Skip to main content
Erschienen in: Society 5/2014

01.10.2014 | Commentary

Anti-Minotaur: The Myth of a Sociological Morality

verfasst von: Bradley Campbell

Erschienen in: Society | Ausgabe 5/2014

Einloggen

Aktivieren Sie unsere intelligente Suche um passende Fachinhalte oder Patente zu finden.

search-config
loading …

Abstract

Recently Philip Gorski has argued that sociology can help us answer moral questions such as how to live and how to organize societies. Gorski rejects “value-free sociology” and the distinction between factual statements and value judgments, but actually factual statements and value judgments are distinct and sociology can be value-free.  The practice of value-free sociology is ethically imperative, even, if we are to be honest with our audiences and if we are to fulfill our vocation as sociologists.

Sie haben noch keine Lizenz? Dann Informieren Sie sich jetzt über unsere Produkte:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

  • über 102.000 Bücher
  • über 537 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

  • Automobil + Motoren
  • Bauwesen + Immobilien
  • Business IT + Informatik
  • Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
  • Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
  • Finance + Banking
  • Management + Führung
  • Marketing + Vertrieb
  • Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe
  • Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

  • über 67.000 Bücher
  • über 340 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

  • Bauwesen + Immobilien
  • Business IT + Informatik
  • Finance + Banking
  • Management + Führung
  • Marketing + Vertrieb
  • Versicherung + Risiko




Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

Fußnoten
1
Gorski, Philip S. 2013. “Beyond the Fact/Value Distinction: Ethical Naturalism and the Social Sciences.” Society 50:543–553.
 
2
Turner, Stephen. 2013. “Sociology Rediscovering Ethics.” Society 50:602–609.
 
3
Weber, Max. 1958. “Science as a Vocation.” Pp. 129–156 in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press.
 
4
Berger, Peter L. 1963. Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective. New York: Anchor, pp. 5–6; Berger, Peter L. and Hansfried Kellner. 1981. Sociology Reinterpreted. Garden City: Anchor, pp. 51–53, 99.
 
5
Black, Donald. 1972. “The Boundaries of Legal Sociology.” Yale Law Journal 81:1086–1100; 2013. “On the Almost Inconceivable Misunderstandings Concerning the Subject of Value-Free Sociology.” British Journal of Sociology 64 (4):763–780.
 
6
Maull, Amanda. 2013. “A Deweyan Defense of Ethical Naturalism.” Society 50:576–580.
 
7
Kadakal, Reha. 2013. “Truth, Fact and Value: Recovering Normative Foundations for Sociology.” Society 50:592–597.
 
8
Gorski, “Beyond the Fact/Value Distinction,” p. 548.
 
9
Davis, Joseph E. 2013. “Social Science, Objectivity, and Moral Life.” Society 50:554.
 
10
Jacobs, Jonathan. 2013. “The Fact/Value Distinction and the Social Sciences.” Society 50:568.
 
11
Lawson, Tony. 2013. “Ethical Naturalism and Forms of Relativism.” Society 50:572.
 
12
Sabl, Andrew. 2013. “Whose Flourishing? Which Aristotelianism?” Society 50:587.
 
13
Davis, “Social Science, Objectivity, and Moral Life,” p. 554.
 
14
Kadakal, “Truth, Fact and Value,” p. 592.
 
15
Smith, Christian. 2013. “Comparing Ethical Naturalism and ‘Public Sociology.’” Society 50:598.
 
16
Gouldner, Alvin W. 1962. “Anti-Minotaur: The Myth of a Value-Free Sociology.” Social Problems 9 (3):199.
 
17
Compare Sumner, William Graham. 1911. “The Absurd Effort to Make the World Over.” Pp. 195–212 in War and Other Essays. New Haven: Yale University Press.
 
18
Carroll, Sean. 2010. “The Moral Equivalent of the Parallel Postulate.” Preposterous Universe Blog. Retrieved February 27, 2014. (http://​www.​preposterousuniv​erse.​com/​blog/​2010/​03/​24/​the-moral-equivalent-of-the-parallel-postulate/​).
 
19
It is useful to think of factual statements as “is” statements and value judgments as “ought” statements, but this should not be taken too literally, since the words “is” and “ought” might be used in different ways. A statement like “It is wrong to get drunk” is a value judgment, an “ought” statement, despite containing the word “is.” Likewise, a statement like “If you want to go to prison, you ought to kill someone” is a factual statement. It is a claim about the likely consequence of killing, not a claim about the morality of killing, despite containing the word “ought.”
 
