjerg’s view on ethics and the social sciences
I am not the only one who has been niggled by the problems of reconciling a dominant Weberian position on ethics with social advocacy and the political use of social science writing.
Flyvbjerg begins his account by noting that since the Enlightenment, humanity has been obsessed with instrumental knowledge – how to do things. The question of what to do has been sadly neglected. We have had little “reflexive analysis of goals, values and interests” (Flyvbjerg 2001: 53). This is the particular role of social science. In order to tackle this problem, Flyvbjerg recommends we turn to Aristotle. Aristotle talks about three kinds of knowledge. Episteme is the understanding of “universals” – this is what we can learn from science. We can think of things like Newton’s laws of motion as an example.
Then there are two kinds of particular knowledge – knowledge for which you cannot frame up a universal law.
There is techne which is the application of knowledge to particular situations where we want to know how to achieve some particular goal. We can think of something like how to grow a tomato. Finally, there is the true goal of the social sciences, phronesis which encompasses knowledge to do with values and oriented to practical questions. Like techne, this knowledge is pragmatic “variable, context dependent” (Flyvbjerg 2001: 57). So, in a telling example he points out that the Romans could not have been expected to come up with the idea – should we abolish slavery?
For me this schema has a certain logic and I am happy to accept the role of social sciences as being to develop answers to value questions which are particular for a given social situation. But what remains a puzzle is whether Flvbjerg thinks answers to these value questions are questions of fact or merely questions of preference, as the Weberian tradition implies.
There is a tricky ambivalence in the term “particular” that is exploited here. It is a particular and not a universal truth that the chair is sitting outside the door at 353 Sydney road on Monday afternoon. It is not like a law of nature. It is context dependent in the sense that the context of that particular chair being there on that afternoon is the context that makes this statement true. But it is not context dependent in the sense that its truth depends on who said it and what social and particular circumstances led them to make that claim. The chair either was there or was not there. So, was it true that slavery was a bad thing or does that statement make sense now in our context and is strictly speaking ridiculous when applied to the Romans because their social context made it impossible for them to imagine the idea of abolishing it?
In one statement, Flyvbjerg seems to suggest that there may be ethical facts as I have been arguing. This is where he is writing about a book that interviews Americans about their values and considers the contexts in which these are formed. Flyvbjerg praises this book as doing what social science should – it helps us to compare different values and have a look at the values that are being expressed in society. He says:
By probing the past as well as the present, by looking at values as much as facts – or at values as facts – such a social science is able to make connections that are not obvious … (Flyvbjerg 2001: 64).
I do not think Flyvbjerg intends here to mean literally that statements about value can be factual statements, as I would. I think instead that he means that it is factually true that the people interviewed have the values which are described.
Flyvbjerg’s adherence to a Weberian concept of ethical statements is perhaps indicated by an early declaration:
Choices must be deemed good (or bad) in relation to certain values and interests in order for good and bad to have meaning. (Flyvbjerg 2001: 57)
He goes on to say later, explaining his interpretation of Aristotle, that:
… phronesis is about value judgements, not about producing things. (Flyvbjerg 2001: 58)
I am taking these statements to mean that there is nothing factual about whether something is good or bad; its “value” is a product of specific and socially constructed preferences – value judgements. In this context the role of social science is to interpret the “status of values and interests in society” (Flyvbjerg 2001: 60). We are to ask four questions:
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Where are we going?
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Is this desirable?
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What should be done?
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Who gains and who loses?
All these questions seem to be screaming out for the kind of ethical understanding that I have been advocating. They are about what is good or bad in a particular situation and about who a particular state of affairs is good or bad for. As I have shown repeatedly, answering such questions is the inevitable outcome of any kind of social science enquiry, however much it may be masked by genre conventions. Flyvbjerg’s point that things are not “good” or “bad” absolutely but only in relation to particular people and their circumstances is an insight that fits very well with the view that the good is that which satisfies human nature. Human nature is a universal biological substrate of conduct, for sure, but what satisfies humans at any point certainly includes getting what they want, which is very particular. The way in which drives for autonomy, to eat, to be appreciated and the like are manifested is something which has a particular social inflection in particular circumstances. Even more obviously, it is something which can be realized only in particular ways depending on the circumstances. Moreover it is not something that can be talked about in abstraction from the people in question. Which people are having their nature satisfied and which are not, is always relevant.
