Freedom for values

The idea that knowledge of society must consist in, or be based on, universal truths is very durable. It actually predates modern science and helped to give an impetus to its search for laws. It is tied up closely with religion, with ideas of morality and meaning in life.

The reason is that human social relations are mediated through culture and based in part on shared beliefs about the world and other people. They are not based simply in power or calculation and people’s beliefs are factors in the conduct of social relations. We observed this in our discussion of norms in a previous lectures. It was illustrated in our discussion of community.

Such concepts, when operating to regulate our social relations, are known as values. An everyday idea like friendship exerts an influence on any particular pair of people to the extent that it has a meaning beyond them. Each can appeal to it as something which is widely understood in the society at large.

But reference to other people is not as effective as appeal to a value that is universal. Collectivities in general justify standard practices in terms of values they claim to be universal. The sociologist and philosopher Max Scheler expressed it once as ‘My friend may betray me, but friendship lasts for ever.’ Indeed it is by the standards of ‘friendship’ as locally understood that a judgement can be reached on ‘betrayal’ which people around might accept.

The earliest literary evidence shows that human beings have always been aware of the arbitrariness of these claims. Travel has always shown that customs vary infinitely world-wide. Everyday knowledge of relationships and how they should be conducted is local presuming to be universal. This is how it seemed to Herodotus writing 2,500 years ago:

Everyone without exception believes his own native customs, and the religion he was brought up in, to be the best; and that being so it is unlikely that anyone but a madman would mock at such things. There is abundant evidence that this is the universal feeling about the customs of one’s country.

But how does one resolve differences between peoples of different countries. This is the problem of the diversity of morals. It has challenged the greatest writers and philosophers over the centuries.

Michel de Montaigne, the early modern European commentator on the diversity of morals, suggested that there was a ‘law of laws’—namely, behave in the way the place you are in requires. In other words let your behaviour be determined by local practices. That is the extreme relativist position. ‘The laws of conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature, proceed from custom.’

Montaigne’s account is in one sense conservative because there are no rational criteria to justify change; in another sense it is liberal in that any locality, however small, can assert its own way of doing things. Like so many of us Montaigne finds the variety of sexual customs fascinating. But in a tourist world the question ‘are absolutely all sexual practices permissible?’ arises.

The opposite view is represented by Immanuel Kant, for many the greatest philosopher of the modern period. ‘Behave always in a way which can be a law for others’—his categorical imperative, or the law for laws—suggests that it is possible for individuals to arrive at universal criteria for right and wrong actions. It subjects all custom to this test and in this sense is critical and even radical. But in its claims to arrive at universal laws it is potentially authoritarian and imperialistic. It opens the possibility for laying down the law for others.

Sociologists cannot avoid this basic human dilemma. But their approach is also a major intervention, for instead of siding with Montaigne or Kant they ask a further question: namely, how in practice do people handle the dilemma in a world where people confront difference of custom and morality on a daily basis?

In this way their work reflects a third philosophical position on morality. Montaigne accepts customs as facts of life, Kant looks to abstract ideals. The pragmatist finds that ideals and facts take on meaning through the human experience of changing social relations. The sociological outlook of the contemporary world has arisen in large part in conjunction with this pragmatism, allied with the conviction that in the flow of human experience there is always the possibility of finding rules for social relations which apply generally. It is this pragmatic universalism which is expressed in the developing law of human rights.

In encounters between people and peoples morality emerges as the permanent tension between fact and ideal and this is a primary human experience. If anything like a universal morality exists it can only be the ongoing achievement of human beings in their relations with each other. If we need a classic statement we can find it in Francis Bacon:

The parts and signs of goodness are many. If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers it shows he is a citizen of the world, and that his heart is no island cut off from other lands, but a continent that joins to them.

The problem of objectivity greatly exercised the founders of sociology, with the idea that there might be some secure method for achieving it. But that problem was posed initially as if society could be an object like the natural world. Max Weber pointed out that human reality, and that included the social, was cultural and pervaded with values. Facts are the result of people following values and are only important in relation to them. ‘Value freedom’ in the social sciences on his account could only mean indeed objective accounts of the relevance of facts to values and enhance the chance of choosing between them. In this sense value freedom, far from meaning freedom from values, or neutrality between them, means freedom to choose for them. But this makes society a battlefield of competing values.

After nearly a century of further debate and work sociologists might now reach a rather different formulation. Facts and values and our understanding of them arise out of our experience of human beings in relation to each other. Sociological accounts distil that experience and are most useful when they enable people to come to a greater understanding of those very social relations.

Sociology provides above all a cognitive frame for communicating the experience of social relations. This arises not as a judgement from on high, nor as an arbitration of disputes, nor a wish list. It is the intellectual representation of the changing reality of those relations. In a world which is one it will seek to represent that unity.

Sociological evidence now makes a central contribution to contemporary moral debate. No argument on women’s rights, child labour, capital punishment, abortion, worker participation is complete without drawing on evidence of the diversity of experience of these in different places at different times. Protagonists in the debates on such issues, the state, pressure groups, business, charities, will make commissioned research one of the key planks in the case they present.

It is the autonomous reality of society combined with the independence, moral integrity and intellectual capacities of the researchers which guarantees that such research will make a contribution to debates on values and the policies which might implement them. This places a heavy burden on the researcher.

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