20
Hume, David. 2000. A Treatise of Human Nature. New York: Oxford University Press, p. 302.
 
21
A good example of a value claim much like this occurred on October 17, 2000, in one of the debates between presidential candidates George W. Bush and Albert Gore. Both candidates were asked if they believed the death penalty deters crime. Both said yes, but Bush went on to say, “I do, that’s the only reason to be for it. I don’t think you should support the death penalty to seek revenge … I think the reason to support the death penalty is because it saves other people’s lives” (retrieved March 1, 2014; http://​www.​ontheissues.​org/​Archive/​St_​Louis_​Debate_​Crime.​htm).
 
22
Some scientific statements, though, are conceptual rather than descriptive or explanatory. Conceptual statements are necessary to science, since one cannot describe or explain a phenomenon before defining it. Unlike descriptive and explanatory statements, conceptual statements cannot be right or wrong. Still, they are not value judgments but rather an entirely different kind of nonfactual statement.
 
23
Lundsgaarde, Henry. 1977. Murder in Space City: A Cultural Analysis of Houston Homicide Patterns. New York: Oxford University Press.
 
24
Williams, Linda S. 1984. “The Classic Rape: When Do Victims Report?” Social Problems 31 (4):459–467.
 
25
Black, Donald. 2010. The Behavior of Law (Special Edition). Bingley, UK: Emerald Books, p. 40–47; 1989. Sociological Justice. New York: Oxford University Press, 11–13.
 
26
Durkheim, Emile. 1951. Suicide: A Study in Sociology. New York: Free Press.
 
27
Homans, George C. 1964. “Bringing Men Back In.” American Sociological Review 29 (6):816.
 
28
Cohen, Lawrence E. and Marcus Felson. 1979. “Social Change and Crime Rate Trend: A Routine Activity Approach.” American Sociological Review 44 (4):588–608.
 
29
Stark, Rodney. 1994. “Rational Choice Theories of Religion.” The Agora: Newsletter of the Rational Choice Section of the American Sociological Association 2 (1):3.
 
30
Collins, Randall. 2008. Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
 
31
Campbell, Bradley. 2013. “Genocide and Social Time.” Dilemas: Revista de Estudos de Conflito E Controle Social 6 (3):468. See also 2011. “Genocide as a Matter of Degree.” British Journal of Sociology 62 (4):586–612; 2010. “Contradictory Behavior During Genocides.” Sociological Forum 25 (2):296–314; 2009. “Genocide as Social Control.” Sociological Theory 27 (2):150–172.
 
32
Weber, Max. 1949. The Methodology of the Social Sciences. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, p. 11.
 
33
Black, “Inconceivable Misunderstandings.”
 
34
Ibid., p. 767.
 
35
Gorski, “Beyond the Fact/Value Distinction,” p. 546.
 
36
Ibid., p. 547.
 
37
Other symposium participants make the same error. Joseph E. Davis (“Social Science, Objectivity, and Moral Life,” p. 554) says that “value-freeness is a chimera and … objectivity does not require it.” But he has this exactly backward. It is objectivity that is the chimera. Christian Smith (“Comparing Ethical Naturalism and ‘Public Sociology,’” p. 599) conflates the two concepts completely in saying that those who oppose normative sociology “are obliged to answer his [Gorski’s] smart critique of their belief in (allegedly) unbiased objectivity.” But who believes in unbiased objectivity? Claiming to be free of even unconscious bias would be like claiming to be God—an unmoved mover, to use Aristotle’s term. This has nothing to do with a claim that a statement is not a value judgment.
 
38
Black, “Inconceivable Misunderstandings,” p. 769.
 
39
Gorski, “Beyond the Fact/Value Distinction,” pp. 550–551.
 
40
Ibid., p. 543.
 
41
Tony Lawson (“Ethical Naturalism and Forms of Relativism,” p. 572) is the only symposium participant who actually tries to show how facts can lead to values. This is his example: “The occupants of a house do not want to get burnt. The house is on fire, and the only way not to be burnt is to leave. Therefore the occupants ought to leave.” Though he claims this is an “ought-statement following purely from is-statements,” he does not realize that the final statement does not follow from the previous statements. If it seems to do so, this is because he has chosen a value claim readers will agree with, since we would value the man’s safety and have no objection to fleeing burning buildings. But those other (unstated) values are required to reach the conclusion. Lawson has confused even himself by not trying to think through any other possibilities. Consider, then, another set of statements with the same logic: A man wants to have sex with a woman, and the woman will not have sex with him voluntarily. The only way to have sex with her is to rape her. Therefore the man ought to rape her. (I trust that any reader would reject this value claim and see now why it does not follow from the facts.)
 