But Flybjerg does not take such an obvious path with these issues. The variability of ethical solutions is for him evidence that there are no ethical facts; there are just values which are socially constructed:
… imagine trying to ask the Romans to abolish slavery or to think about an international equilibrium. The present effectively limits the possible preferences; humans can not think or do just anything at any time. (Flyvbjerg 2001: 100)
For a start, this is far from clear. One wonders where Spartacus and the Early Christians came from. But even if we agree, it is hardly the point. It is an ethical fact that slaves were worse off than their masters. That their autonomy and self realization as human beings was constrained. That their masters at the time were incapable of seeing these facts does not prevent them from being “universally” true statements about these particular circumstances.
The central ethical problem for Flyvbjerg is that his Weberian theory of ethics drives him into an ethical relativism that is not a comfortable position for someone who wants to act ethically. If ethical judgements (values) are really just the socially constructed preferences of the speaker, why should anyone else take them at all seriously? In a Flyvbjerg ethical universe the following statement by an ancient Roman uncovering an anti-slavery tract makes perfectly good sense:
It is an interesting social fact about the author of this text that he thinks slavery is a bad thing for the people who are enslaved. But this tract is cutting no ice with me – as I am an ancient Roman who has been brought up to think the opposite.
The reality, as we shall see in the next chapter, is that Aristotle (an ancient Greek actually) does in fact defend the ethical validity of slavery with an argument that still requires an answer today – something that is rather hard to understand if Flyvbjerg is right – why did he ever bother?
Flyvbjerg cannot in fact ask the question “What should be done?” as though that question has a right answer. The only question he could ask is “How do the various options fit with my values, or your values?”. His program, to be consistent, is the one he claims for the book “Habits of the Heart”:
The whole point of the study is to enter into dialogue with individuals and to assist them – after they have assisted the researcher – in reflecting on their values. (Flyvbjerg 2001: 63)
In other words, we cannot tell someone that their values are wrong, we cannot say to them that what they want will lead to a “bad” outcome for some specified group of people – but we could point out to them that they are being inconsistent. We could show them that if they really had the values they said, they would be favouring some different policy. Certainly all a very laudable ambition for social science but not a program that can answer the question “What should be done?”
Why Flyvbjerg claims he is not an ethical relativist
Flyvbjerg does have an answer to the problem of ethical relativism and I will now consider it. He presents this as he defends the ethical positions taken by Foucault. Flyvbjerg appreciates Foucault as an author who realizes, like himself, that ethics is context dependent, an author who does not try to establish a universalistic ethics, true for all time.
He describes Foucault’s position like this. Foucault has a desire to challenge “every abuse of power, whoever the author, whoever the victims” and he wants to give impetus to the “undefined work of freedom” (Flyvbjerg 2001: 100). Foucault, he claims, is an author who is not committed to one of the “many systems of thought about what is good for man”, an author who does not have one of the many “utopian visions of the good” and does not defend “global moral norms”. In other words, he likes Foucault because he seems to realize that there is no “universal” ethics and that answers to ethical questions are context dependent.
Yet surely if we think that every abuse of power, in any social context, is wrong and we want to defend whatever strategy it may be that will lead to an increase in “freedom” we are fairly heavily committed to one of many “systems of thought about what is good for man” and one among many “utopian visions of the good” and to the defence of at least one of a number of possible “global moral norms” – a norm which could be very simply put as “to defend freedom in whatever way will work best”.
Not so, according to Flyvbjerg. Foucault realizes that what may advance the cause of freedom in one context is not so useful for freedom in another context. Well this is certainly a useful degree of caution but it would be extreme to see it as an abandonment of a “universalistic” ethics. It is maybe a cautious and pragmatic universalistic ethics rather than a stupidly dogmatic one.
