Ethics for Social Scientists

Social scientists face a difficult task. They must play the role of scientists, which requires objectivity in observation and analysis. But unlike other scientists, the subject matter of social science, people, is choked full of values which can derail the scientific process. This makes objectivity an elusive goal for social scientists. For example, it’s difficult to approach the subject of genocide objectively; most people are not going to be able to separate themselves from their own value judgments that that genocide is evil. As a result the researcher runs the risk of their own biases obscuring the truth.

The great pitfall of social science is that too often its debates loose sight of the science and start arguing ethics and values. People will argue if foreign aid is good, or weather or not parliamentary democracy is better than another system of governance. These value judgments of “good” and “better” start to be argued like they are facts that exist out there in the world. The objective, measurable data of social science takes a back seat to value judgments in these debates. When this happens social science ceases to be a science at all.

One way for social scientists to stay on task is to change the way they think about values. They can adopt a form of moral anti-realism called projectivism. Projectivism argues that there are no moral facts in the world. Meaning that when we say something is good there is no truth value attached to the predicate “is good.” Instead, saying something is good is more akin to saying “yay!” or “boo!” An utterance like “boo!” can’t be true or false. So when we say dictatorships are bad we are really just saying “boo dictatorships!” This goes a long way in resolving the conflicting values encountered by social scientists. Values are no longer pervasive facts about the world, but rather an expression of individual preferences.

Imagine researchers encounter two cultures fighting over weather vanilla or chocolate ice cream is better. The researchers’ job will be much easier and objective if they are not concerned about which ice cream is, in fact, really better. If they simply regard the values of each culture to be expressions of preferences that have no truth values, the researcher will be able to do a more scientific job. That probably sounds like a commonsense thing for a researcher to do, but now imagine instead of ice cream the cultures are fighting over the right to own slaves. In such a case it’s harder for the researcher not to think that there are facts about right and wrong. But once again the science will be more objective and easier if the researcher regards the values involved as preferences that can be neither true nor false.

A few precautions: First DO NOT confuses projectivism with subjectivism or relativism. They are not the same thing. Subjectivism and relativism entail that there are moral facts and that the moral facts are dependent on the individual or culture, consequently one can still be wrong about values. Projectivism does not do this, it argues that there are no moral facts; an utterance of a preference can’t be right or wrong. Second, I’m not advocating that projectivism is a good way to approach ethics in day-to-day life; I’m not sure what is. I’m simply saying that it can serve as a useful framework for social scientists.