Why Things Matter to People: Social Science, Values and Ethical Life

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Why Things Matter to People

Andrew Sayer undertakes a fundamental critique of social science’s difficulties in acknowledging that people’s relation to the world is one of concern. As sentient beings, capable of flourishing and suffering, and particularly vulnerable to how others treat us, our view of the world is substantially evaluative. Yet modernist ways of thinking encourage the common but extraordinary belief that values are beyond reason, and merely subjective or matters of convention, with little or nothing to do with the kind of beings people are, the quality of their social relations, their material circumstances, or well-being. The author shows how social theory and philosophy need to change to reflect the complexity of everyday ethical concerns and the importance people attach to dignity. He argues for a robustly critical social science that explains and evaluates social life from the standpoint of human flourishing. andrew sayer is Professor of Social Theory and Political Economy in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University. His most recent publications include The Moral Significance of Class (2005) and Realism and Social Science (2000).

Why Things Matter to People Social Science, Values and Ethical Life

andrew sayer

cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521171649 © Andrew Sayer 2011 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2011 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Sayer, R. Andrew. Why things matter to people : social science, values and ethical life / Andrew Sayer. p. cm. ISBN 978-1-107-00114-5 (hardback) 1. Social values. 2. Social norms. 3. Values. 4. Normativity (Ethics) 5. Social sciences – Moral and ethical aspects. I. Title. HM681.S29 2011 303.30 7201–dc22 2010038774 ISBN 978-1-107-00114-5 Hardback ISBN 978-0-521-17164-9 Paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Some discouragement, some faintness of heart at the new real future which replaces the imaginary, is not unusual, and we do not expect to be deeply moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heartbeat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity. (George Eliot, Middlemarch) We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. (Wittgenstein, 1922, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus)

Contents

Acknowledgements

page viii

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Introduction: a relation to the world of concern

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Values within reason

23

3

Reason beyond rationality: values and practical reason

59

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Beings for whom things matter

98

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Understanding the ethical dimension of life

143

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Dignity

189

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Critical social science and its rationales

216

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Implications for social science

246

Appendix: Comments on philosophical theories of ethics

253

References

264

Index

279

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Acknowledgements

I am indebted to the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for the fellowship I held in 2004–5 on ethics and social theory, which allowed me to pursue this research. Many people have helped me in various ways. I am indebted to the graduate students at Lancaster University who took ‘Contemporary Debates in Sociology’ over the last five years with me, and who had to endure earlier versions of some of the contents of this book. I’d also like to record my appreciation of Lancaster Sociology Department’s excellent support staff team of Claire O’Donnell, Jules Knight, Ruth Love, Karen Gammon and Cath Gorton. There are many friends and colleagues I’d like to thank for their support, feedback, guidance, inspiration and beneficial distraction: John Allen, Margaret Archer, Pat Batteson, Ted Benton, Sharon Bolton, Keith Breen, Gideon Calder, Eric and Cecilia Clark, Norman Fairclough and Isabela Ietcu-Fairclough, Steve and Anne Fleetwood, Bernhard Forchtner, Anne-Marie Fortier, Bridget Graham and Tom Fairclough, Costis Hadjimichalis and Dina Vaiou, Frank Hansen and Helle Fischer, Iain Hunter and Sue Halsam, Bob Jessop, Russell Keat, Richard Light, Kathleen Lynch, Dimitri Mader, Marie Moran, Kevin Morgan, Caroline New, Phil O’Hanlon, Betsy Olson, Diane Reay, Bev Skeggs, Eeva Sointu, Sylvia Walby, Dick Walker, Ruth Wodak, Erik Olin Wright, Jill Yeung, Karin Zotzmann, and friends in the Over the Hill walking club. Special thanks to my good friend Linda Woodhead, fellow member of the Lancaster Neo-Aristotelian Dining Club, who commented both critically and encouragingly on much of the book and helped me think more clearly, and likewise to John O’Neill (once again) for his invaluable advice on philosophical matters. For music therapy I would like to record my thanks to Celso Fonseca, Gillian Welch, David Rawlings, Nitin Sawhney, Per Kindgren, and the late Thomas Tallis and Roberto Baden-Powell; more locally and

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Acknowledgements

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actively, my thanks and appreciation to Richard Light, Iain Hunter, Rick Middleton, Sam King, and the Lancaster Millennium Choir. Finally, I would like to thank my daughter Lizzie for making me feel a very fortunate Dad; and to Liz Thomas, my love and thanks for her warmth and wisdom, and for spreading well-being around.

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This book is about social science’s difficulties in acknowledging that people’s relation to the world is one of concern. When we ask a friend how they are, they might reply in any number of ways; for example: ‘I’m OK, thanks: my daughter’s enjoying school, things are good at home and we’ve just had a great holiday.’ ‘Not so good: the boss is always in a bad mood and I’m worried about losing my job.’ ‘OK myself but I’m really appalled by what’s been happening in the war.’ ‘I’m a bit depressed: I don’t know where my life is going.’

Such responses indicate that things matter to people, and make a difference to ‘how they are’. Their lives can go well or badly, and their sense of well-being depends at least in part on how these other things that they care about – significant others, practices, objects, political causes – are faring, and on how others are treating them. In some respects the answers are very subjective and personal, yet they are not just freefloating ‘values’ or expressions projected onto the world but feelings about various events and circumstances that aren’t merely subjective. They reflect the fact that we are social beings – dependent on others and necessarily involved in social practices. They also remind us that we are sentient, evaluative beings: we don’t just think and interact but evaluate things, including the past and the future (Archer, 2000a). We do so because, while we are capable and can flourish, we are also vulnerable and susceptible to various kinds of loss or harm; we can suffer. The most important questions people tend to face in their everyday lives are normative ones of what is good or bad about what is happening, including how others are treating them, and of how to act, and what to do for the best. The presence of this concern may be evident in fleeting encounters and mundane conversations, in feelings about how things are going, as well as in momentous decisions such as

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whether to have children, change job, or what to do about a relationship which has gone bad. These are things people care deeply about. They are matters of ‘practical reason’, about how to act, and quite different from the empirical and theoretical questions asked by social science. If we ignore them or reduce them to an effect of norms, discourse or socialization, or to ‘affect’, we produce an anodyne account of living that renders our evident concern about what we do and what happens to us incomprehensible. When someone says ‘my friends mean a lot to me’, they are indicating what matters to them, what has import. When an immigrant says ‘let me tell you what it means to be an immigrant’ she is not about to give a definition but to indicate how being an immigrant affects one’s wellbeing, what one can and can’t do, how one is treated by others, and what it feels like. All of these everyday expressions show that we are beings whose relation to the world is one of concern. Yet social science often ignores this relation and hence fails to acknowledge what is most important to people. Concepts such as ‘preferences’, ‘self-interest’ or ‘values’ fail to do justice to such matters, particularly with regard to their social character and connection to events and social relations, and their emotional force. Similarly, concepts such as convention, habit, discourses, socialization, reciprocity, exchange, discipline, power and a host of others are useful for external description but can easily allow us to miss people’s first person evaluative relation to the world and the force of their evaluations. When social science disregards this concern, as if it were merely an incidental, subjective accompaniment to what happens, it can produce an alienated and alienating view of social life. It needs to attend to our evaluative orientation, or to ‘lay normativity’, though that is a rather alienated way of describing it. In his book Culture and Truth, Renato Rosaldo writes about his early work studying headhunting among the Ilongot people of northern Luzon, in the Philippines (Rosaldo, 1989). When he asked headhunters why they did it, they told him that ‘rage, born of grief’, impelled them to do it. Of one he says, ‘The act of severing and tossing away the victim’s head enables him, he says, to vent and, he hopes, throw away the anger of his bereavement’ (ibid., p. 1). Rosaldo reveals that it took him fourteen years to understand this explanation, during which time his informants rejected his own proffered explanations, including one that interpreted headhunting in terms of transactions theory. What finally enabled him to understand it was the accidental


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death of his wife and fellow anthropologist Michelle Rosaldo, who slipped and fell from a mountain path while on field research. Overwhelmed with grief and anger, and remembering the death of his brother years earlier, only then did he begin to understand headhunting and its relation to grief. Rosaldo goes on to note how anthropologists writing about the ways in which cultures deal with death did so ‘under the rubric of ritual rather than bereavement’, so that the emotional force of the experience – the thing that matters most to the people themselves – was edited out. In contrast, Rosaldo argues that ‘cultural descriptions should seek out force’ (ibid., p. 16). I agree; indeed, not to do so is to misunderstand social life. The aim of this book is to help social science do justice to this relation of concern, to lay normativity, and to the fact that we are sentient beings who can flourish or suffer. To do so we need to clear away a number of obstacles and develop more fruitful frameworks. One of the most important obstacles is the view that values are merely subjective or conventional, beyond the scope of reason – not susceptible to evidence or argument – and have nothing to do with the kind of beings that we are, or with what happens. Imagine three friends sitting watching the television news together. Two of them are social scientists. Some disturbing footage is shown of survivors in a village which has just been bombed; people are standing in the ruins of their own homes, having just come to realize that their loved ones have been killed. They are wailing and screaming – beside themselves with grief. The non-social scientist says, ‘I can’t imagine anything more appalling than that. They have lost everything. How terrible.’ One of the social scientists responds, ‘Well, yes, but that’s just a value-judgement.’ The other says, ‘Well, according to the norms of our society, it’s bad; but we must remember values come from the norms of a society. We say these things are terrible not because they are, but rather we think they’re bad because our social norms say they are.’ The first viewer is outraged: ‘No, it’s not just my value-judgement. It’s a fact that they are going through appalling suffering – it’s as real as the rubble they’re standing in. They really have lost everything. They will be traumatized for the rest of their lives, regardless of what their norms are. How can it not be bad?’ This, of course, is an invented example, and you might say an unrealistic one, for it’s unlikely that social scientists would actually say such bizarre things in such a context. But many do make such assumptions

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when practising their social science, and I invented the example to point to their absurdity. The non-social scientist is saying that her judgement is not arbitrary or merely subjective but reasonable in relation to what it’s about – ‘real suffering’, she might say – and she provides reasons and evidence for her judgement. In effect, while she highlights the deeply evaluative character of human experience, and its relation to human vulnerability, her social scientist friends bracket these out, leaving mere values or norms, ‘subjective’ and strangely detached from their objects, the things they are about, so that they appear to lack justification. The view of values as beyond reason is part of a whole series of flawed conceptual distinctions that obstruct our understanding of the evaluative character of everyday life: distinctions such as fact and value, is and ought, reason and emotion, science and ethics, positive and normative, objective and subjective, body and mind, animal and human. Each term conceals internal distinctions that may be important, such as the different kinds of reason, and while the terms in the pairs are different they are not simply opposed and mutually exclusive, but sometimes overlapping, so that for example there is emotional reason. The distinction between is and ought, that has dominated thinking about values in social science, allows us to overlook the missing middle, the centrality of evaluation. It obscures the nature of our condition as needy, vulnerable beings, suspended between things as they are and as they might become, for better or worse, and as we need or want them to become. Although many social theorists, particularly feminists, have attacked and deconstructed these distinctions, I shall argue that the deconstruction is far from complete, so that they still hold sway, even over some who claim to reject them. While I believe that values, feelings and emotions need to be taken more seriously in social science, I have no truck with a romanticism that attempts to deflate reason or rationality. Rather I argue that, properly understood, reason is involved with all these things. The first part of the book provides a constructive critique of this framework of concepts. They are not merely questionable academic ways of thinking, but have become fundamental to the organization and self-understanding of modern life. The division between positive and normative thought has become institutionalized with the emergence of the academic division of labour, and the estrangement of social science, dealing with description and explanation, from philosophy and


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political theory, dealing with normative thinking. I shall attempt to mediate between them by matching their complementary strengths and weaknesses, addressing social science’s understanding of social influences on individuals, to philosophy’s undersocialized view of individuals, and addressing philosophy’s understanding of reason and normative arguments, to social science’s often oversocialized view of individual action. Another obstacle to understanding lay normativity is the tendency to overlook our sentient nature – not only in the sense of beings who feel things, but who can suffer or flourish in various ways. We can be well-fed or malnourished, healthy or sick, respected or despised and humiliated, powerful or powerless, supported or exploited, and loved or unloved; we can have a sense of self-worth or worthlessness, be stimulated or bored, happy or depressed, and so on. Hence our concerns. Concepts of human agency emphasize the capacity to do things, but our vulnerability is as important as our capacities; indeed the two sides are closely related, for vulnerability can prompt us to act or fail to act, and both can be risky. Capacity and vulnerability are always in relation to various circumstances, whether passing events or enduring conditions. We might say people sometimes value the things they care about more than themselves, but then those concerns have become a part of them rather than something separable. While attachments and commitments can bring meaning, interest, satisfaction and fulfilment to people’s lives, in becoming dependent on them they become vulnerable to their loss or damage, and hence suffer. Given all these possibilities for different kinds of flourishing and suffering it is not surprising that we are beings for whom things matter. Do we flourish or suffer and value things in various ways because of our nature, or because of the understandings and conventions of our culture that we have learned? Sociology and anthropology lean towards the latter answer, and are often extremely wary of any invocations of ‘human nature’; and for good reason, as we are cultural beings, albeit ones who can easily mistake our cultural specificity for some general human nature. But not everything is capable of cultural variation – you can’t teach a stone or insect a language or acculturize it, and it can’t feel French or Muslim – so we must have the kind of nature that is capable of cultural variation. The problem is that human nature and culture are so complexly related that to give a sensible answer we have to get beyond a simple relation of opposition and deconstruct the concepts; we could talk about ‘differently cultivated

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natures’, for instance. But if we simply opt for either nature or culture – for either biological or cultural reductionism – then we won’t understand how we flourish or suffer. These are complex matters that we have to explore if we are to understand our relation to the world of concern. What is it about us that makes us like this? It is in the context of capability, vulnerability and precarious wellbeing or flourishing, and our tendency to form attachments and commitments, that both values and reason in everyday life need to be understood. Social science’s favoured spectator’s view of action, coupled with its wariness of normative or evaluative discourse, can easily prevent it from understanding what is most important to people. It seems that becoming a social scientist involves learning to adopt this distanced relation to social life, perhaps so as to be more objective, as if we could become more objective by ignoring part of the object. It therefore often tends to produce bland accounts of social life, in which it is difficult to assess the import of things for people. One might of course try to report people’s feelings about how their life is going as social facts about them, but that can easily allow them to be treated as values beyond reason, as merely subjective or conventional, by detaching their concerns from what they are about, thereby failing to treat them as evaluative judgements about things. We could just report that some group claims to feel happy or oppressed, but we are also likely to want to know whether their claims are warranted, and this involves an assessment of flourishing and suffering, not merely as subjective judgements but as actual ways of being. People often try to make the best of what they have and to value this rather than feel resentful about what they lack; they may have what economists call ‘adaptive preferences’. But we cannot acknowledge such possibilities without evaluating their judgements. There are obvious difficulties and dangers in making such evaluative judgements, particularly if researchers misunderstand what the others’ situation is like from the inside, ignoring the meaning that their way of life has for them, as in ethnocentrism. Clearly, social scientists should seek to understand this, but to understand someone is not necessarily to agree with them. When feminist researchers argue that women are oppressed, even sometimes where they deny it, or that misogynists misrepresent women, they are adopting a critical relation to the ideas and practices of those they study, yet it doesn’t necessarily mean that they misunderstand such people. Nor does such a critical relation imply


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or provide a warrant for paternalistic, illiberal intervention: people still have the right to decide for themselves how to live. Rather it opens up a space for public discussion of what constitutes well-being. Sometimes the only way we can adequately describe social phenomena is through evaluative descriptions: to describe actions as ‘compassionate’, ‘abusive’ or ‘racist’ is also to evaluate them. It may not be possible to find value-free terms for those actions without turning the descriptions into misdescriptions; the scene of the bombed-out village might be described as ‘collateral damage’, but that would also fail to describe the enormity of what happened. Values and objectivity need not be inversely related. For many social scientists, assessing well-being is a step too far, a dangerous importation of the researcher’s own values. But well-being and ill-being are indeed states of being, not merely subjective value-judgements. As the lay television viewer said, the bombed-out villagers really were suffering. The very assumption that judgements of value and objectivity don’t mix – an assumption that is sometimes built into the definition of ‘objectivity’ – is a misconception. People’s concerns cover a wide range of things, from health, to relationships, work, the arts, politics, religion, sport and many others. Within the general theme of lay normativity, I shall focus on ethical or moral matters, by which I mean, roughly, issues of how people behave or should behave in relation to others, with respect to their well-being. These are particularly important because the quality of people’s lives depends hugely on the quality of the social relations in which they live, and on how people treat one another. We continually monitor both our own behaviour and that of others, particularly towards ourselves, and those we care about. Our relation to self is strongly influenced by our relations to others; it is hard to have self-esteem if no-one else esteems us, and we can hardly avoid assessing ourselves by reference to shared standards and comparisons with others. To be sure, the social structures and norms in which we live shape how we behave towards one another, and provide positions from which we interact, strongly influencing what we can do and the kind of people we become, but they do not fully determine actions. Social structures and rules themselves can institutionalize moral norms about entitlements, responsibilities and appropriate behaviour; as such they can still be the object of ethical evaluation, whether in everyday life or academic commentaries; are they fair, empowering, democratic, oppressive, conducive to respectful treatment of others, friendliness or selfishness?