42
Collins, Randall. 2012. “C-Escalation and D-Escalation: A Theory of the Time Dynamics of Conflict.” American Sociological Review 77 (1):6–8. Oddly, though Randall Collins was one of the ASA officers who signed a statement condemning Glenn Beck and portraying his comments as threatening the sociologist’s safety, in the article (the published version of his 2011 ASA presidential address), he downplays the threat, noting that real assassins—some of Beck’s fans, though not Beck himself, had apparently made death threats—do not normally announce themselves. The sociologist, Frances Fox Piven, had been receiving sporadic death threats for a while, he says, “and there was no imminent danger” (p. 6).
 
43
Mathieu Deflem (2013. “The Structural Transformation of Sociology.” Society 50 (2):161–162) connects the politicization of sociologists with their intellectual deficiencies: “I argue that it is not the political orientation of many of today’s sociologists, but the relative weakness of their intellectual prowess that must be considered to account for the contemporary radicalization of sociology. Many sociologists today have fallen for the trappings of radicalized sociology, under the seemingly benign heading of public sociology, simply because they do not have the intellectual skills necessary to think critically about their own activities.”
 
44
Burawoy, Michael. 2005. “The Critical Turn to Public Sociology.” Critical Sociology 31 (3):317–318.
 
45
It has not gone completely unopposed, however. See Brint, Steven. 2005. “Guide for the Perplexed: On Michael Burawoy’s ‘Public Sociology.’” The American Sociologist 36: 46–65; Deflem, Mathieu. 2005. “Public Sociology, Hot Dogs, Apple Pie, and Chevrolet.” The Journal of Public and Professional Sociology 1 (1): Article 4. Retrieved March 1, 2014. (http://​digitalcommons.​kennesaw.​edu/​jpps/​vol1/​iss1/​4/​); Nielsen, Francois. 2004. “The Vacant ‘We’: Remarks on Public Sociology.” Social Forces 82 (4):1619–1627; Tittle, Charles. 2004. “The Arrogance of Public Sociology.” Social Forces 82 (4):1639–1643; Turner, Jonathan H. 2005. “Is Public Sociology Such a Good Idea?” The American Sociologist 36:27–45.
 
46
Deflem, “The Structural Transformation of Sociology” p. 160.
 
47
Deflem, “Public Sociology, Hot Dogs, Apple Pie, and Chevrolet.”
 
48
Smith, “Comparing Ethical Naturalism and ‘Public Sociology,’” p. 600.
 
49
Feagin, Joe R. and Hernan Vera. 2008. Liberation Sociology (Second Edition). Paradigm Publishers, p. 1.
 
50
Piven, Frances Fox. 2006. The War at Home: The Domestic Costs of Bush's Militarism. New York: New Press.
 
51
Wright, Erik Olin. 2010: Envisioning Real Utopias. London: Verso.
 
52
Collins, Patricia Hill. 1990. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. HarperCollins.
 
53
“Not Your Typical Call for Papers,” Berkeley Journal of Sociology. Retrieved February 28, 2014. (http://​berkeleyjournal.​org/​call-for-papers-2/​)
 
54
Pellow, David N. 2001. “Why I Choose To Be an Activist-Scholar.” Shared Governance: Pleas and Provocations. Retrieved February 28, 2014. (http://​www.​colorado.​edu/​FacultyGovernanc​e/​JOURNAL/​ARCHIVE/​Pellow0901.​html); Weber, Clare M. 2006. “An Activist and a Scholar: Reflections of a Feminist Sociologist Negotiating Academia.” Humanity and Society 30 (2):153–166. See also the faculty webpages of Professors Mark Chesler, Michael Gillespie, and Nandita Sharma. Retrieved February 28, 2014. (http://​www.​lsa.​umich.​edu/​soc/​people/​cheslermarka_​ci; http://​www.​eiu.​edu/​sociology/​faculty.​php?​id=​mgillespie; http://​socialsciences.​people.​hawaii.​edu/​faculty/​?​dept=​soc&​faculty=​nsharma@hawaii.​edu).
 
55
For a critical review of arguments in favor of feminist methods, see Hammersley, Martyn. 1992. “On Feminist Methodology.” Sociology 26 (2): 187–206.
 
56
Quoted in Veres, Steve. 2005. “Students, Profs Question Class Climate.” The Chronicle. Retrieved March 2, 2014. (http://​www.​dukechronicle.​com/​articles/​2005/​07/​20/​students-profs-question-class-climate).
 