But this is not how Flyvbjerg is reading Foucault. Foucault, he says, is aware that the commitment to freedom that he defends is:
… not based on idiosyncratic moral or personal preferences, but on a context-dependent common world view and interests among a reference group, well aware that different groups typically have different interests and that there exists no general principle – including the ‘force of the better argument’ – by which differences can be resolved. (Flyvbjerg 2001: 101)
He states this again later with the same approval as an antidote to the relativist view that “one set of values is just as good as another” (Flyvbjerg 2001: 130). “Phronetic” researchers take their “point of departure” from the society being studied. They seek to ensure that the value attitude they work from is based:
… on a common view among a specific reference group to which the researchers refer. (Flyvbjerg 2001: 130)
These researchers realize that:
… our sociality and history is the only foundation we have, the only solid ground under our feet. (Flyvbjerg 2001: 130)
It is amazing that Flyvbjerg believes this is a departure from ethical relativism. The only difference between this and some more extreme relativist position is that a set of values is given credibility only if it held by a “specific reference group” and is a common view among the members of that group and has been founded on their history and sociality. In other words, for Flyvbjerg any ethical position which meets these criteria is as valid as any other that meets the same criteria, and there is “no way” by which these differences could be resolved and no valid argument for defending one of these perspectives against another one. We would only be able to argue against one of these views in dispute if it was “idiosyncratic” and “individual” – in which case we could write off the minority viewpoint as that of an eccentric nutter.
Personally, I do not find this a very convincing or reassuring departure from ethical relativism, nor do I find this viewpoint the real basis of discussion in the social sciences or even in any popular ethical tradition.
We can certainly think of some amusing encounters. The social scientist and the Klu Klux Klansman.
Well, I have to admit that your values are shared by a large reference group and come out of a shared social foundation in which it is considered moral to hang a black man from a tree if he has had sex with a white woman. Although my values are different I have to concede that I have no moral argument against what you are saying and your racist perspective certainly meets the criteria for an ethical point of view (no date; no author).
The fact is that almost all moral debates in our culture today, and probably throughout history, come out of clashes between reference groups that have been historically created to think a certain way and do not take kindly to being told that their moral viewpoints are wrong. It is bizarre to associate Foucault with a view that could suggest there is nothing wrong with the bashing of gay men whether in the streets or through psychiatry and religion – at least if you come from one of the reference groups which endorses these anti-gay viewpoints.
As with all relativism there is an implicit insularity which is hard to get around in this perspective. Where do you begin a dialogue if these standpoints are merely the different products of history? The attack on individual and idiosyncratic perspectives seems to completely rule out the idea that any individual might actually pioneer a new and more adequate ethical position. It seems to endorse an ethics of warring camps, sticking to what they have inherited from their history. The only way that Flyvbjerg even seems to get this argument to fly is that he uses the “desire for freedom” as his example and his “reference group” is the “democratic” culture of the “West”. It is only the last word that is not a quote from Flyvbjerg. This is a very worrying kind of social science. What we end up with is a de facto universalistic ethics which has found a reason why it does not have to defend itself. It is just “our” tradition in the West to look at ethical issues in this way and it needs no further defence!
Weberian and humanist ethics
In this chapter I have argued the key importance of Weber’s views on ethics and values in the social sciences. These views, and the arguments of Hume, from which they are derived, have had an enormous impact on the social sciences. The problems that are inherent in this position are most obvious in any discussion that tries to come to grips with ethical issues in writing the meta-theory of the social sciences. There is always an awkward mismatch between the relativism implied by Weber’s theory and the desire to join in political debate on ethical issues. This is just as true for a text book treatment like that of the Paynes as it is for a more considered and philosophical treatment like that of Flyvbjerg.
In my view this understanding of ethics is a big problem for the social sciences because it asks social scientists to pretend to work within the framework of a theory of ethics which actually does not make sense and is not consonant with the way ethical issues are actually considered in the community at large. The way working social scientists actually deal with this disaster is by adopting a set of genre conventions that mask ethical facts in their writings. While this set of conventions has become sanctified by tradition and seems unlikely to vanish from academic social science, this ethical perspective is in fact a political problem for social scientists. We enter political debate on ethical issues with one hand tied behind our back, while representatives from the natural sciences like psychology and biology, not to mention the churches and political organizations, have no hesitation in pronouncing and making claims on ethical issues. I am arguing that the effect of this legacy is to systematically mask the real nature of social science from its practitioners. A humanist understanding of ethics in fact accords much more closely with what it is that social scientists actually do, and allows us to join debate with the other sciences in a way that respects, but also answers, the ethical arguments that they claim to derive from their factual studies.
In the next two chapters I will explore the humanist view in more detail and consider what it might mean for the social sciences. | 