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Although this ethical dimension of life matters enormously to us, social science is often poor at acknowledging and understanding it, preferring to account for action in terms of self-interest, or norm-following, or habitual action, or discursive constitution, which comprehensively fail to deal with the quality of ethical sensibilities. In so doing we may find it hard to recognize our own concerns as people, though in becoming a social scientist one can get socialized into not noticing this, and come to regard oneself as a spectator and not also a participant. This can cause theory–practice contradictions: in everyday life a sociologist who was mistreated by someone would probably feel that the wrong consists in having been harmed in some way, but as a social scientist they might gloss this merely as a transgression of norms, or difference in subjective values. Philosophy takes great interest in ethics, but mainly as regards what an ideal, rational morality would be like, rather than actual everyday ethical and unethical behaviour. It tends to value reason and discourse over emotion, dispositions and the body, and to focus on individuals as rational, autonomous actors in abstraction from the social circumstances that influence who they are and how they think and act. As we shall see the connection of ethics or morality to well-being is vital. There are limits to the extent to which we can rationalize or wish away harm, and fabricate a sense of well-being. How people can best live together is not merely a matter of coordination of the actions of different individuals by means of conventions, like deciding which side of the road to drive on, but a matter of considering people’s capacities for flourishing and susceptibilities to harm and suffering. When we think about how to act, we do so with some awareness of the implications for well-being – both ours and that of others. It’s hard to define well-being but, while there are many aspects of it that we’re unsure of, there are also many that are rather obvious – for example, we know that children need care, that disrespect, abuse and violence are harmful, and that homelessness is bad. When we ask people how they are, they usually have no trouble telling us, but they would probably be stumped by abstract questions like ‘What is well-being or flourishing?’ Of course, ideas of ‘the good’, as philosophers call it, will vary culturally, but all cultures provide some notion of this, and indeed, of what is good or appropriate behaviour and what is a good or bad person. Given the importance of these matters to people, one might expect social science to have a better idea of what ‘well-being’ and so on mean. How could


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it claim to understand society if it had no idea about what it might mean to flourish? However, on the whole it tends to be extremely coy about such questions, perhaps because it is feared that answering them would invite researchers to impose their own value-judgements or ‘conceptions of the good’ on those they study. A minority of social science does address our relation to the world of concern and help us understand why things matter. Here is a male, Algerian migrant worker in France, quoted in Abdelmayak Sayad’s book The Suffering of the Immigrant: What kind of life is it when, in order to feed your children, you are forced to leave them; when, in order to ‘fill’ your house, you start by deserting it, when you are the first to abandon your country in order to work it? . . . Their country is back there, their house is back there, their wives and children are back there, everything is back there, only their bodies are here [in France], and you call that ‘living’ . . . Who are these people? Men, but men without women: their wives are without men, but they’re not widows because their husbands are alive; their children are without fathers, orphans even though their fathers are alive . . . I ask myself who are the real widowers, the real orphans – is it them [the emigrant men], or is it their wives? (Sayad, 2004, p. 59, parentheses in original)

Sayad includes extensive quotations from interviews with immigrants in which they describe such feelings. He doesn’t merely report their views as social facts about them but takes them seriously as evaluations of their experience, as indicators of the precise ways in which they have suffered, and as sources of insight into their objective situation. Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb’s The Hidden Injuries of Class gives us insights into why class inequalities matter in relation to individuals’ well-being (Sennett and Cobb, 1973; see also Charlesworth, 2000). Some more recent feminist writing on gender, class and race explores the kinds of suffering and repression engendered by these forms of inequality, and how people value themselves and others (hooks, 2000; Reay, 2002; Skeggs, 1997, 2004).1 More generally there is a large feminist literature, which, in effect, shows the many forms of suffering and restricted flourishing to which women are subject (e.g., Bartky, 1990, 2002; Steedman, 1986). Significantly, these authors deal not only with the micro-politics of inequality and what Bourdieu terms ‘soft domination’, but with 1

This is also what I tried to do in my Moral Significance of Class (Sayer, 2005).

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people’s well-being and their evaluative orientation to the world, particularly through their relations to others (Bourdieu, 1990). For example, in her book Personal Life, Carol Smart attempts to do justice to how lives are lived and notes that, while there is a significant literature on emotions in sociology, much of sociology ignores the topic, and either steers clear of dealing with emotions in everyday life, or deals with them in a distanced way. In particular, it deals with love in a ‘disdainful’ manner, as a frivolous matter associated with women’s magazines and trivia (Smart, 2007). As she puts it, the ‘seriousness of sociology as a discipline seems to become compromised if it gets too close to the taken-for-granted stuff of everyday life’ (pp. 58–9). Rather than get close to things that matter very much to people – things which involve vulnerability and powerful feelings – it is tempting to remain loftily aloof. It is significant that this other, minority literature has in common a recognition not only of people’s capacities but of their vulnerabilities, and it takes their first-person view of the world seriously, both recognizing their agency and what their concerns tell us about them and their situation. While our evaluative relation to the world in society itself is the main subject of this book, the role of evaluation and values within social science is a minor theme. My point regarding the latter is not the banal one that social science is unavoidably value-laden; of course it is. Rather it is to support the fictional lay television viewer and argue that values in life generally are within the scope of reason. Moreover, without careful evaluative descriptions, that, for example, identify the presence of various kinds of suffering and flourishing, social science cannot develop adequate accounts of social life. While I am primarily concerned with the evaluative character of everyday experience itself and how we can best understand it, and only secondarily with values within social science, there ought to be consistency between the way valuation and values are understood in each. From taking part in seminars and workshops on values and social research I have often encountered the strange idea that values are not only subjective but synonymous with ‘bias’ and distortion. It’s further assumed that they are personal biases that one ideally should confess to, so that others will at least be able to ‘take them into account’, that is, discount them. This is self-deprecating insofar as it invites the reader to discount what may be reasonable evaluative judgements. Tactically, it’s disastrous since it invites readers with different values to ignore them. It


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implies that values are no more than subjective afflictions having nothing to do with what is being valued. In addition, values are often seen as private and inviolable – ‘my personal values’ – and not to be assessed by others. Because they assume that values are beyond the scope of reason, some social scientists try to avoid value-judgements in their accounts of social life, believing that this is necessary to ensure objectivity. As Weber put it, ‘Whenever the person of science introduces his personal value judgment, a full understanding of the facts ceases’ (Weber, 1946, p. 146). Others argue the reverse, that values are inevitable in social science, so we cannot expect to be objective. Although these two positions are diametrically opposed, they are completely agreed on one thing: that objectivity and values are incompatible. I disagree with both positions. Each is trapped within the framework of problematic distinctions that prevent us from understanding normativity. If values are within the scope of reason, they need not be regarded as a contaminant in social science itself. Critical theory and critical social science fully acknowledge their evaluative relation to their subject matter, being critical not only of other academic theories but of social practices themselves. However, they have struggled to justify the critiques that they have developed. I shall argue that this is because they lack an adequate account of human capacities and vulnerabilities, generally through an exaggerated fear of ethnocentrism or other kinds of misjudgement of social life. As a result, their critiques have become more cautious, and retreated into an inward-looking reflexivity.

Us or them? Social scientists tend to address their readers more as fellow spectators of social life than as possible co-participants. They generally offer third person accounts of what other people or ‘actors’ do and are like, how society is organized and how it works, and so on. Readers are not usually invited to check the accounts against their own experience and ways of thinking, although of course they may do so anyway. The validity of a social scientific account of some social group’s behaviour simply doesn’t depend on how it squares with the reader’s behaviour. Social scientists do not generally evaluate the thinking of those they study and hold them responsible for their thoughts and actions; they just report it. Philosophers, on the other hand, tend to address their readers as fellow participants in life, in first or second person mode;

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when discussing examples of actions, particularly moral actions, they refer to what ‘we’ or ‘one’ would do or ought to do. If they refer to ‘what a rational person would do’, readers are implicitly invited to identify with such a person and to check such claims by reference to their own behaviour. When philosophers refer to an example of someone’s behaviour, the reader is usually expected to assess it in terms of whether it was justified. As participants in social life, we hold each other responsible for our actions; in organizations, for example, individuals expect each other to take responsibility for doing certain things and we generally try to make things go well – sometimes just for ourselves, sometimes for others too. We are concerned about our well-being, and the worth of what we and they are doing. As social scientists observing others, however, our prime aim is to find out what they do and why. Unless it affects our research process, we don’t have to worry about whether we approve or disapprove of their actions, or whether they will honour their responsibilities. Even in so-called ‘participant observation’, the goal is still observation; the point is still to observe how others live. When we study an organization we hope we will be given plenty of access so that we can observe people freely and find out as much as possible. When we go to work for an organization, we worry about how we will be treated, whether it will be friendly, democratic and fair, or hostile, authoritarian and oppressive. As co-participants, the quality of our experience – including our relations to others – matters much more to us. The danger is that, because, as social scientists, we mostly want to observe and explain what people do rather than cooperate with them in some practice, we will project that spectator’s relationship onto them, and fail to appreciate the import of the practices for them, so that they appear as unfeeling actors of parts, bearers of roles, occupants of subject positions, mere causal agents. But in everyday life, when a friend tells us about what’s been happening, say at work, we are generally expected to evaluate it in some way and see it in terms of some wider picture of their and our concerns (‘wasn’t what the boss said outrageous?’). If we can’t see any such connection we might wonder why they’re telling us about it. If I write ‘people’s judgements of what is good or bad depend on the social norms of their community’ it may seem a broadly acceptable social scientific proposition. If I ask you, dear reader, if all your judgements of people and practices as good or bad depend simply on the


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social norms of your community, then you will probably say no. It is likely to seem not only wrong but offensive, for it suggests you merely believe what others have told you to believe. In other words, the third person, spectator mode tends to allow not only a distanced relationship to those under study but a demeaning one, because it leaves no room for the life of the mind, for personal decision and responsibility. This situation generates contradictions between what social scientists say in their theory and what they do in their practice. As social scientific spectators we tend to talk about behaviour in terms of what explains it, usually by reference to existing circumstances and meanings, but as participants, we tend to justify what we do, and implicitly invite others to accept or reject our justification. As researchers, sociologists might explain students’ performance by reference to their social background, but in their practice as teachers they tend to hold students responsible for their performance. It would of course be problematic if social science always tried to reconcile our third person, spectators’ accounts of the thought and action of others with our first person, participants’ accounts, for others may actually be different from us. But even where this is the case, they still think and have concerns. Like us, they are evaluative beings and things matter to them; they don’t just go through the motions or act out parts. To avoid theory–practice contradictions, we need to check that the way we account for others’ behaviour is not at odds with the way we account for our own behaviour. If there are differences in these accounts, they should reflect actual differences in behaviour; they should not merely be artefacts of social scientists’ reluctance to acknowledge people’s reflexivity, agency and concern. In order to encourage readers to think about social life from the inside, as participants and agents, as well as from the outside, as spectators, I shall, at the risk of a little grammatical clumsiness, regularly switch back and forth between referring to us and them, and we and they.

Some further things to bear in mind (1) As a social scientist myself, I am writing this book to or for fellow social scientists, but the issues are mostly conceptual, and many of the authors I shall draw upon are philosophers. Some of the terms and concepts I shall use may consequently be unfamiliar to social scientists; no doubt ‘flourishing’ and ‘virtues and vices’ will seem not only

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vague but strangely judgemental; I shall argue that, while they need clarifying, social scientists cannot sensibly evade them. The major philosophical influences are also rather different from those sometimes seen in social science; they are not utilitarianism, Kantianism, hermeneutics, discourse ethics or social contract theory, but neoAristotelianism, Adam Smith, the feminist ethic of care literature and critical realism, which, in my view, are much more congenial philosophical partners for social science. While the book derives from an engagement with many theorists in philosophy and social theory, my intention is primarily to develop a constructive argument as to how we might deal with our evaluative, and especially ethical, being, and not to detail precisely what I do, and do not, accept in the work of other authors. My debts are extensive but selective. (2) We need a ‘postdisciplinary’ perspective (Sayer, 2000a). The conceptual problems that make it difficult to understand evaluative being are partly a product of the emergence of a division of academic labour, in which each discipline imperialistically seeks to extend its parochial concerns to the exclusion of others, and each imagines that it is the most fundamental and insightful social science. The mutual hostilities between sociology (and anthropology), psychology, politics and economics serve to support various kinds of disciplinary reductionism that prevent us understanding the social world. The polarization between oversocialized and undersocialized conceptions of individuals is the most obvious example. The divorce of normative from positive thought about society, through the separation of philosophy from the rest of social science, is another. A plague on all disciplinary imperialism and parochialism! If ‘postdisciplinary’ sounds a bit pretentious, it’s actually little different from the familiar predisciplinary social science of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century founders (Sayer, 2000b). Although a social scientist myself, this research is based on a lengthy search within philosophy, particularly moral philosophy, for ways of overcoming social science’s difficulty with lay normativity in general, and ethical being in particular. I ask readers to be open to ideas and orientations from outside their own disciplines. (3) Pierre Bourdieu has warned us of the dangers of what he terms ‘the scholastic fallacy’ – of academics projecting their contemplative, discursive relation to the world onto actors who have a more


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practical relation to the world (Bourdieu, 2000). This removal from the pressures of practical activity also reflects and signals the privileged social position of the academic. Philosophy’s preoccupation with reason and autonomy make it particularly liable to ignore or devalue practice, emotion, vulnerability, dependence and embodiment, and to marginalize psychological and sociological considerations. Another kind of scholastic fallacy involves the projection of social science’s suspension of evaluation onto the people it studies so their evaluative relation to the world is overlooked. There is also more than a streak of scientism and statusseeking in the valuation of the bloodless descriptions of people we find in social science, like the ‘rational actor’ or the ‘subject’, which give the author an elevated status precisely because they are unlike those of everyday language. To be sure, we sometimes need these abstract concepts, but the linguistic distance also signifies social distance. There is further a kind of macho tendency to view the study of values, emotions and ethics as less scientific than the study of power, discourse and social structure. (4) It is probably best to acknowledge a certain wariness in social science of talk of ethics and especially morality. This has many sources: (i) A belief that morality is no more than a system of power, or a form of legitimation of a society’s power structure. This corresponds to the view commonly (mis)attributed to Marx, that morality is relative to society, with the implication that we cannot appeal to it in developing critiques of such systems of power. But though moralities do indeed tend to be shaped by systems of power they are never wholly reducible to such legitimations (Walzer, 1989). Marx’s work is both an attempt to develop a scientific theory of capitalism and a passionate critique of its oppressive (hence immoral, unethical) character. To suppose that it can only be one or the other is to accept completely the problematic modernist dualisms of fact and value, science and ethics that need deconstructing. Those who disparage morality – perhaps as ‘pieties’ – in the seminar room tend in their everyday lives and politics to be at least as morally offended by exploitation and oppression as anyone else.

