Sociology Rediscovering Ethics

Gorski tells us that the fact-value distinction is dead, that we know what human flourishing is and therefore relativism is wrong, and concludes that sociologists ought to throw off their self-imposed shackles and get into the business of telling other people how to live their lives, but only after sociologists listen to other people who are already in this business, especially from ethics and religion. In one sense this advice is misdirected, because, as I shall explain briefly below, sociologists have long been concerned with exactly the thing he suggests they should be concerned with, flourishing, eudaemonia or happiness, and continue to produce research on the topic in several subfields of the discipline. Morever, there have been many attempts to do exactly what he is recommending. The results, however, including my own attempt withMarkWardell in the 1980s, have not been especially successful. In this comment I will try to point out some of the philosophical obstacles to this kind of work. The sociological obstacles are also serious: the intellectual cultures of ethics and sociology are so radically divergent that dialog is virtually impossible. Nevertheless, there is no reason to give up. In this respect I agree with Gorksi. My dissenting point will be a simple one: there is are multiple relations of fit between sociological ideas and ethical theories, not just the one he describes, and some ethical theory is in outright conflict with normal social science. What has been tried? Attempts by sociologists to do exactly what Gorski is advocating would include, a generation ago, Derek Philips’ attempt, in Toward a Just Social Order, to derive something fromAlanGewirth’s account of the ethics of agency; Habermas’s discourse ethics, which is a form of Kantian constructionism (meaning that it involves the results that ideal speakers or thinkers would arrive at), and more recently Oxford sociologist Stein Ringen’sWhat is Democracy For?, which also embraces Aristotle and flourishing. Moreover, there are philosophers who have a more or less sociological rather than moral realist approach. Gorski mentions two, Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre. These thinkers might provide a better opening for common discussion with sociologists, and indeed this is already happening with Habermas and Taylor under the religion program of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). One might add Phillip Pettit, whose idea of common knowledge resembles Durkheim’s collective conscience. Pettit is non-relativistically against domination, but leaves the determination of what that is to mean in a particular state up to common knowledge, i.e., the culture, of the citizens of that state. These are not exactly negligible figures, and their ideas have had public influence: Pettit’s ideas have been taken up by the Spanish government; Ringen’s by the Norwegians. Surveying this mass of writing will not bemy concern here. The real interest of Gorski’s article lies elsewhere, with the problem of the relation between social theory and sociology and various hard meta-ethical claims, and specifically with a subset of these claims. Among the various writers Gorksi mentions, there is a prominent group of ethicists who are