57
Gorski, “Beyond the Fact/Value Distinction,” p. 549.
 
58
Smith, “Comparing Ethical Naturalism and ‘Public Sociology,’” p. 599.
 
59
Sabl, “Whose Flourishing? Which Aristotelianism?,” p. 587.
 
60
Gray, David J. 1968. “Value-Free Sociology: A Doctrine of Hypocrisy and Irresponsibility.” The Sociological Quarterly 9 (2):176–185.
 
61
Dahrendorf, Ralf. 1968. Essays in the Theory of Society. Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 8.
 
62
Ibid., p. 18.
 
63
The critics of value-free sociology would do well to learn from Dahrendorf. If their real objection to value-free sociology involves moral claims about what the role of professional sociologists should be, as Dahrendorf’s does, they might spend their energies articulating and defending this position rather than rambling incoherently about why value-free sociology is impossible.
 
64
Again, the argument is that factual statements and value judgments are different kinds of statements, and that value judgments cannot be derived from facts alone. Gorski equates moral realism with the anti-value-free position, but moral realists, while believing that value judgments can express truths about reality, do not necessarily think these are the same kinds of truths as those conveyed by valid empirical statements. This may be the case even when they call both kinds of truths “facts,” since they might then distinguish between “ethical facts” and “natural facts,” thus “reproduc [ing] the fact value distinction in all but name” (Turner, “Sociology Rediscovering Ethics,” p. 604).
 
65
Seubert, Virginia R. 1991. “Sociology and Value Neutrality: Limiting Sociology to the Empirical Level.” The American Sociologist 22:212, 218.
 
66
Gorski, “Beyond the Fact/Value Distinction,” p. 550.
 
67
Black, Donald. 2011. Moral Time. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 52–54.
 
68
The “noble lie” is probably not one of the ancient Greek ideas Gorski believes sociologists should adopt, but Patrick Nolan worries that many sociologists, such as the writers of sociology textbooks, have in fact adopted something similar: “In their zeal to convince undergraduate students, university administrators, and the general public that sociology is a legitimate and important endeavor, or to effect positive social change, they may focus more on what is ‘good to think’ than what is strongly rooted in fact” (2003. “Questioning Textbook Truth: Suicide Rates and the Hawthorne Effect.” The American Sociologist 34 (3):107–116).
 
69
Barnes, J. A. 1994. A Pack of Lies: Towards a Sociology of Lying. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, p. 30.
 
70
In extreme cases, activists on college campuses might even lie about being victims of “hate crimes,” such as when a visiting professor at Claremont McKenna College, Kerri Dunn, slashed her own car’s tires and painted ethnic slurs and a swastika on it to present herself as the victim of white male racists (Parmar, Neil. 2004. “Crying Wolf.” Psychology Today 37 (4):14). In another case two black students at Duke University hung a black baby doll from a noose on a tree near where the Black Student Alliance was planning a protest. In such cases, people might defend these lies as understandable efforts to bring attention to a cause. After the Duke incident, for example, the student newspaper published a letter defending the hoaxers, who had said they were making a political statement, saying “the idea behind the act … is being overlooked” (quoted in Gose, Ben. 1999. “Hate-Crime Hoaxes Unsettle Campuses.” Chronicle of Higher Education 45 (18):A55-A56).
 
71
Rarely do activist-scholars openly advocate lying or distorting the truth to advance a political agenda—this would seem to undermine a lie’s effectiveness—but it is not unheard of. For example, when Peter Rossi found that there were fewer homeless persons than homeless advocates had been claiming, a Charles Hoch, writing in the Journal of Applied Sociology, criticized him, not because the study was wrong, but because it was unlikely to further the pro-homeless political agenda. Hoch objected to Rossi for his extension of “the scientific notion of objectivity to the contentious realm of the public domain” and for his creation of “damaging practical effects in an ongoing effort to define the homeless as a needy and deserving social group” (quoted in Hollander, Paul. 1999. “Saving Sociology?” Sociological Inquiry 69 (1):138).
 
72
Quoted in Barnes, A Pack of Lies, p. 55.
 
73
Seubert, “Sociology and Value Neutrality,” p. 218.
 
74
Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, p. 20.
 
75
Weber, Max. 1958. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
 
76
Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” p. 135.
 
Metadaten
Titel
Anti-Minotaur: The Myth of a Sociological Morality
verfasst von
Bradley Campbell
Publikationsdatum
01.10.2014
Verlag
Springer US
Erschienen in
Society / Ausgabe 5/2014
Print ISSN: 0147-2011
Elektronische ISSN: 1936-4725
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-014-9810-1

Weitere Artikel der Ausgabe 5/2014

Society 5/2014 Zur Ausgabe

Symposium: America in the World

The Paradox of American Global Power