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(ii) More particularly there is a common view of morality as something that restricts us, through ‘moralizing’. But to be against moralizing or ‘being judgemental’ is itself a moral argument. I am against moralizing too. But the critique of moralizing is not necessarily a form of immoralism, that is, outright opposition to any morality, but a more limited kind of critique; those who are against moralizing do not remain neutral about exploitation, abuse, rape and murder. We need also to be reflexive and acknowledge that this suspicion of morality is typical of liberal societies, in which individuals are supposed to be free to define their own conceptions of the good. (iii) In poststructuralism there is a more general view of normativity as a normalizing of behaviour. But it is self-contradictory to be against normativity: it would be like saying it is wrong to say anything is wrong. ‘Heteronormativity’ is a term that alerts us to the oppressive nature of norms that stigmatize homosexuality, but what is problematic about such norms is that they devalue something that does not deserve to be derogated, not the simple fact that it offers a valuation of behaviour. Those who (like me) are critical of heteronormativity are so because they are critical of homophobia, and hence normative in a different way. This misplaced resistance to normativity reflects the problematic dualisms that we will be deconstructing, in that it reduces normativity to ‘oughts’, to telling people what to do, ignoring the prior work of evaluation that lies between is and ought. (iv) Many may wonder whether this book will be concerned with morality or ethics. Given the above worries, ‘ethics’ tends to be seen as a more acceptable thing to study today than morality.2 Many different ways of distinguishing them have been proposed, and confusingly, sometimes the same distinction has been proposed with the terms reversed. Currently, the 2

‘Ethics is avant-garde, whereas morality is petty bourgeois and passé’ (Eagleton, 2008, p. 261). This project grew out of a research fellowship on the moral dimension of social life; in talking about it to colleagues I gradually became aware that the ‘m’ word triggered extraordinary suspicions, including that I was engaging in moralizing. I have since found that substituting ‘ethics’ for ‘morality’ goes down much better.


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association of morality with norms, and ethics with the questioning of such norms, is popular. While such a distinction makes sense, like other ways of distinguishing the terms, it is too restrictive to be helpful. Like many philosophers who are familiar with a variety of such distinctions, I will use the terms interchangeably to cover all the things that others have associated with either term; if you were to ask me which I am dealing with, I would say both. (v) For a social scientist, the philosophical literature on morality or ethics can seem strangely frustrating, as I know only too well, having wrestled with it for over ten years. One reason is that it offers little that we can be very sure about; anything which is described or endorsed as moral seems eminently contestable. Why should we accept such-and-such as ethical? Is it just our local norms that prescribe it? When it invokes supposedly everyday examples of behaviour to justify its judgements, we might wonder how these examples are justified. Here it may help to remember what is true of all processes of learning a specialist subject, be it ethics or physics: we always have to start from everyday understandings to get a foothold, even though we later need to revise some of those familiar concepts. Another reason for the strangeness of ethical theory is that it often abstracts from the social context in which actions take place, and takes the disembodied, adult, rational, implicitly male, liberal actor to represent humanity in all its diversity. In its concern to say what ought to be regarded as moral, much moral philosophy takes insufficient account of actually existing morality, with all its imperfections – but also with some of its strengths. Over and above all these things, the fact that we are capable of acting in many ways, moral or immoral, makes the subject inherently uncertain. But then if that weren’t the case, and we could only act in one way, then ethics and ethical norms would be redundant. As Jonathan Glover remarks, the attribution of ethical dispositions to people as a feature of their ‘humanity is only partly an empirical claim. It remains also partly an aspiration’ (Glover, 2001, p. 25). Thus, whenever anyone says something like ‘certain conditions x tend to produce a compassionate response in observers’, it will be easy to imagine counter

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examples, but to dismiss the claim on that perfectionist basis is precisely to misunderstand ethics. Yet, as I indicated earlier, strange though it may seem to social science-trained ears, this is where we live – between the actual and the possible, between present flourishing or suffering and future possible flourishing or suffering. And because we live with others and have to act, we cannot evade ethical matters in our practice, even if we ignore them in what we read and write as social scientists. The flip-side of perfectionism is an impractical scepticism that can lead us to abandon ‘good enough’ ways of thinking and acting that allow us to live adequately. Like weather systems, ethics is inherently fuzzy, and as Aristotle warned, one shouldn’t expect more precision than the subject matter allows. It’s also inconsistent for those who reject the idea of any kind of foundations for thought to reject ethical reasoning because it lacks foundations. (vi) Finally, one useful way of assessing social scientific ideas about evaluative being and ethical life is to ask whether they apply to us. If they do not, then we have theory–practice contradictions, and hence a good reason for doubting either our theory or our practice. As Marx put it: ‘The idea of one basis for life and another for science is from the very outset a lie’ (Marx, 1844; 1975, p. 355).

Outline of the book In Chapter 2 I develop some initial proposals regarding how we can best think about values in social life and in social research in particular, and defend the idea that values are things people can reason about. To do this it’s necessary to problematize and deconstruct a whole set of related and contrasting concepts – in particular, what I term the fact– value family of dualisms – in which the meaning of values and cognate terms is determined through opposition to ideas of facts, reason and objectivity. I argue that it is not enough to show that emotions and subjectivity influence how we reason and what we accept as fact, for we need also to acknowledge the opposite – the role of reason within emotion and value. In the course of this discussion I address the old question of the so-called ‘naturalistic fallacy’, concerning whether


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‘ought’ can be deduced from ‘is’. I suggest that this way of framing this question comprehensively misses the point, thereby making our everyday judgements about what’s good and bad and what to do by monitoring what is happening appear irrational and arbitrary. The chapter ends with a sketch and defence of how people reason about valuejudgements in practice. Chapter 3 continues the process of challenging the wider set of concepts in terms of which values tend to be understood in modernity and social life, by questioning the narrow conceptions of reason and rationality that have become common in modernity and which are often counterposed to values. Here I argue that just as values have come to be understood in a way that divorces them from what they are about, so reason has been abstracted from its relation to its object. This makes it hard to understand and appreciate the worth of the kind of practical reason or sense that we use in everyday life in guiding our actions, and which often makes little use of abstract rationality. While a rational person makes use of such abstract forms of reasoning, a reasonable person also or alternatively attends to the specificities of the object and the situation, in particular attending to the specific needs and capacities of other people. She has embodied know-how as a result of extensive experience of particular cases, and can make judgements about particulars, and she is not only clever but wise, in that she can assess the ends or goals of action themselves. I assess a range of different meanings of the term ‘practical reason’, arguing that all of them are helpful for understanding how people evaluate things and decide what matters and why. However, practical reason has often been attacked as opaque and inherently conservative, so I next address these suspicions. Finally, acknowledging that critiques of concepts of rationality in modernity have been common in social theory, I argue that the critiques of Weber and Habermas fail to get to the heart of the problems and hence also misunderstand values. In Chapter 4 I address the question of what makes us ‘evaluative beings’. What is it about human beings and social life that makes people beings for whom things matter? To answer this requires that we have at least some ideas about the nature of human beings, though developing such ideas has become controversial for a variety of reasons; for example, some fear that it is bound to invite a kind of naturalistic determinism, or to lead us into passing off contingent facts about our own society as universal, to attribute to nature what

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is due to culture, and to result in the categorization of some as ‘less human’ than others. However, it is impossible to avoid at least an implicit conception of human nature in describing social phenomena, and having an unexamined, implicit conception is more risky than having an examined, explicit one. I therefore begin by rebutting such fears and then proceed to outline those features of human social being which seem to be most relevant to our evaluative relation to the world, paying special attention to ethical tendencies and cultural variety and development. Acknowledging the wondrous cultural variety of human life is shown to be compatible with acknowledging that we have much in common. Finally, I argue that social science’s implicit or explicit models of human beings as causal, meaning-endowing agents tend to overlook the fact that our relation to the world is not merely causal and interpretive, but one of concern. We don’t just do things and interpret one another. Things matter to us. In Chapter 5 I turn to what is probably the most important aspect of our evaluative being, the ethical or moral dimension of life, which concerns how, as inherently social beings, we live together. We are certainly imperfect ethical beings, but to the extent that we do relate to others in ways that are conducive to well-being, why do we do so? Building on the previous chapters, I outline a largely descriptive account of the elements of ethical being in everyday life – elements such as moral sentiments, capacity for fellow-feeling, virtues and vices, norms and moral reflection and argumentation. In the process I reject conventionalist accounts which tend to reduce morality or ethics to norms, and argue instead that our ethical sentiments are primarily related to our sense of harm and flourishing. In the Appendix I discuss some of the ethical theories that I have either drawn upon or rejected in developing my account of actually existing morality, and justify my judgements about them. In Chapter 6 I move beyond the general and abstract reflections of the foregoing chapters to explore a more particular, fundamental matter of concern to people – their dignity. Although it matters hugely to people, at least when it is threatened, it is notoriously difficult to define. However, if we examine the diverse ways in which the term gets used and the circumstances in which it is invoked, it reveals much about our deeply social nature and the things which make us capable of flourishing and suffering. Although the term is generally associated with autonomy, the analysis reveals that dignity requires a respectful acknowledgement


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of vulnerability. In thinking about the nature of well-being, it’s easy to get drawn back to the physical aspects of health and security, but dignity is sometimes valued more highly than those, and it is much more dependent on how others interpret and treat us, particularly in terms of relations of equality and difference. The main focus of Chapter 7 is social science itself, focusing on the question of in what sense it might be said to be ‘critical’ – not merely of itself and other ways of thinking, but of wider social practices themselves. It assesses a range of rationales for ‘critical social science’, noting that over the last four decades these have become increasingly cautious and timid, so that, for example, critique is reduced to uncovering hidden presuppositions and deepening reflexivity. The different rationales have different critical standpoints, such as freedom and the reduction of illusion. I argue that in addition to these, and in keeping with the larger message of the book, a stronger standpoint of the critique of avoidable suffering is also needed, though it is already implicit in limited form in existing critical social science. This requires a conception of the elements of human flourishing. Here it is argued that the capabilities approach, pioneered by Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, provides a way forward. However, the isolation of this normative way of thinking from concrete studies of the social processes that produce well-being and ill-being is problematic. Finally, in Chapter 8, I outline some further implications of the book’s arguments for how we approach social science. If you are still doubtful – as I was for many years – of the need for social science to understand ourselves as evaluative beings and to delve into ethics, try recalling occasions when you have felt a burning sense of outrage at some injustice, cruelty or selfishness, whether to yourself or to others. These were things that presumably mattered, and hence are worth trying to understand. Then try explaining why you responded in that way; what caused or warranted that response? Why did it matter to you? The difficulty of explaining and justifying such responses should indicate that the ethical dimension of life is an extraordinarily complex and elusive subject. Yet since it matters to us so much, and since we have to decide how to act, then the subject is inescapable. In trying to answer such questions you may find yourself wondering whether to consider your responses as feelings or as forms of reasoning. You may wonder if they’re simply learned cultural responses, and how you came to acquire

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them, and what values and morality are. If so, you are already in the thick of thinking about the ethical dimension of life. We need to go back to basic concepts of value, reason and human being if we are to make any progress across this difficult terrain. If my arguments hold much water, then they suggest not only a different way of understanding normativity and ethics in life, but a fundamentally different conception of social science.

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Introduction What are values? The prime aim of this chapter is to argue that social science’s understanding of values is deficient, both with regard to their place in social life in general, and within its own methodology. In particular, I wish to attack the common assumption that values are beyond the scope of reason. Such an assumption implies that the values and valuations held and made by people cannot be assessed as better or worse, or more or less true of anything – as if the arguments over values and valuations that go on in everyday life were merely arbitrary, a matter of assertion and power. As such, while they may be perfectly proper objects of study for social science, they seem not to belong to the arguments of social science itself; indeed their alleged dogmatism and irrationality would render them antithetical to the project of social science. Yet in everyday life we regularly engage in reasoning about how to value things – about how children should be brought up, whether a certain kind of behaviour is acceptable, whether the tax system is fair, or whether people are becoming too selfish, and so on. Evaluation, judgement and reasoning overlap, and, I shall argue, sometimes we have to evaluate behaviour or people in order to be able to understand and describe them adequately – both in everyday life and social science. Although social science prioritizes positive (descriptive and explanatory) questions over normative ones, in our everyday lives normative questions are more important. Because of our psychological and physical vulnerability, our dependence on others and our capacity for diverse actions, and because of contingency, we are necessarily evaluative beings, continually having to monitor and evaluate how we and the things we care about are faring, and to decide what to do. Some of this evaluation is done ‘on automatic’ through our ‘feel for the game’, 23

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but some involves reflection or ‘internal conversations’ (Archer, 2003; Bourdieu, 2000; Murdoch, 1970). In social science, it is common to regard values in emotivist or subjectivist terms, as not being about anything, except perhaps the holder’s emotional state of mind. They are also often seen as conventional – as merely derived from social norms – rather than as valuations of circumstances and actions. This, I shall argue, has a detrimental effect both on social science’s interpretations of social life, and on its own self-understanding. In the former case, it prevents social scientists from identifying why anything matters to people, and hence what kinds of things motivate them. In the latter case, despite the now common recognition of the unavoidably value-laden character of social science, sociology and other social sciences have still not adequately come to terms with the reason-laden – or reasonable – character of values, so that there is still an aversion to normativity, that is to offering valuations of social phenomena, since values are seen as a source of bias and a threat to objective thought. In the last two decades, this aversion has come to be based not only on the view that values are beyond the scope of reason, but on the fear of illiberalism and ethnocentrism. For some, values in social science are seen as a threat to objectivity that we should attempt to minimize. For others, the inevitably value-laden character of social science is taken as a reason for rejecting the very idea of objectivity. Although opposed, these two positions share the assumption that objectivity and values are incompatible. I shall argue that such responses involve unnoticed slides between quite different meanings of ‘objectivity’ and ‘subjectivity’. However, if we distinguish these, and recognize the reasonable character of values and valuation, we can find a third way here that treats values and objectivity as possibly compatible. Emotivism and conventionalism are not merely academic theories but aspects of modernity itself. What generates these problems is a set of modernist dualisms of fact and value, reason and emotion, and positive and normative inquiry. Although a process of deconstruction of these dualisms has begun, it is one-sided and incomplete, so that social science is still in their grip, and hence it struggles to treat values as involving a kind of reasoning about things and circumstances. This weakens social science’s ability to understand and convey why anything matters to actors, why values and norms have normative force, or why actors or researchers see anything as good or bad (Archer, 2000a). While it has


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told us much about what causes suffering and flourishing, it has been decidedly coy about saying what they are. As we noted, there are important exceptions to these tendencies, particularly in some feminist writing and in other literature which deals with various forms of oppression and avoidable suffering, showing, through reasoning about values and well-being, why they matter to people, and explaining what suffering and flourishing involve, hence avoiding alienated accounts. I use the term ‘writing’ here deliberately to include literature which might not be counted as typically social scientific, and which is less inhibited by social scientific aversions to value-laden description.1 ‘Literature’, understood as part of ‘the arts’, often does better in this latter respect (Haines, 1998; Nussbaum, 1998). I shall argue that our descriptions of social life are likely to be inadequate if we attempt to avoid evaluation of social action and the conditions in which people live. I shall begin with a brief discussion of the nature of values and valuation, distinguishing between more and less useful ways of thinking about these. Then I shall deconstruct the ‘fact–value family of dualisms’ that underpin emotivist views of values. I attempt to show how they cannot comprehend valuation, norms, emotional reason, needs and desire or normative force. This argument includes critiques of: (1) the emotivist and conventionalist views of values that have dominated sociology and economics and which have the effect of negating the reasonable character of values; (2) the treatment of the positive– normative distinction as a dichotomy; (3) confusions about the multiple meanings of objectivity and subjectivity; and (4) the belief that social science cannot legitimately derive normative views from its attempts to describe and explain social phenomena. I shall then suggest how we do in fact reason about values, and conclude.

