Moral Relativism and Sociological Morality
Tags: Philosophy, Politics, Deviance, Self-awareness, Sociology

tldr:

1) We attain objectivity in social analysis by maintaining an environment of moral relativism

2) There *is* kind of a default morality in sociology, which is essentially progressive

3) How would we engineer society to work more smoothly if we actually could?

I want to hit a couple points that come up from this week’s reading

When I was in college one of my jobs was library desk guy. Someone turned in a book called Catholic Sociology (I think), which I immediately read parts of. It struck me as kind of futile, because it was trying to build a Sociology off of the moral foundations of Catholicism. There’s nothing wrong with that really. Except that it has already been done by the Catholic church itself. If you want to know how gender works, how relationships work, the proper role of the individual and the institution, read the Catechism. It’s all there, and it’s very well reasoned. The unabridged catechism will even give you the bible passages and early scholars their arguments are made of.

Now, you could easily be a Catholic, who is also a sociologist, in which case, you would restrict your activities (including your sociological ones) to activities that fit within the moral universe of Catholics. Kind of like being an Ob/Gyn who is Catholic. You may choose not to perform abortions, but that doesn’t mean that the D&C is not a thing that exists in the world.

Henderschott gives us an example of something similar this week. She gives us an understanding of deviance that is religiously based. Natural Law is a Catholic notion of innate morality that is the foundation of conscience. It works great for Catholics, and has a certain intuitive sense to it that is definitely appealing.

But, what of people who don’t share the same faith? Natural Law proponents will say it still works. But that’s essentially religious mansplaining. If a Catholic says Catholic morality still works for me as a non-catholic, I am going to be kind of annoyed with him.

So what morality do we use to determine these things? Well, every other theorist aside from Hendershott says, let the people decide for themselves.

Moral Relativism

As scientists, we are going to have a hard time studying deviance if we are too committed to one moral perspective or another. The answer is we adopt moral relativism. Most of the time I hear moral relativism discussed , people seem to be a little misunderstood.

Moral relativism simply means that when studying another culture, we have to put our own morality on the back burner and evaluate the people in question with their own community standards. It’s not really fair to judge distant fathers from the 1950s — men who fought in WW2, who saw their primary role in the household as making an income, and who may have had somewhat contractual relationships with their wives — by 2016 standards. We expect fathers nowadays to be emotionally available to thier sons and daughters, and if Mom makes more money, as long as he’s carrying his proportionate share of the family work, that’s cool. But those are two different definitions of masculinity. A 50s man would have little respect for a modern man, and the modern man would have disdain for the 50s man.

Now this doesn’t mean you don’t have morals, and it doesn’t mean you engage in behavior you see as immoral. It simply means that you try and understand people in their own moral universe. To go back to the Catholic doctor, you don’t give abortions, but you try and understand why the physician who does, and why it’s important to her to provide good service and do a good job.

So, when we do social science, we try to be as objective and non-judgmental as possible. This is why deviance class is so difficult for many people. They come to it with their well fleshed out predefined morality, and I’m asking them to check it at the door. Many people can’t handle it.

But the fact is, while deviance is universal, the morals and laws it is based on is not. As sociologists this is the subject under study.

The Morality of Sociology

While the social sciences try very hard to be as objective as possible, you will note that in your Psych and Soc classes there is an underlying morality. And if you’ve had me in other classes, you’ve heard me say that Sociology tends to list to the left, which is a moral leaning. Which means that unless you know something specific about your professor, or social science major friend, this is where you should probably assume they are coming from.

This basic assumption is based on we understand as progressive politics. And it sees itself as usually pro-human freedom, pro-self-definition, and a little suspicious of traditional mores. Let’s explore this. When it comes to traditional stuff like sex, drugs, and recently gender, most social scientists will allow the person to self-define. However you choose to live your sexual life, as long as it’s your choice, then no worries. Want to have sex with a hundred people? ok. Want to be celibate until the day you die? ok. Want to have sex with the same sex? ok. The opposite sex? ok. Every sex? ok. Want to force someone else into sex? Not ok. You’ve been forced into sex? Not ok.

Want to do drugs? Your choice. But it’s illegal? That’s between you and the cops. You want to steal from old people to fund your drug habit? Not ok.

Gender comes up later in the book I think. But the basic assumption is going to be — you are who you tell me you are. Whether or not that’s hurting someone else is part of what the current discussion is about, and we can talk about that later. But even without being trans, there is a tremendous amount of gender diversity already. You wanna be a super butch woman? ok. Super femme? ok. You wanna be a feely emotional guy? great. Corporate-warrior Type A go-getter man? I might not choose to be friends with you, but it’s your choice.

Now, I recognize that this is it’s own morality, and I recognize that the southeast is one of the more conservative areas of the country, so I try very hard to point out what is actual sociology, and what is this morality that comes with it.

Smooth Operator

One of the questions Hendershott asks is what morality works best for society? What leads to smooth operation of society?

This is an interesting question. All of the old time sociologists thought society needed some sort of morality. Durkheim especially spent some time developing an idea of what morality would look like in a world of declining religious influence.

As a social engineer, perhaps smart sociologists could tweak the system for the “best” operation of society. Two problems immediately pop up though. Who gets to say what the best operation is? How are we going to define it? Secondly, if sociological engineers gave recommendations that differed from those in power, how quickly do you think they would be implemented?

A third problem, perhaps less obvious occurs to me as well. As a whole, at the societal level, we humans are not that rational. So the best operation of society would include a certain amount of propaganda tweaked to get people’s buy in emotionally. We wouldn’t be all that truthful with people if all we were looking for was buy in and obedience. Following from that, the rights of the individual are a huge inconvenience to the operation of the group sometimes. How often does a real perpetrator go free because cops don’t follow some technical detail properly? This happens because our system is (theoretically) built around the rights of the individual against the rest of the community. It’s what is supposed to stop mob mentality.

In closing, morality in deviance is tricky because it is the thing we are studying, but we can hardly operate in an environment of truly complete value-neutrality. So we do our best to be objective.