So what are values? I suggest that we should think of values as ‘sedimented’ valuations that have become attitudes or dispositions, which we come to regard as justified. They merge into emotional dispositions and inform the 1

Examples might include Carol Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman (Steedman, 1985), bel hooks’s Where We Stand: Class Matters (hooks, 2000), and Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed (Ehrenreich, 2001).

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evaluations we make of particular things, as part of our conceptual and affective apparatus. They are more abstract than the particular concrete evaluations from which they derive and which they in turn influence. The relation between values and particular valuations is thus recursive. Values are not merely backward looking but forward looking too, influencing our actions. For example, someone who has known both respect and disrespect and the hurt caused by the latter may come to believe that being respectful matters a great deal. This value is thus based on repeated particular experiences and valuations of actions, but it also tends, recursively, to shape subsequent particular valuations of people and their actions, and guide that person’s own actions, sensitizing them to any sign of disrespect. The acquisition of values in everyday life lies between the two extremes of passive osmosis and extended reflection on experience. Values differ from mere preferences or inclinations in that to some degree we have reflected upon them, though they tend not to be articulated unless challenged. Our ‘professed values’ may also differ from our ‘values in use’, not necessarily through deliberate deceit, but through lack of reflection and self-knowledge. The reasons for particular valuations are often unclear; hence, we may find ourselves thinking ‘that kind of behaviour is just not right’ or ‘she’s a good person’ without being able to say why very precisely, though ‘I just don’t like it’ or ‘she’s my kind of person’ would usually be regarded as unsatisfactory justifications, and we can often make at least some progress in justifying them if we try. Generally, only philosophers go in for full examinations and justifications; in everyday life we can mostly get by with much less. Valuation, at least at the level of having a feel for whether things are good or bad, is a more or less continuous part of our waking experience (Murdoch, 1970). We hardly notice it much of the time, and only reflect in a focused way on our valuations when we encounter something out of the ordinary. Sometimes we may be prompted to consider our more abstract values that inform our specific valuations, especially where they suggest conflicting valuations. For example, as a teacher, I might say to myself ‘OK, that student’s grammar is poor but how important is that relative to the other qualities of her work?’ Here what is in question is not so much the application of a particular standard but the standard itself and how it fits with others. General evaluative stances towards familiar things may become habitual, but they are habits of thinking to which we become committed


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or emotionally attached. They inform not only how we evaluate others but how we evaluate ourselves, and they influence how we act, albeit often imperfectly. They therefore become part of our character, so that we are likely to feel upset if they are criticized; indeed radical challenges to them may feel like a violation. It is this quality which lends support to the view that values are subjective and private, indeed perhaps even sacred. However, they are not just subjective and private, and we do often contest them, not least because we are social beings and have to find a way of living with others, and because it is difficult to live with values that no-one else supports. Further, because values and valuations guide our actions, and our actions have consequences for our well-being and the things we care about, then judgements which lead to actions that worsen these are liable to make us rethink our values and valuations. Thus someone who thought that acquiring more material goods was the most important thing in life might reconsider that value if success in this respect left them no happier. Although it is common to regard values as personal and subjective, especially in liberal society with its undersocialized view of the individual, they owe much to prevailing social values. However, our values are not merely ventriloquized by social discourses, so that what we think is important or valuable is simply what is regarded as such in the wider society. This demeaning view of people as ‘cultural dopes’ has been common in sociology, though interestingly, sociologists don’t seem to apply it to themselves and they like to think they can challenge those values. But ordinary people sometimes do this too. The wider social values of others mediate our own experiences, but they don’t fully determine them. The body of thinking about social life that we inherit through acculturation is enormously complex and shot through with tensions and uncertainties. The tools it gives us for thinking and valuing are selective – highlighting certain things and occluding others – without fully determining what we think. Values are not merely a priori: despite being discursively and culturally mediated they are to some extent the product of interactions and experiences. Although particular valuations are guided by our values, they are not necessarily solely a function of our values; indeed they would be problematic if they were because they would then be indifferent to what was being evaluated and put us at risk. Values themselves may sometimes be weakened and changed by having to evaluate novel situations, which may disturb the sediments, though this does not generally happen easily, precisely because they are

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things to which we have become committed. For example, the person whose values prioritize being respectful may come to realize that this can be taken too far, so that people are kept at a respectful distance, inhibiting friendly engagement. This view of values emphasizes that they are about something, indeed that they can be susceptible to change in the light of experience and argument. While in one sense values are indeed subjective and personal, they are fallibly related to objective circumstances and events – that is, ones which exist whatever we think about them. The treatment of values as subjective and private protects them from challenge in terms of their adequacy and consistency. This is only a first cut at defining values, and it only goes a little way to defending the claim that they lie within the scope of reason. The very term ‘values’ is problematic here insofar as it implies free-floating, seemingly arbitrary ideas about what is good or what one ought to do that can be left to individuals to choose as they see fit. By pointing out the link to valuations, we have begun to counteract this, for valuations are made of particular things, having particular qualities; they have objects, and sometimes we challenge them by reference to those qualities. The rest of the book is devoted to developing a stronger defence. The subjectivist, emotivist and conventionalist views of values that I wish to challenge require a more fundamental form of attack to overthrow them, for they are held in place by a deeper level of problematic conceptual distinctions.

Values beyond reason: the fact–value family of dualisms Up to about the end of the eighteenth century, positive and normative thought – that is, analysis (description and explanation) and evaluation and prescription – were often seamlessly fused in early social science, but since that time they have been progressively separated, and come to be seen as antithetical – typically in the form of an assumption that ‘values’ are beyond the scope of reason, and a threat to science. There has not only been an attempted expulsion of values from science, but a lessnoticed expulsion of science or reason from values (Bhaskar, 1998), so that the latter have widely come to be regarded as ‘merely subjective’.2 2

While the former expulsion can never be complete, the divorce of normative reasoning from positive reason has been more successful.


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This divorce has become institutionalized in the academic division of labour between social sciences and philosophy. Consequently now, unless they happen to have studied moral and political philosophy, social scientists lack training in normative thought, and tend to be dismissive of it, regarding it as groundless and inferior, a threat to objectivity and unnecessary for understanding social life. The expulsion of normative reasoning from social science and reason from values has produced not only generations of social scientists who are both ill-practised in normative reasoning and dismissive of the very idea, but who tend unknowingly to project their ‘de-normativized’ orientation to the world onto those they study, thus producing an alienated and alienating social science which struggles to relate to everyday experience and why anything matters to people (Manent, 1998; Sayer, 2005).3 Thus much of recent social theory assumes action to be merely interest-driven, which implies a narrow form of normativity, or else merely habitual or a product of wider discourses and institutions, in which case any clue as to why some discourses or conventions should have any normative force and hence matter to people is lost altogether. As Axel Honneth puts it, ‘without a categorical opening to the normative standpoint from which subjects themselves evaluate the social order, theory remains completely cut off from a dimension of social discontent that it should always be able to call upon’ (Honneth, 2003, p. 134). The divorce of positive and normative discourses reflects changes in society, particularly the rise of liberal individualism and the related rise of markets (Poole, 1991). According to liberalism, individuals should be free to decide on their conception of the good, and while this does not preclude public discussion of such matters, it prioritizes the right of individuals to pursue their own conceptions regardless of what others think, provided that they do not harm others. The spread of commerce increased the interaction between different communities with different values, and made it in their mutual interest to adopt a lowest common denominator form of consensus that allowed many differences to be left unresolved. One of the distinctive features of markets is that they do not generally require actors to justify their decisions and valuations; as long 3

This projection is a kind of ‘scholastic fallacy’, to use Bourdieu’s term, but he could be accused of falling into it himself in the treatment in much of his work of laypeople as basically unreflexive.

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as buyers have the money to buy the goods, that is all that matters. If you want to buy a sports utility vehicle (SUV) and have the money, you can have one: your money does the talking, not your reasons. Questions of the good are replaced by what will sell or can be afforded. So while capitalism has involved an explosion of rationalization, as Weber showed, it also liberates individuals not only from feudal bonds but from the need to provide reasoned justifications for many of their actions. Hence also the rise of ‘subjective’ theories of value, and the treatment of actors’ values – including their valuations of and commitments to particular ways of life – as mere individual preferences, which is exactly how they appear in markets. Not surprisingly, with the development of capitalism and the extension of markets, the language of political economy has become less moralistic, so that instead of the rich moral economic vocabulary of ‘self-interest’, ‘greed’, ‘envy’, ‘vanity’, ‘benevolence’, ‘pity’, ‘profligacy’, ‘prudence’ and ‘virtue’, we have bland, vague and uninformative concepts such as ‘interest’ and ‘utility’ (O’Neill, 1998). Instead of studying how economic relations fit into the wider order of society and the ethical implications of such relations, political economy developed a narrow ‘engineering’ focus which unreflexively reproduced this capitalist ‘de-valuation’ of economic behaviour (Sen, 1992). This separation of reason and value is part of a whole family of dualisms:4 fact–value is–ought reason–emotion science–ideology science–ethics positive–normative objectivity–subjectivity mind–body.

The fact–value family of dualisms It is hard to imagine doing without these distinctions. Even their most strenuous critics can easily be caught out using them in off-guard

4

I use ‘family’ rather than ‘set’ or ‘series’ to suggest there are ‘family resemblances’ (to borrow Wittgenstein’s term) between the dualisms.


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moments. They are useful in many situations, because they have at least some rationale. But they are also in many ways misleading, particularly if they are treated as simple and clear-cut dichotomies, as has happened particularly in modernity. Many, perhaps most, social scientists today regard them as problematic, but I wish to argue that understanding just why they are so is limited and inadequate. Consequently, many who imagine they have escaped these dualisms are, in fact, still trapped by them, and indeed inadvertently reinforce them. (For example, some Marxists see Marxism as a scientific, as opposed to an ethical, socialism, and are quite disdainful about the latter, as if science and ethics could only be incompatible.) They might legitimately be called dualisms or dichotomies rather than merely ‘distinctions’ because the terms have come to be understood as mutually exclusive and opposed (Putnam, 2002). At the same time the terms are interrelated vertically, since associations of each term seep into those above and below them. Thus, in combination, this vertical mutual reinforcement and horizontal mutual polarization and exclusion encourages us to assume that, for example, values are emotional, and that neither values nor emotions have anything to do with facts or reasons or objectivity. The things on the left might seem absolute; those on the right – with the exception of the body – relative. Sometimes the things on the right seem like unruly forces threatening to overwhelm us and make us ‘lose our heads’, while those on the left might be things we have to face up to, but we can do so actively, without coercion, using our heads (Blackburn, 1998, p. 88).5 As feminist authors have pointed out, the dualisms also tend to be gendered (masculine – left, feminine – right), and there are further alignments with other gendered dualisms, particularly those of thought and feeling, public and private, and nature and culture (for example, Haraway, 1985; Le Doeuff, 1989).6 5

6

As we shall see, the position of reason is unstable here, being sometimes counterposed to nature and facticity, and associated with the realm of freedom and subjectivity. Jean Grimshaw shows that, in philosophy itself, plenty of eminent male philosophers have prioritized the subjective, supposedly feminized side (Grimshaw, 1986). The more important issue, though, is what conclusions we draw from the gendered nature of the dualisms in assessing the various elements. The mind–body dualism’s orientation in the structure is unstable: sometimes association of the body with the feminine and the mind with the masculine can be reversed, as in the association of men with physical labour and violence and women with confinement and contemplation (Strathern, 1980).

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While the process of deconstructing these dualisms has been going on for decades, it is far from complete, although it would be hard to imagine dispensing with such distinctions altogether; but then deconstruction is not destruction and some kind of reconstruction is required. What has mainly happened in the last fifty years is that characteristics associated with the terms on the right side have come to be identified as applying on the left too, so that factual statements are argued to be ‘value-laden’, science is held to be in some sense ‘subjective’, and so on. Arguments about this seepage from the right to the left have formed a large part of the literatures on the philosophy and sociology of social science in this period, whether written by philosophers or social scientists. What is striking is that there has been little seepage in the opposite direction: that is, arguments for attributing some of the characteristics associated with the terms on the left to the terms on the right. This is the key point. Thus, while it is now widely acknowledged that extended descriptions of social phenomena can hardly avoid some kind of value content, outside philosophy it is hardly ever argued that values have anything to do with facts in the sense of having truth content, or are in any sense matters of reason. In other words, while much has been written on how values enter social scientific reasoning, little has been said about how values themselves involve a kind of reasoning. Consequently, values remain counterposed to reason, and on the whole, the limitation of the deconstruction of the dualisms to the leftward seepage has meant that they have been challenged primarily by a form of subjectivism. Insofar as the fact–value family of dualisms has ‘collapsed’, to use Putnam’s term, the value side has collapsed leftwards into the fact side, but scarcely any features of the fact side have collapsed rightwards into the value side (Putnam, 2002). The view of values as beyond the scope of reason tends to take either ‘emotivist’ or conventionalist forms in social science. In the former case – sometimes ridiculed as ‘the boo–hooray theory of values’ (e.g., ‘inequality – boo, community – hooray!’) – they have no apparent rational content but merely represent individuals’ personal preferences.7 In 7

‘Emotivism is the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character . . . moral judgments, being expressions of attitude or feeling, are neither true nor false; and agreement in moral judgment is not to be secured by any rational method,


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conventionalism, on the other hand, values are merely arbitrary cultural conventions – ‘what people do round here’ – or, in a more recent version, merely ‘culturally constituted’. This implies a ‘conformity concept of morality’ (Davydova and Sharrock, 2003). Like emotivism, conventionalism can be seen as a product of wider trends in society, specifically the growth of awareness of the existence of different cultures and value systems, and liberalism’s attempted agnosticism about the good, for which the idea of values as mere norms or conventions is congenial. Of course, values are indeed culturally variable, but they are not completely arbitrary; they have something to do with well-being and ill-being and they refer to something which is not merely their product. When those who are subjectivists or conventionalists in the seminar room are badly treated by someone in their everyday lives, they are unlikely to remonstrate with the perpetrator by saying ‘look, personally, I just don’t happen to like that’, or ‘don’t you know that’s culturally constructed as bad round here?’; rather they are likely to draw attention in some way to the harm and suffering that has been caused. This implies that values are not just conventions about what we should do and think but are about matters to do with well-being, where well-being is not simply anything we care to define it as or just an experience, but a state which can exist even if it is not noticed, and which we can try to understand. To refer to harm is to identify objective consequences. To be sure, our sensitivity to and awareness of harm is mediated by available ways of seeing and convention, and our beliefs about harm are fallible, but that fallibility presupposes there is something objective in the sense of independence of our beliefs about which we can be mistaken (Collier, 2003). At the same time, if we could never successfully identify harm, we wouldn’t survive for long. We tell children to be careful when crossing a busy road not because we have a convention that it is dangerous, but because it is dangerous whatever our conventions, and the costs of our fallibility in making judgements about it are extremely high. Both emotivist and conventionalist views of values are subjectivist in the sense that they treat values and valuations wholly as emanations of subjects and discourse, with emotivism implying a more individual kind of subjectivism; conventionalism, a more collective kind. Both present a for there are none . . . We use moral judgments not only to express our own feelings or attitudes, but also precisely to produce such effects in others’ (MacIntyre, 1985, pp. 11–12). As we shall see, the very term is itself problematic in that it suggests that emotions have nothing to do with reason and cognition.

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demeaning, reductionist account of people’s valuations as beyond reason: the former because they are purely subjective and have nothing to do with states of the world, the latter because actors simply internalize values as cultural dopes or puppets – or if they do think about them, they conform to them simply because of the sanctions against not doing so. However, in everyday life, we often do reflect upon values and evaluate and contest them.8 Moreover, we tend to be objectivists about values and valuations: that is, we act in ways that imply that they are about something that goes beyond our subjective experience; we think that some things (including certain kinds of identities, practices, relationships, institutions) are more (less) conducive to well-being than others, and that they are so even if we sometimes do not notice that they are. At the same time, we tend to assume that the ‘subjective’ beliefs about and experiences of well-being are metaphysically real in the sense that people do actually have them.9 A common radical sociological idea is that we don’t say that things are good or bad because they are good or bad, but that they are good or bad because we believe them to be so.10 The latter view is a subjectivist inversion of the former, mundane objectivist view. On the subjectivist view, the Holocaust was evil only because it is thought to be evil.11 Someone who seriously and consistently believed in the subjectivist view who was harmed by anyone would have to respond to the 8

9

10

11

Against these demeaning forms of reductionism, rational choice approaches at least acknowledge actors’ capacity for reason (e.g., Goldthorpe, 1998), but as we argue in Chapter 3 they reduce reason to instrumental rationality, and demean individuals’ capacity for practical reason about ends and values. As Davydova and Sharrock note, Durkheim did acknowledge this subjective internalization, as well as the objective morality of the group (Davydova and Sharrock, 2003). However, he did not consistently acknowledge the objective side of morality, in the sense of its being concerned with an objective kind of being – well-being – that differs from others. On the antimonies in Durkheim’s theory of morality, see Abend (2008). This subjectivist view of values goes back 2,300 years to Epicurus, and continues to appeal to adolescent iconoclasts of all ages. Durkheim’s statement that ‘we should not say that an act offends the common consciousness because it is criminal, but that it is criminal because it offends the consciousness’ (Durkheim, 1984, p. 39) is similar, but, as Abend argues, Durkheim’s position was more complex. He was a normative relativist, in that he believed different moralities were appropriate for different social types, so, for example, in modern societies he considered that the division of labour is morally valuable (Abend, 2008). Abend classes this as a ‘metatheoretical relativist’ interpretation in refusing any claims that moral values might in some sense be true (Abend, 2008).


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perpetrator by saying that what they did was only wrong because people think it’s wrong. Not surprisingly, it’s strictly an ‘academic’ viewpoint. This is not to deny that values have a conventional aspect to them, evident when we compare the values of cultures at different times and places. To some extent the conventions are related to the material forms of organization of their societies, although they do not merely ‘reflect’ these, for discursive forms have some autonomy from their material contexts, so that the same situation can be interpreted in more than one way. We can acknowledge that our awareness of harm or indeed flourishing is strongly culturally mediated and often inconsistent, as in the case of attitudes to alcohol as compared to other drugs in contemporary western culture. We can also accept that different cultures may provide different forms of flourishing through their characteristic practices.12 However, it does not follow from this that our valuations of phenomena are not about anything independent of such judgements, and that our dependence on prevailing discourses means that we cannot do anything but accept their valuations, as if collective wishful thinking could render anything harmful or beneficial. Indeed if it could, it is hard to see why evaluative judgements should be so contested. Actual lay discourses cannot be completely indifferent to the way the world happens to be and are also usually sufficiently internally inconsistent, permeable and overlapping to allow internal dissent. Thus, Betty Friedan and other feminists were able to identify many restrictions on women’s flourishing in 1950s United States, even though it was then a ‘problem that had no name’, that is, precisely not something acknowledged in the dominant discourses of that time (Friedan, 1997). People make sense of themselves and their well-being in terms of their cultural values and norms, just as scientists can only observe the world in theoryladen ways. But just as in science, theory-laden observation is not necessarily theory-determined but can still register certain mistakes and false expectations, so people may find some of their own cultural interpretations unsatisfactory without going beyond the interpretive resources offered by their own culture. Even in their constructive aspects – that is, in constructing practices and ways of life and 12

We can further acknowledge the possibility that humanity can discover and create new forms of flourishing (and suffering). This implies what Allen Wood calls ‘historicized naturalism’ (Wood, 1990).

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thinking – cultures and discourses are fallible, because they have to use materials – physical, psychological and ideational – that have properties that are not merely their voluntaristic construction. We should also remember the capacity of discourses to proliferate new meanings out of old ones through the play of difference: particular discourses limit and enable our thinking in specific ways, but they do not imprison our thinking altogether.

Emotions and emotional reason Modernist thought tends to divorce reason from emotion or what used to be called the ‘passions’, setting up emotion as its opposite: unreasonable, irrational, ‘blind’, ‘merely subjective’, or reduced to ‘affect’, simply expressive of drives, preferences and aversions for which there is no rational basis. Conversely, reason becomes unemotional, detached from anything we might care about. On this view, emotion is seen as threatening reason; thus, judges sometimes instruct juries not to allow their emotional responses to a case to influence their judgement. A limited objection to this view merely argues that emotions generally do influence reason, whatever some may say to the contrary, but this fails to challenge the assumption that they are irrational. Recently, the reason–emotion dualism has been deconstructed by some theorists who argue that emotions themselves are part of our reasoning activity, and hence not necessarily a threat to it, so that there is a zone of overlap between emotion and reason which we can call ‘emotional reason’.13 A number of philosophers, neuroscientists and social scientists have proposed a broadly cognitivist view of emotions as a form of evaluative judgement of matters affecting or believed to affect our well-being and that of others and other things that we care about (Nussbaum, 2001; see also Archer, 2000a; Barbalet, 2001; Damasio, 1994; Helm, 2001; Oakley, 1992; Williams, 2001). Although we feel them subjectively, in our mind/body, our emotions are about something: we are proud or ashamed of something, angry about something, grateful to someone for doing something, and so on. The judgements may be felt rather than articulated, but they can provide highly discriminating and valuable responses to the flow of experience. 13

In some cultures emotions are treated as a subcategory of thought (Nussbaum, 2001, p. 24n).


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Thus, for example, we might struggle to express in words the subtle but important differences between guilt, shame and embarrassment, but we can often readily feel the differences and how they occur in different circumstances. Without the continual monitoring of our well-being that emotions provide, our lives would go disastrously.14 In addition to these dimensions of cognition and feeling or affect, emotions involve desire and concern to produce or prevent change; they incline us to act in some way, though we may override such inclinations (Oakley, 1992). The adjective ‘emotive’ signals this motivating quality most clearly. Emotions can also affect motivation and our ability to function and flourish at a more general level; we may feel energized by happiness, and depressed and weakened by sadness and shame. Sometimes, we respond to things emotionally before we are able to articulate what has happened. This is clearest in the primitive fright response where we recoil from something before we can register it consciously as threatening. But it can also happen with more complex emotional responses. We may come away from a conversation with an uneasy feeling that something was not quite right in what was said or agreed, and only later be able to work out what it was; when this happens we can appreciate the intelligence of emotions. To be emotional is therefore not necessarily to be irrational; in fact, in some situations absence of an emotional response can suggest a cognitive deficiency. Imagine a friend who had just lost her home and job simultaneously, but was not at all anxious or in any way emotional about it: in such a case we would doubt her rationality, her grasp of reality.15 As Nancy Sherman argues: a sense of indignation makes us sensitive to those who suffer unwarranted insult or injury, just as a sense of pity and compassion opens our eyes to the pains of sudden and cruel misfortune . . . We notice through feeling what might otherwise go unheeded by a cool and detached intellect. To see dispassionately without engaging the emotions is often to be at peril of missing what is relevant. (Sherman, quoted in Oakley, 1992, p. 82)

14

15

Here, our account of ethical being departs from ‘sentimentalist’ positions which validate emotion but counterpose it to reason, as in Hume, for example (Nichols, 2004). As we shall see, ‘grasp of reality’ suggests a different concept of reason from that implied by many usages of the term ‘rationality’ (see Chapter 3).

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Emotions have complex normative structures that are responsive to particular kinds of social situation, and moral philosophy attempts to identify these (e.g., Nussbaum, 2001, 2004; Williams, 1993). Take the example of compassion. Nussbaum argues that it involves a certain kind of reasoning directed at someone’s suffering. It includes the feeling or ‘belief that the suffering is serious’, a belief ‘that the suffering was not caused primarily by the actor’s own culpable actions . . . and that the pitier’s own possibilities are similar to those of the sufferer’ (Nussbaum, 1996, p. 31).16 Compassion also gives the compassionate a reason not merely for wanting to end the suffering of the dominated but to resent and nullify its causes (Griswold, 1999, p. 98).17 It can therefore lead to a social critique and not merely to individualist responses. On this view, then, it is disastrous to dissociate moral thought and judgement from moral feeling, and indeed Nussbaum argues that normative ethics must begin from moral emotions like compassion, shame and sense of injustice. I shall return to this link between emotions and ethics in Chapters 4 and 5. This view of emotions as capable of being rational need not deny that there is a difference between the way emotions can impose themselves on us when we want them to stop, perhaps keeping us awake at 3am, and ‘cool reason’ which is easier to start and stop at will. At times, we may feel ‘overwhelmed’ by emotions, but when that happens it prompts us to reason why: ‘Why do I feel so anxious?’, ‘Should I be?’, ‘What can I do about it?’ Sometimes reflection and further inquiry about a situation may change our emotions about it; the direction of influence between emotion and reasoned reflection is not necessarily one way. We need not, like Kant, see emotion as a form of ‘heteronomy’, and something that needs to be avoided in order to allow us to reason. Even the power of emotions to intrude and persist against our will can have benefits in getting us to take problems seriously and deal with them; for example, our anger may motivate us to resist someone who is attempting to manipulate us. It would be strange to call this ‘irrational’. Emotions can assist rather than obstruct the process of reasoning. Emotions 16

17

These possibilities may be purely hypothetical but nevertheless vivid; the pitier may feel confident that the misfortune will never affect her, but that were she in that situation, perhaps in another society, she would also be vulnerable. Charities such as Oxfam rely on this. These claims come with a ceteris paribus clause, for such sentiments may be overridden by other considerations.


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acknowledge our ‘neediness and lack of self-sufficiency’ (Nussbaum, 2001, p. 22); indeed, without them we might be indifferent to our wellbeing. To be sure, emotional reason is fallible – we can be falsely proud or mistakenly angry, for example – but then unemotional kinds of reason are fallible too, and if we were to make infallibility a condition of rationality, then the only reason would be tautological, analytic reason. One of the reasons why emotions can sometimes seem unreasonable is that they have a narrative structure so that current responses may be subconsciously influenced by past events, perhaps even forgotten events. Thus someone who was bullied as a child may ‘overreact’ to such behaviour in adult life. Yet when we know the reason for their overreaction, it no longer seems so unreasonable. Moreover, this influence of habits of thought and response is not so different from the tendency of someone who has learned a certain kind of scientific explanation in the past to assume it to be true even if it is not. Fallibility is to be found on both sides of the dualisms. For all these reasons, emotions are not merely an irrelevant accompaniment to what we are doing, like muzak in a supermarket, but a kind of bodily commentary on how we, and our concerns, are faring (Archer, 2000a). They are ‘eudaimonistic’, that is, concerned with our flourishing and the things that are important to us (Nussbaum, 2001, p. 31). They are therefore worth listening to. Keeping feelings separate from thoughts, echoing the body–mind dualism, is absurd; both are responses to the world and our concerns. Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist, analysed individuals who had lost their emotional responses through brain damage; while they retained the ability to do specific tasks rationally, including intelligence tests, they could not set priorities among different goals, were indifferent to their own well-being, and could not sustain relationships or act ethically as they had previously done (Damasio, 1994). One might say they retained their cleverness but lost their wisdom or capacity for practical reason about ends.18 (Note Damasio did not say that emotions depend on the state of the brain alone and hence that there is no social dimension, merely that certain kinds of neurological functioning are a precondition for them.) This too suggests that emotions can provide a form of intelligence about the world. According to Damasio, 18

Practical reason is discussed more fully in Chapter 3.

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neurological evidence suggests that emotions are ‘in the loop of high reason’, involving the same parts of the brain (p. xxiii), rather than a form of base interference in our powers of reason. Modernism’s tendency to view emotions as irrational, to assume values and ends as beyond the scope of reason, and to reduce rationality to instrumental reason, ironically treats the mental disorders analysed by Damasio as the norm. The tendency is seen at its most extreme form in mainstream economic theory, which uncritically reflects the extraordinary nature of capitalism as an economic system that is guided not by practical reasoning about what is needed for sustaining human well-being, but by the goal of maximizing profit – a purely abstract quantity.19 It encourages highly developed instrumental rationality in pursuing that goal, but lacks any substantive rationality about ends, this being left to subjectively defined ‘tastes’ or ‘preferences’ or ‘utility’. Small wonder that modernity should develop so unevenly, with such an extraordinary combination of beneficial and damaging effects. The reason–emotion dualism is reproduced in the sociology of modernity. As Jack Barbalet (2001) has shown, Weber, like Kant, saw emotion as opposed to rationality: we associate the highest measure of an empirical ‘feeling of freedom’ with those actions which we are conscious of performing rationally – i.e., in the absence of physical and psychic ‘coercion’, emotional ‘affects’ and ‘accidental’ disturbances of the clarity of judgment. (Weber, 1949c)

Do we? Weber counterposes not only reason and emotion but reason and values, so that values are represented as a threat to objectivity and science, as is evident in his bizarre association of values with ‘demons’, and ‘demagogues and prophets’.20 Consequently, he famously saw the value content and the scientific content of research as only capable of being inversely related. As Elizabeth Anderson comments: Weber represents the clash of values as a matter of arbitrarily joining forces in the titanic clash of competing gods, where the intellectually honest courageously recognise both that the battle must be joined and that there are no grounds for choosing one side or the other. The need to reconcile two

19

20

For a critique of mainstream economics on these lines, see van Staveren (2000). Not surprisingly some critics have called for a ‘post-autistic economics’ (Post-Autistic Economics Network: www.paecon.net/). See especially Weber (1946).


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competing thoughts – that the choice must be regarded as of momentous importance, even though nothing objectively matters – leaves one wondering whether the feeling of profundity generated from viewing life from Weber’s elevated perspective is merely a symptom of hypoxia [too much oxygen]. Strip out Weber’s hyperbolic rhetoric, and what remains is the instrumentalist theory of practical reason. According to instrumentalism, reason can only inform us about means to our ends. (Anderson, 2004, p. 6)

Further, as Alasdair MacIntyre observes, Weber’s treatment of values as beyond the scope of reason and just as things one must assert (‘überreden’ rather than ‘überzeugen’) invites a manipulative attitude to debate over values and politics (MacIntyre, 1981).21 Again, the blame for these problems does not lie with Weber here, or indeed the many other modernist theorists who have propagated similar conceptions of reason and value as opposed, for they are symptomatic of the nature of modernity, liberalism and capitalism, which have produced societies which are organized, as well as understood, as if these ideas were true.

The positive–normative distinction A positive, i.e., descriptive or explanatory, judgement (not to be confused with ‘positivist’) is ‘world-guided’, involving an attempt to adjust our ideas to correspond to the way the world is, for example estimating how many students there are in a university.22 A normative judgement is ‘action-guiding’ or ‘world-guiding’; it implies that certain actions or features of the world should be changed in some respect to correspond to our ideas. Initially it would seem that the difference could hardly be clearer. However, two important considerations imply that sometimes the two can be fused. Firstly, consider phenomena such as needs, desire, flourishing, suffering and well-being. When we identify these we are simultaneously noting a state of the world and implying that (other things being equal) 21

22

Überzeugen refers to the practice of convincing by rational argument, where participants are willing to revise their ideas if the force of the better argument implies they should, and it aligns with Habermas’s ideal speech situation. Überreden refers to manipulative forms of persuasion that involve suspended rationality, such as flattery, deceit, demagogy or threat (Reisigl and Wodak, 2001). ‘Positive’ does not entail ‘positivism’; plenty of non-positivist research is positive.

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some aspects of the world should be changed.23 Hunger or loneliness are both states and forms of deficiency, and if we think that someone really is starving or lonely then that means we acknowledge that they need food or company; if they didn’t they wouldn’t be starving or lonely. Concern, desire, longing and sense of lack do not merely passively register a difference between two states, one that is given and one that does not exist, but involve an impulse, drive or pressure to move towards the latter. They are thus world-guided in responding to the difference and action-guiding in seeking to resolve it. (Recall that emotions involve not only cognitions and feelings but the pursuit or avoidance of change of some sort.) Thus, when we say something like ‘unemployment tends to cause suffering’, we are not merely ‘emoting’ or expressing ourselves, or offering a ‘subjective’ opinion about a purely normative matter, but making a claim (fallible, like any other, of course) about what objectively happens. On the other hand we are not simply providing a purely positive description, for in identifying suffering we can hardly avoid the normative implication that the situation is bad and, other things being equal, in need of remedying. As Iain Wilkinson argues, a key characteristic of pain and suffering is that they are not merely states of being, but of frustrated becoming, of continuous yearning for relief and escape (Wilkinson, 2005). In E. P. Thompson’s words: ‘inside every “need” there is an affect, or “want”, on its way to becoming an “ought” (and vice versa)’ (Thompson, 1978, p. 356). In effect, the positive–normative distinction splits us in two. We are needy beings, characterized by lack and desire. Needs would not be needs if the world were such that they could never fail to be fully met. If we think about the ‘flourishing’ or ‘suffering’ of humans or other species, then although these are vague terms, covering wide ranges of conditions, they seem to be both descriptive (positive) and evaluative (normative). If we reflect on more specific adjectives like ‘oppressive’, ‘humiliating’, ‘abusive’, ‘cruel’, ‘kind’ or ‘generous’, which involve what philosophers term ‘thick ethical concepts’, we can see more clearly that they are both descriptive and evaluative, and one cannot separate the two components from one another (Putnam, 2002, p. 35; Taylor, 23

There may sometimes be overriding considerations that warrant the refusal of the implied change. This is equivalent to ceteris paribus clauses in natural science where claims about what follows from some prior state acknowledge the possible influence of contingencies.


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1967, 1994; Williams, 1985; see also Haines, 1998).24 Thus, when we decide to accept a description of some practice, say as ‘oppressive’ or ‘racist’, we simultaneously accept the implicit valuation. Such valuations are not merely descriptive, but imply desire or need for change. ‘We need to recognise . . . that in observing and diagnosing human problems what we observe is productive or destructive, industrious or lazy, brave or cowardly behaviour. These are value judgements, to be sure, but they are also descriptive . . . The man or situation is not seen then, appraised, or appraised then seen in distortion; it is seen morally. Value and fact merge’ (Louch, 1966, pp. 82–3, cited in Davydova and Sharrock, 2003, p. 366). By comparison, thin ethical concepts such as ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘duty’, ‘virtue’, ‘obligation’, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ – ‘empty moral words’, as Iris Murdoch called them – can seem more like arbitrary assertions than reasonable descriptions and evaluations (Murdoch, 1970, p. 40). This is precisely because, as abstractions and summarizing terms, they are removed from the range of concrete situations and behaviours to which they might be applied and in terms of which they can be justified (Putnam, 2002, p. 60). They are noundependent: that is, they lack meaning until they are attached to a noun, as in ‘good student’ or ‘bad teacher’. Novelists and scholars in the humanities, and people in everyday life, have few inhibitions about using thick ethical concepts; indeed our ability to interpret and respond to the world and to communicate with others would be impoverished without them. Of course, their usage needs care, precisely because they are not merely boo–hooray terms but descriptions of their objects; the choice of such terms is as critical as that for any more straightforwardly positive description. Just as a good novelist like George Eliot chose her thick ethical terms with great care, so social scientists need to do so too, for if they do not they will also misdescribe their objects. Such concepts are typically fuzzy, so that one shades into another – compassion into pity, embarrassment into shame, pride into vanity, callousness into cruelty, for example – but the differences may be critical for understanding what is going on. Refusing such terms for fear of ‘being judgemental’ or ‘value-laden’ is likely to leave us with inferior descriptions.

24

‘For an Aristotelian, the sharp division between factual and evaluative claims makes no sense’ (Taylor, 1994, p. 20).

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Social scientists may feel they should try to find more neutral or less value-laden words to describe such matters, but if they do, one of two things will happen: either they will mislead by euphemizing, as in the example of ‘collateral damage’ (in which case the description will be deficient descriptively as well as evaluatively – hence ‘crypto-positive’ as well as ‘crypto-normative’), or the new words will come to take on a similar evaluative load to that of the old ones.25 As needy, vulnerable, evaluative beings we can hardly suspend all evaluation. We may need to be more evaluative in order to be more objective. I do not mean by this that social scientists should intersperse their accounts of social processes with comments that ‘x is good’, and ‘y is bad’, for once we have used thick ethical concepts, such thin ethical terms become redundant; if we have just described what happens in a concentration camp, we do not need to add that it is bad. Secondly, if we notice that normative thinking includes not only imperatives (‘oughts’), and simple assertions (‘x is bad’), but evaluations, including terms such as kind, courageous, intimidating, abusive, fair, corrupt, oppressive, etc., the positive–normative distinction becomes more blurred (Foot, 2001). Whereas simple ought statements and de-contextualized assertions using thin ethical concepts such as ‘y is good’ often seem to brook no debate, ‘evaluations’ only weakly imply particular actions and are more open to debate on their merits (Walzer, 1994). The more that moral values are divorced from descriptions or understandings of states of affairs, the more arbitrary, irrational, ‘moralistic’ (or in some cases the more hysterical) they seem, appearing as empty exhortations or denunciations (Putnam, 2002). While some valuations may be dogmatic, some may be open to empirical evidence bearing upon whether well-being or ill-being is involved, particularly if their context is made clear. Again, dogmatism is not the preserve of normative beliefs; it can be found in more straightforwardly factual judgements too. As Elizabeth Anderson argues, it is not values as such that pose a problem for social science, but dogmatically held values (Anderson, 2004). Anderson shows that there is a hidden contradiction between Weber’s view of values as beyond reason, and his advice to lecturers, in Science as a Vocation, to present students with facts that are ‘inconvenient’ in relation to their values, for it is only if values or 25

‘Crypto-normative’ is a term coined by Habermas in his critique of Foucault’s work (Habermas, 1990).


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value-judgements are susceptible to empirical evidence that any facts could be inconvenient or unsettling. We can therefore reason about values rather than merely assert them (Anderson, 2004). This argument conflicts with the common assumption that the positive and normative content of discourses must be inversely related. Consider the following famous example, comparing two statements about the Holocaust: ‘thousands died in the Nazi concentration camps’ and ‘thousands were systematically exterminated in the Nazi concentration camps’.26 The second is both more value-laden and more factually accurate than the first: the prisoners did not just die naturally, nor were they killed randomly and individually, but in planned mass executions. Therefore, refraining from using evaluative terms may weaken rather than strengthen the descriptive adequacy or truth status of our accounts. The fact–value dualisms have the effect of subjectivizing and de-rationalizing values so that they become ‘personal’ rather than open to intersubjective deliberation and evidence. Again, this echoes the liberal modernist tendency for the nature of the good to be treated as a matter of personal preference.

Objectivity and subjectivity The fact–value family of dualisms aligns values with subjectivity, and thereby counterposes them to objectivity. Thus, it seems that a valueladen account cannot possibly be objective; indeed ‘objectivity’ is sometimes defined in terms of ‘value-freedom’. If our understanding of the world is always from some standpoint, and ‘theory-laden’ or conceptually mediated, how can anyone claim to be objective? To respond to such points we need to disentangle the several different meanings of ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’, as these are perennially conflated and confused. This has blocked an adequate deconstruction of the fact–value dualisms and undermined decades of commentary on values in social life and in social research. Take objectivity first. The most important sense for the present discussion is objective in the sense of ‘pertaining to objects’, acknowledging that regardless of whether we have a good understanding of objects (be they things or other people or practices), they have particular properties; they are ‘other’ – indeed often intractable and resistant. This 26

For a fuller discussion, see Taylor (1967).

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goes for discourses and other social constructions too: whatever their properties are, they do not depend on my understanding of them, although obviously others have influenced them at some time. Neoconservative politics is a social construction, but it is not my social construction, and my attempts to construe it and influence it seem to have made no difference to it. Moreover, like all social constructions, it was constructed with materials, both physical and ideational, that are not merely the product of the wishful thinking of its constructors, and hence its constructors’ construals of their product are fallible; no doubt neoconservatism has developed partly in ways they did not intend (Sayer, 2000b). Even where our interpretations influence what is interpreted, as in so-called ‘observer-induced bias’ in interviews, this presupposes that there is something independent of us (objective) to influence. The opposite of this sense of ‘objective’ is ‘subjective’, in the sense of pertaining to conscious subjects, though, of course, other subjects also stand as objects to us, just as we do to them. This first ontological sense of ‘objective’ is radically different from a second epistemological sense, which concerns the truth status – or, if you prefer, practical adequacy – of statements and claims. We do not have to presuppose some notion of absolute truth to adopt this usage; it is difficult to make sense of what absolute truth would be, but it is often possible to distinguish between more and less true statements. Thus, the statement ‘6 million were killed in the Holocaust’ is an approximation but more true than the statement ‘600 were killed in the Holocaust’. We do not believe the former merely because we find it ‘useful’ to do so, but because we believe it to be true or as adequate an estimate as we are likely to get. To be sure, such claims presuppose the adequacy of particular concepts that need to be assessed, like ‘Holocaust’, as do all empirical claims. Yet while such concepts are a necessary condition for posing empirical questions, they are not usually sufficient for answering them, so empirical investigation is needed, and this may throw up surprises. Thus, although the UN weapons inspectors in Iraq in 2002–3 had to have concepts of weapons of mass destruction and other kinds of weapon in order to do their work, they still had to go and look, and the answer was widely unexpected, though not of course infallible. Objectivity in this epistemological sense is often associated with infallibility, so that it seems that, for example, demonstrating the fallible and revisable character of knowledge, including science, means that any concept of objectivity has to be abandoned. As Andrew Collier and


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other realists argue, this is completely the wrong way round, for fallibility entails and is entailed by objectivity in the first, ontological sense (Collier, 2003). For our knowledge to be fallible, it must be capable of being mistaken, and for it to be mistaken there must be something independent of any particular claim, such that there is something it can be mistaken about. Of course, the object might be another discourse or form of knowledge, but in finding ourselves mistaken about it, we realize that, whatever it is, it is and has been so regardless of what we cared to think about it. It presupposes that the state of affairs which is now claimed to exist might have existed even before it was identified as doing so, for example that women were oppressed even before they were identified as such, just as the world was round even when people thought it was flat. Objective in the ontological sense relating to ‘properties or characteristics of objects’ therefore entails that objectivity in the epistemological sense of the achievement of true or adequate understandings of the world is contingent (i.e., neither necessary nor impossible), and hence we must be fallibilists. Conversely, to be a fallibilist about knowledge is to presuppose the basic claim of realism, that many objects can exist independently of particular knowledges or claims about them (Collier, 2003; Sayer, 2000b; Trigg, 1988). If knowledge were infallible, such that, in using it, we were never caught out and taken by surprise, then it would be hard to see any reason for supposing that there was an objective realm, in the sense of things capable of existing independently of our knowledge of them, for the world would appear as so perfect a product of our knowledge that it would be indistinguishable from it. In arguing that values and valuation in social life and in social research are about something objective, I am using the first (ontological) sense, though, as I have indicated, the second sense presupposes it. I am not claiming some privileged access to the truth, but rather getting at what fallibility presupposes – the existence of something about which we can be mistaken. The opposite of this second epistemological sense of ‘objective’ is ‘subjective’ understood as ‘probably not true or not having to do with claims about the existence and nature of objects’, or, in a sense we shall explore shortly, irrational or beyond reason. In the third common usage, ‘objective’ is often used as a synonym for ‘value-free’, and ‘subjective’ as ‘value-laden’. This is a disastrous mistake, especially where it is confused with the second, epistemological

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sense of objective.27 Having strong feelings or values about some state of affairs might make us misrepresent it, but that is not inevitable, and indeed it might help us understand it better (Anderson, 2004). Thus the strong value-orientation of feminism has helped feminists to identify things which others had missed, and hence has given us more objective (second sense) understandings of the social world. Objectivity in the second, epistemological sense does not require objectivity in the third sense of value-neutrality. Of course, values and valuations are also in several senses ‘subjective’. They are made by subjects, and only by subjects. Insofar as we become committed to them, so that they are part of our character and identity, they are also subjective in the sense of ‘personal’, such that challenges to them can feel upsetting. Emotions and the practice of making judgements are clearly subjective in the sense of being features of subjects that exist only as long as the subject feels them. They therefore seem to be objective features of human functioning in our first sense. It is also common to view values and emotions as subjective in the sense of not being about any object (practice, person, relationship, institution, etc.) beyond the subject herself and hence as not being susceptible to evidence and evaluation in terms of the characteristics of that object. It is this last kind of subjectivism that I want to reject. On this view, it would be a mistake, for example, to think that racist values could be challenged by any empirical evidence about what people with different racialized characteristics are actually like or are capable of, and hence challenge such values as falsely based; racist values would simply be a product of racist subjects and would be immune to any evidence regarding the objects.28 Any attempt at anti-racist education would be arbitrary moralizing. Similarly, we could never come to think that we have mistakenly valued something in the past. More fundamentally, it would make nonsense of many of our valuations: if I said of two identical copies of this book that one of them was good and the other bad, I would be challenged: how could they be if they were identical? 27

28

In The Protestant Ethic, every time Weber mentions judgements of value, it is to reassure readers that he is not going to make any, and hence that objectivity will not be threatened (Weber, 2001). Some individuals’ values may be resistant to evidence, of course, but this merely shows that they refuse to face empirical challenge, not that such challenges are irrelevant.


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For my valuation to make any sense, there must be at least some difference between the two objects. Thus, valuations make sense in terms of what they are about, as well as in terms of the characteristics of the valuer. They are objective in the sense of being about something independent of the act of valuation. To be sure, we can evaluate ourselves, which might seem to imply no difference between the subjective and the objective, but clearly, if we come to the conclusion that we have been doing something wrong, then we do so because we think that we really have done something wrong, and that it was wrong even when we didn’t notice it was. So again, even here, what we value or evaluate is something different from the valuation itself. When we distinguish the different senses of objective and subjective, we can come to appreciate that they are not always mutually exclusive – so your feelings are subjective in the sense that they only exist as long as you experience them, but they exist objectively in relation to my observation, regardless of whether I notice them, just as the Himalayas exist regardless of whether I am aware of them. When we tell our doctors that we have a headache, or tell a friend that we are depressed, we expect them to accept that these actually exist as states of being, rather than merely as something we have imagined, though, of course, they could be. Even though the headaches and depression are metaphysically subjective, in the sense that they only exist as long as we experience them, claims about them can be epistemologically objective, or true (LaFave, 2006). Initially, these may seem difficult distinctions to grasp, but given the strength of the association of values with subjectivity in modernity, we need to make them if we are to understand why they are things that we can argue about; they are within the scope of reason.

Is and ought, and the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ It is hard to think of any other widely used phrase in the history of philosophy that is such a spectacular misnomer. (Bernard Williams, 1985, p. 121, on the naturalistic fallacy)

It is common in social science to frame any discussion of values in terms of the ‘is–ought distinction’ and the so-called ‘naturalistic fallacy’.29 29

It is also sometimes referred to as ‘the David Hume problem’, but there are different interpretations regarding whether Hume intended to ban inferences from is to ought (e.g., see Appiah, 2008, pp. 21ff.; MacIntyre, 1998, pp. 166ff.).

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The usual argument is that ‘is’ statements, that is, factual, world-guided statements, do not logically entail ‘ought’ statements, that is, action- or world-guiding statements. Thus from any given factual statement about what is the case, one cannot logically deduce any conclusions about what one ought to do. To imagine that one can do so allegedly involves ‘the naturalistic fallacy’. In social science it is common to regard the naturalistic fallacy as providing a knock-down argument against the inclusion of evaluative judgements or ‘values’ in social research, though in philosophy there is also considerable – and weighty – criticism of the idea that one cannot make value-judgements on the basis of factual accounts, and of the assumption that the is–ought framework is even a helpful one (Anderson, 2004; Appiah, 2008; Bhaskar, 1998; Collier, 2003; Geuss, 2008; MacIntyre, 1998; Putnam, 2002; Taylor, 1967, 1985; Williams, 1985). At one level, strictly on its own terms, the argument seems persuasive. For example, if we accept a statement of fact as true, for example that ‘unemployment numbers have doubled in the last year’, it doesn’t logically follow that we should see this as good or bad or that we ought to respond in any particular way.30 One might even argue that a statement like ‘x hasn’t eaten for two weeks and is starving’ does not logically entail the statement ‘x should be given food’. However, unless there are some rather unusual overriding circumstances, it wouldn’t make much sense to refuse such an inference (Collier, 1994). Imagine person A, who is severely malnourished, meeting person B who is wellfed and has more food than she can eat: A says to B, ‘I’m starving, please give me some food.’ B says, ‘Why should I?’ ‘Because I’m starving,’ says A. ‘Ah yes,’ replies B, ‘but from the fact that you are starving it does not logically follow that you should be given food.’ In such a case, I suggest that we might wonder about not only B’s ethics but her sanity. But let us be charitable to those for whom the naturalistic fallacy is important and accept that, logically, ought does not follow deductively from is. The confusion of logic with relations of need, want, etc. The naturalistic fallacy, if it is one, involves a faulty kind of logic. But note that logic is concerned with the relations between statements. If I am starving, I don’t need a logical argument for getting some food; I just 30

Though if p, then we ought to believe p.


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need food. The force of the ‘ought’ here is not a matter of the logical relations between statements, but of bodily needs or compulsions – states of being or becoming, not statements. Likewise, when someone says they have reason to be angry about the way they have been treated, they don’t mean they have a logically deductive argument which entails that they should be angry. Rather, as Nussbaum puts it, paraphrasing Aristotle, ‘in order to have anger, I must have . . . [a] . . . set of beliefs: that some damage has occurred to me or to something or someone close to me; that the damage is not trivial but significant; that it was done by someone; probably, that it was done willingly’.31,32 The treatment of the naturalistic fallacy as applicable to such cases, to such ‘responses’ or ‘inferences’, involves a kind of linguistic or epistemic fallacy, for it mistakes questions of being for questions of the internal logical structure of knowledge or discourse. It assumes that ‘the force of the ought’ (for example, in ‘I’m starving – I ought to get some food’) should come from logic, rather than from need or lack.33 It mistakes the logic of things for the things of logic, as Marx put it. The force of an urge or need doesn’t automatically count as a justification for satisfying it, though it would be bizarre to discount it simply because it’s a need rather than a form of reasoning. Possibly, we might be mistaken: someone might be mistakenly angry about something, or be desperate to feed a debilitating addiction (Taylor, 1993). The senses of anger or lack, like any kind of sense, are fallible, though it would be hard to explain how we managed to survive if our senses, responses and inferences were invariably faulty. Is the absence of a deductive relationship between factual and normative statements a problem? Deductive relations are, as Charles Taylor notes, just one among many forms of inference or relations among statements, and in practice we 31 32

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Note the implicit appeal to human vulnerability and suffering. One could of course put the inference into deductive form by invoking a general law ‘whenever x tends to happen I feel angry; x has happened, therefore I am angry’. One could, but it would be utterly silly, for it would add nothing and indeed would obscure the cause of the anger, mistaking logical relations among statements for causal processes. This is similar to the confusion of natural necessity with logical necessity that realists such as Roy Bhaskar and Rom Harré identified as central to the debates of the 1950s and 1960s in the philosophy of science over induction (Bhaskar, 1975; Harré and Madden, 1975; Sayer, 1992, pp. 160–2).

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have to use others (Taylor, 1967). If we were to refrain from making judgements in everyday life because we were unable logically to deduce how to evaluate things on the basis of our beliefs about their nature, it is hard to imagine how we would survive, let alone flourish. Elizabeth Anderson reminds us that, in science, theories are ‘underdetermined’ by evidence, that is, they do not follow deductively from observation statements (Anderson, 2004). The theory of evolution cannot be logically deduced from observational data such as the fossil record or studies of reproduction, but that does not mean we may as well cast it to the flames. Yet while scarcely anyone would argue that theorizing is therefore impermissible or unreasonable in science, many people believe that making non-deductive evaluative inferences from descriptions is neither permissible nor reasonable. If the only inferences that we could allow were deductive ones, not only scientific but everyday reasoning would be stunted. ‘Valuey facts’ and the omission of evaluation The specification of the is–ought problem and the naturalistic fallacy already prejudices the conclusion, for it polarizes the relationship by on the one hand reducing the normative to a matter of ought statements, construed as imperatives, and ignoring evaluative descriptions, and on the other hand assuming that descriptions are value-neutral or at least can always be expressed in a value-neutral form (Foot, 2001). In the former case, the treatment of ought statements as simple imperatives lacking any reasoned support makes it seem that when someone says ‘you ought to do x’, and you ask ‘why should I do so?’, their answer can only be ‘because you just ought’. However, ought statements are often supported by reasons, and ones that might be publicly evaluated; for example, ‘you ought to do x so you can keep healthy’, or ‘you ought to do x because it’s part of your responsibilities as a manager’ (MacIntyre, 1998, p. 167). We use this kind of reasoning regularly in everyday life. Should we really regard it as illegitimate? Moreover, much normative discourse is evaluative rather than prescriptive, not telling us what we should do, but assessing in what respects something is good or bad. While such assessments do have implications, they indeed do not follow deductively, but always subject to other considerations. On the descriptive, ‘is’ side, while it is true that not all factual statements need have any value implications, when we are dealing with descriptions of sentient beings then the descriptions are inevitably


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already ‘valuey’, as Collier puts it (Collier, 1994).34 Recalling our earlier point about thick ethical descriptions, someone who did not know that suffering or humiliation were bad would not understand those phenomena. As vulnerable, needy subjects, operating in an open world and unable to predetermine much of what will happen, we are necessarily evaluative beings. Even if the words are neutral, if they are understood to refer to something of importance to us, then the thoughts that they awaken – the way they are understood – will already be ‘valuey’. As sentient beings, we can be in states of suffering or flourishing, but this fundamental feature of our being becomes incomprehensible if we have to split the description of our condition into simple, pure ‘is’ statements on the one hand, and simple ‘oughts’ on the other. The main problem of the familiar arguments about the naturalistic fallacy is their failure to question the violence of those abstractions. Ought>is While the arguments about the naturalistic fallacy draw our attention to the issue of whether ought might follow from is, what tends to worry social scientists most about values is the ought>is relationship, in particular the fear that evaluative judgements will distort understanding of what is the case. However, as Anderson’s excellent discussion of research on divorce shows, values can illuminate as well as obscure, prompting hitherto unnoticed facts to be revealed. Researchers who viewed divorce as a social problem tended to frame their research accordingly, and overlooked certain benefits that people going through the process experienced. Researchers whose values regarding divorce were more mixed and saw it as having possible benefits as well as costs asked questions which revealed these. Further, remembering that reasoning about values is susceptible to evidence, someone with a wholly negative view of divorce might have their views changed by reading such research. Far from being a contaminant threatening the

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Hans Jonas comments that the idea ‘that no “ought” can be derived from “being” . . . is only true for a concept of being that has been suitably neutralized beforehand (as “value-free”) – so that the nonderivability of an “ought” from it follows tautologically. To expand this trivial conclusion into a general axiom is equivalent to asserting that no other concept of being is possible’ (Jonas, 1984, p. 44). As we shall see, the relation of the ought to being is crucial.

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objectivity of social research, values may help achieve adequate understanding (Anderson, 2004). Common contradictions There is lastly an irony: arguing that the (fact of the) non-deducibility of value statements from factual statements means we ought not to make value statements in social research involves a performative contradiction – the naturalistic fallacy would be used as a premise of an argument which itself committed the fallacy! Further, if values had nothing to do with matters of fact, then that would imply that social scientific discourse which included value statements was merely heterogeneous – consisting of both factual and evaluative statements; it would not imply that the inclusion of the latter in some way subverted or contaminated the former. If we consider this contradiction, we can see that the more likely source of concern is not to do with is>ought and deductive logic (which, as we have seen, mistakes the normative force of needs and lack for the force of logical necessity) or to do with ought>is relationships, but with the belief that values are beyond the scope of reason and always liable to distort our understanding of the world. Dogmatically held values – that is, values treated as immune to argument and empirical evidence (usually regarding well-being) – are indeed a threat, but we can make a case for evaluations and discuss them. This is what we often do already. Those who invoke the is>ought problem against evaluative judgements in social research misunderstand the issue; the whole framework prevents us understanding values and valuation, both in everyday life and in social science. Most importantly they fail to consider what values are, and what they are about; they attach a priority to logical deduction that is impossible to respect without hobbling our ability to make sense of the world; they fail to note the fusing of evaluative judgements with descriptions and explanations in thick ethical concepts, and they fail to take account of the characteristics which make us evaluative beings. The standard argument about the relationship between is and ought statements is neither persuasive nor particularly relevant to social science.

Reasoning about valuations If values are within the scope of reason, how do we reason about them? Values are implied not only in thick ethical terms but in the way in


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which issues are framed, that is, how particular social phenomena of interest are contextualized. As Taylor argues, the frames are simultaneously descriptive and value-laden insofar as they imply a certain general view about human needs and nature and about what enables people to flourish or suffer (Taylor, 1967; Bhaskar, 1998; see also Nussbaum, 1993). Though particular terms, phrases or sentences may be largely value-free when taken in isolation (e.g., ‘Catholics tend to vote Democrat’), the frames implied by the larger discourses of which they are part create what he calls a ‘value-slope’, which tends to ‘secrete’ certain values and encourage the reader or listener to evaluate the phenomena being described in a certain way. They do not logically entail a particular conclusion, but rather suggest one through what they imply about human well-being. Thus an account of capitalism which centres on consumers choosing what to buy is likely to create a positive response in that it highlights individual liberty and autonomy, while one which centres on unemployment is likely to secrete more critical responses because it suggests failure to satisfy people’s need for security. Listeners are of course free to disagree with the secreted values, though if they do they might be expected to justify their response. Two options are then open to them. They can respond by attempting to undermine the account, for example denying that capitalism tends to produce job insecurity or that unemployment causes any harm. Alternatively they can adopt an overriding strategy that concedes that the secreted values have some warrant, but argues that other concerns override them; for example, they might argue that, while economic insecurity is a problem, it is a lesser evil than possible alternatives, such as guaranteed employment, which might inhibit economic development and freedom to change job. To some extent, this is what already happens, at least in the more open kinds of debate. Where we have rival framings we might evaluate their relative merits by assessing their explanatory power. Thus, a wholly individualistic view of society, as often assumed in right wing accounts, which secretes ideas that individuals are wholly to blame or to be credited for their fortunes, runs into difficulties in explaining why particular kinds of behaviour correlate strongly with social conditions which are not of individuals’ choosing. On the other hand, a wholly sociologically determinist theory which allows no space for individual responsibility implies theory–practice contradictions in that we cannot function in social life without attributing, and accepting, such personal

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responsibility. An approach which integrates social influences and scope for reflexivity and responsibility can explain things which neither of these one-sided theories can. We should therefore, other things being equal, prefer the values it secretes to those implied by the two reductionist theories. This is not to say that it is always possible to decide which available way of framing issues is superior in terms of its explanatory adequacy, but insofar as we can, the values that it secretes should be preferred as they make more sense in terms of human needs and wellbeing. Taylor’s account shows how we can reason about matters of values, but again, the values themselves imply claims about matters of fact, for example what causes and constitutes suffering. The frames we favour simultaneously imply what seems to us to be the best available understanding of human needs, capacities and actions and a system of related values.35

Conclusion I have been attempting to counter deeply entrenched modernist assumptions that values are merely subjective and beyond the scope of reason; people manifestly do reason about their values. These assumptions are also common in social science, deterring researchers from evaluating their objects of study. My strategy has been to deconstruct the modernist fact–value family of dualisms that underpins the assumptions, albeit in a way which does not merely leave us with relativism by subjectivizing everything. In Science as a Vocation, Weber wrote: ‘Consider the historical and cultural sciences. They teach us how to understand and interpret political, artistic, literary, and social phenomena in terms of their origins. But they give us no answer to the question, whether the existence of these cultural phenomena have been and are worth while’ (Weber, 1946). On the contrary, they already do to a limited extent, and so does contemporary sociology and other social sciences, though their potential for evaluating social life has been held back precisely by the modernist misconceptions about value which Weber and others propagated. 35

As I warned in Chapter 1, it’s important to avoid a sceptical perfectionist approach here, which rejects ‘good enough’ forms of reasoning that usually protect us from harm, because they are not infallible.


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To be sure, Weber, like Hume before him, was worried that the incorporation of evaluation into social science would not only threaten objectivity, but lead to a kind of dogmatism which would foreclose debate on normative matters by claiming a scientific warrant for some conceptions of the good over others. What seems right in the no–ought– from–is argument is its acknowledgement of the openness of action – the fact that we can choose how to act. But then ought presupposes not only can, but can-do-otherwise. However, what I have been arguing is not that social scientists should prescribe and tell others what to do, but that they should evaluate, which involves careful analysis and attentiveness to the object, an orientation to what is, albeit one which includes needs, lack and becoming, suffering and flourishing, and hence also an orientation to future possible states. Indeed this evaluation is necessary for adequate description and explanation. There are important differences between evaluations and imperatives. Firstly, evaluations are open to criticism and revision, in much the same way as more straightforwardly positive claims, though they’re more difficult to assess than the latter precisely because they are implicitly or explicitly about possibilities – that suffering would be reduced if such and such were the case, and that within limits people can become different and develop novel practices. The world is open. Hence, evaluative reasoning need not close down alternatives as Weber and Hume feared. Secondly, evaluations should not be taken as imperatives because, even if we successfully identify a particular source of suffering and its causes, it only makes sense to argue for its removal if we are confident that this would not do more harm than good, and that there are alternative forms of social organization or practice which are both feasible and less harmful. The common tendency for practices and forms of social organization to have interdependent goods and bads, creating intractable dilemmas, should make us cautious here (Sayer, 2000b). That there are good grounds for caution in moving from evaluation to prescription is evident in the history of development studies, which is littered with cases of interventions which have done more harm than good. Thirdly, such interventions also pose a warning in terms of the need for inclusive democratic deliberation in deciding on prescriptions, both as a matter of principle and of prudence. I shall say more in Chapter 7 about the obstacles and dangers of moving from thick ethical concepts in evaluative description and explanation to proposals regarding what to do.

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So far, I have focused mainly on the value-side of the fact–value family of dualisms, but the misconceptions about value are just half of the picture. As we shall see in the next chapter, they are complemented and reinforced by misconceptions about reason. I hope to show that understanding how reason has been attenuated in modernity can help deepen understanding of the de-rationalization of values.

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Nor is intelligence about universals only. It must also come to know particulars, since it is concerned with action and action is about particulars. Hence . . . some people who lack knowledge but have experience are better in action than others who have knowledge. (Aristotle, 1980, The Nicomachean Ethics, 1,141b, 15ff.)

Introduction Many of us are all too familiar with the rise of audits and the imposition of standardized procedures on activities which seem to defy standardization. Supposedly, these provide rational systems for organizing and assessing the performance of individuals and institutions. In universities, research and teaching, as well as a host of other activities, are increasingly audited, rated and ranked. Teaching comes to be modelled as a rational process of setting ‘learning objectives’, deciding how these are to be ‘delivered’, designing assessment procedures that test how far students have achieved the specified ‘learning outcomes’, as if courses consisted of separable bits of knowledge or skill that could simply be ‘uploaded’ by students. The whole technology is intended to allow the process to be analysed and evaluated. Teaching is therefore treated much as a production engineer might treat an industrial process – as capable of being broken down into rationally ordered, standardized, measurable units, so that wastage and inefficiency can be identified and eliminated, and quality improved. A general, abstract technology is thus applied to every course, from aesthetics to zoology. Just what the learning objectives are apparently does not matter, as long as a rational, means–ends analysis is used to make sure that they are met. Instead of seemingly inscrutable processes controlled by unaccountable producers, we have supposedly rigorous methods for opening the business of education to public view and comparison. Equivalent developments can be found in other professions, such as social work, policing and 59

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health services. The use of such general frameworks and procedures may be driven by a managerial zeal that imagines that it can clearsightedly root out and improve the apparently inefficient and ad hoc ways of working of the practitioners themselves. But it can also be driven by a well-meaning pursuit of accountability and procedural fairness, so that different individuals and institutions are treated in the same, standardized way, instead of arbitrarily. Thus, equal opportunities policies for recruitment may require interviewers to ask job applicants for a particular vacancy exactly the same questions, regardless of their different identities and experience. Those who have to ‘implement’ these technologies – the ‘audit subjects’ – often have serious doubts about them and argue that they obstruct rather than assist their effectiveness. Typically, activities become oriented to ‘ticking boxes’ and meeting external targets instead of pursuing the goals and internal standards of the practice itself. Teachers begin to worry more about meeting the audit targets than about the complex, messy and elusive matter of how their students’ understanding is developing. Faced with these intrusive technologies, however, sceptical practitioners may find it hard to articulate just what is being suppressed by them. Just how does a good teacher teach, or a student learn? How do tutors mark essays? Many of the practical skills and knowledge seem intuitive and resistant to formalization and standardization. Those who resist audits and the like are therefore liable to be regarded merely as conservative defenders of unexamined habit, tradition and privilege. The rise of audits is merely a recent development in a long history of what Weber termed ‘rationalization’. This takes many forms and is evident in the rise of science, theory and technology, monetization and other kinds of quantification, and bureaucratization. As he demonstrated, these bring not only advantages, usually in the form of economies that make life easier, and improvements in consistency and fairness, but also problems, in that they remove scope for autonomy and discretion, and tend to lead to a prioritization of means over ends, and a subordination of people to the logic of instrumental rationality (Weber, 1978).1 However, while Weber’s diagnosis is useful, it counterposes rationalization, in which reason is dominant, to values and 1

See also the critiques of the dominance of instrumental rationality in Bauman (1989), Habermas (1971) and Horkheimer and Adorno (1972).


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value-judgements which are apparently beyond reason. In the last chapter we saw that values can indeed appear to be beyond reason if they are divorced from what they are about, but can seem more reasonable if they are expressed in a sufficiently concrete form to reveal what they are valuations of. Much, of course, depends on what we mean by ‘reason’, and so far I have left this unspecified. In this chapter, I shall attempt to remedy this. Like values, reason can be misunderstood, and become dysfunctional, if it is divorced from its object – the things reasoned about. This is what has happened in modernity, so that reason tends to be reduced to ‘rationality’, narrowly conceived as formal, abstract and instrumental, so that its distinctiveness lies purely in its own internal logic and consistency.2 Important though the critiques of Weber and others of rationalization are for understanding the modern world, I shall argue for a different account of the changing character of reason in modernity. Given that the focus of the book – our relation to the world of concern – is a very practical matter of how we engage with the world, what we do and how we interact with others, the main focus of my argument here is ‘practical reason’, that is reasoning about what we should do. Social theorists have mostly focused on one particular form of practical reason – instrumental, or means–end, rationality – in which, given a particular end or goal, we reason how to achieve it in the most effective and efficient way. But there are other forms of practical reason that are still important in modernity, and it is these that are my prime concern. They are concerned with ends rather than means, and particulars rather than universals. They are concrete and embedded rather than abstract and disembedded, they embrace ethical judgement, and they often take a tacit rather than discursive form, involving know-how rather than propositional knowledge. It also includes what is sometimes termed ‘practical wisdom’. I certainly do not wish to invert the problem of rationalization by rejecting formal and instrumental rationality, but rather to acknowledge and defend the different but often complementary role of these other kinds of practical reason.3 Values, on this 2

3

Nicholas Smith argues that this narrow, formal view of rationality, which can only negate difference and uniqueness, is central to ‘enlightenment fundamentalism’ (Smith, 1997). Instrumental rationality is indispensable, even though it is not sufficient. Whether it is problematic depends on the goals to which it is directed, and on whether it results in people being treated as means rather than as ends.

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account, lie within the scope of reason thus defined, albeit a reason whose prime characteristic is not logic and consistency but attentiveness to the object (Collier, 2003).4 In saying this, I do not mean that it gives us direct, unmediated access to the world, as in empiricism, for it is always mediated by our mental schemata and available concepts and discourses. But to mediate is not to determine; that A mediates B does not mean that B is A’s product.5 And while particular discourses can limit our understanding in some ways, they are not a barrier between us and the world, but rather a fallible but invaluable resource for understanding and coping with it. Where the objects are tangible, reason is often usefully accompanied and checked out through practical interventions, testing the objects’ properties, and seeing what happens. In the case of social practice and discourse, the checking includes dialogue, to assess whether we have understood what others are thinking and doing. Such tests are themselves conceptually mediated and fallible, but that doesn’t mean they are always wrong and hence useless. Society would be impossible if they were. Although the other kinds of practical reason are common enough, they tend to be undervalued both in everyday life in modernity, and in academic theory. Forms of practical reason that go beyond instrumental reason are evident in the largely tacit, embodied skills of the experienced parent, cook, teacher, nurse, doctor, gardener, driver, social worker, builder, photographer, manager or tennis player. Without the faculty of practical reason, activities like these can only be conducted poorly. It is inevitably hard to describe and explain things which are partly nondiscursive, but given the importance of these forms of practical knowledge or know-how in life, it makes no sense to dismiss or derogate them. We need to do justice to this practical reason, precisely so that we can value it appropriately. Although philosophy has traditionally been the discipline which most values reason, and has most to say about it, it is particularly prone to the scholastic fallacy – the fallacy of projecting its own discursive, contemplative and abstract form of relation onto the world, including its own logical and analytical model of reason, though as our opening quotation from Aristotle shows, not all philosophers 4

5

Here I am indebted to Collier’s re-evaluation of John MacMurray’s account of reason. Note also that there are many ways of differentiating between kinds of reason. For an example of an argument for a finer set of distinctions, see Dunne (1993). Recall the example of the weapons inspectors (p. 46).


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have succumbed to this illusion.6 Consequently, practical reason in everyday life is often either treated as inferior to discursive reason and dismissed, or treated as if it had an underlying logical, discursive structure. Though philosophers and social scientists do not generally intend it, this also functions sociologically as a form of social distinction – elevating the status of those whose work involves discursive reason and reflection over those involved in practical action. The time needed for reflection and putting things into words requires ‘distance from necessity’, as Bourdieu puts it, that is, distance from everyday material, social pressures, and hence an elevated social position of purely mental labour – the sheer luxury of unrestrained reflection; hence its bourgeois associations (Bourdieu, 2000). As a first step, I’ll sketch the territory ahead by comparing the revealingly different ways in which people tend to use the adjectives ‘rational’ and ‘reasonable’ in everyday life. Secondly, I shall analyse some of the distinctive features of rationality as it has developed in modernity, including not only its formal and instrumental character, but its abstraction from concrete situations. Thirdly, I shall examine a number of different takes on practical reason or ‘phronesis’, each of which has a different emphasis. These are: (i) its concern with concrete objects or particulars – particular people or things rather than abstract universals; (ii) its practical, embodied and tacit character; (iii) its focus on ends rather than means; and (iv) its ethical dimension and its relation to individuals’ characters. Fourthly, I shall highlight some of the ways in which this analysis differs from those of Weber and Habermas – two theorists who are also critical of the overextension of formal, technical, instrumental rationality in modernity, but who, I believe, are themselves trapped by the abstraction of reason from its objects and subjects.

The ‘rational’ and the ‘reasonable’ in everyday talk Although the terms ‘rational’ and ‘reasonable’ are sometimes used as synonyms, they are also often used in different ways. A person is usually said to be rational if they can efficiently and successfully pursue some goal, such as assembling flat-pack furniture, solving a mathematical 6

Aristotle did, however, value sophia or theory even more highly, and notoriously did not escape the influence of his social position and some of the arrogant social attitudes that went with it.

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problem, or finding the cheapest way to get to their destination. They are described as rational or irrational on account of the way in which they pursue their ends, whatever their ends happen to be. There are more or less rational ways of aiming a bomb or building a house; what makes them more or less rational is not the ends, but the choice of means. In addition to this instrumental aspect, we tend to associate rationality with logical qualities: someone is rational if they can work out what is entailed by any given propositions, and what is not. These two characteristics are similar: just as instrumental rationality does not assess the ends towards which it is directed, logical deduction from given premises does not require that those premises are correct or ethical. Both are indifferent to the worth of premises or goals. By contrast, when we describe people as reasonable or unreasonable, we often mean in terms of their evaluation of ends, that is, how they respond to specific situations and how they value and balance different activities, priorities or goals.7 In the latter case, we need to know what the activities and goals are in order to assess whether they came to a reasonable judgement in valuing and balancing them. The emphasis is less on following formal procedures than responding to the particularities of the situation. There is also an interesting parallel here with the difference between rationality and wisdom, in which the former is associated with amoral cleverness, for example in solving given problems, and the latter with a more moral and second order or ‘strong’ evaluation, in which we assess the goals or ends themselves, and the nature and significance of the problems posed (Archer, 2000a, 2000b; Taylor, 1985). Note also that, while rational actions have some kind of logical procedure, we don’t necessarily follow any particular procedure in acting reasonably or wisely. An experienced person may act wisely almost spontaneously, or, if they reflect on what to do, they may compare different aspects of the situation, the different kinds of standards and pros and cons, but without following any formal procedure. For example, in wisely assessing how to balance the competing demands of being a parent and a worker, a person has to think about different, indeed incommensurable, things: the quality of their children’s life, their relation to their family and the need to earn an income and meet the demands of their job, and so on, but there is hardly a 7

This is similar to the view of Sibley, cited in Rawls (2001, p. 7n): purely rational agents lack moral sensibility.


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procedure for doing so. Sometimes, of course, there may be no satisfactory solution: we may be faced with genuine dilemmas. Secondly, we use ‘reasonable’ more often in describing people’s actions and character with reference to other people, and ‘rational’ more often in describing their actions with respect to things. A reasonable person is someone who takes account of the specificities of the people they interact with, their particular capacities, needs and vulnerabilities, as well as other specificities of the situation. For example, a manager who expects a new recruit to a job immediately to be able to do it as well as workers who have done it for years might be described as an ‘unreasonable’ person, precisely because they have not been attentive to the specificities of the situation, particularly the specific attributes of others. The manager might nevertheless be quite rational in terms of being able to work out the organization’s accounts. When we talk about having ‘reasonable expectations’ of people, we mean expectations that take into account their particular characteristics, constraints and resources, including their vulnerability and fallibility, and ‘reasonable behaviour’ also suggests some degree of emotional sensitivity to others. Further, to be a reasonable person is to be able to imagine things from other people’s standpoints – in other words, to be willing to take the standpoint of the other. Indeed, emotional reason, which, as we noted earlier, can provide a highly discerning commentary on situations, is crucial in reasonableness; the reasonable person is ‘emotionally intelligent’. In addition, and more simply, an unreasonable person is someone who cannot be reasoned with, though they might be quite capable of instrumentally rational action. This indicates a relationship not only between reason and objects but reason and the social in terms of awareness and consideration of others and willingness to listen to them.8 Hence to call someone ‘a reasonable person’ in such contexts suggests an ethical judgement of them. A third sense of ‘reasonable’ implies moderation – for example, avoiding overreacting to events. It is noteworthy that this was central to Aristotle’s analysis of practical reason and virtue: a virtuous person’s 8

This social dimension also captures the dependence of reason on discourse, on intersubjectivity and the need of others’ approval. For Kathryn Dean, there’s a double estrangement in modernity – of rationality from emotion, and rationality from sociability, the latter being a product of deepening of divisions of labour (Dean, 2003). They also involve, I would argue, a refusal of practical, naturalistic bases for logic and reason. See also Archer (2000a, pp. 145–52).

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reactions to others’ actions are proportionate to those actions. And, as Aristotle famously noted, we cannot expect much precision about such matters, and hence cannot expect simply to use contextindependent formulae. It takes experience, learning from where one has overreacted or underreacted, to get a feel for how to respond in different situations. Thus, whereas rationality implies precision and logical, rulefollowing action, reasonableness is inevitably imprecise, resistant to formalization and responsive to context and human capacities and frailties. In a university examination board, most of the candidates are awarded degree classes purely according to a formally rational procedure, which governs how candidates’ marks for various courses are to be aggregated. But sometimes, where such boards encounter a candidate whose circumstances are unusual in ways which are not anticipated in the formal rules, the members of the board agree that it would be ‘unreasonable’ to give the candidate the degree class that the formal procedure indicates. They then set aside those formally rational procedures and come to a decision by paying close attention to relevant features of that candidate’s specific situation – the particular medical or personal circumstances that impaired their performance, and so on. As such examples indicate, to recognize the differences between reasonableness or practical reason on the one hand, and rationality in its dominant instrumental, formal meaning on the other, is not to say they cannot be combined.9 This comparison of the rational and the reasonable gives us an initial feel for the difference; even though we sometimes use the terms interchangeably (as I shall sometimes do), some significant differences in concepts remain. In modernity, reasonableness or practical reason have tended to become undervalued, indeed to be seen as beyond or antithetical to rationality, lying in the realm of intuition, tradition and value. But before we look into these, it’s first useful to look more closely at rationality in the narrow formal, technical and instrumental sense, in terms of both its character and its social influences.

9

Consider also the meanings of the term ‘sensible’. On the one hand it denotes good reasoning; a sensible person is one who reasons well. On the other hand, there is an older meaning: that which can be felt or perceived or sensed. Although the former might embrace reasonableness, the second meaning more clearly implies a relation to the object or referent.


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The reduction of reason to rationality In the last chapter we saw how the rise of the treatment of values as merely subjective or conventional resonated with the rise of liberal capitalism, in which individuals came to be seen as autonomous and free to choose without having to justify their choices in markets. Similarly, the attenuation of reason, and its abstraction from what it is about, also reflect the rise of modernity, particularly the triumph of science, technology and theory, for their success encourages the belief that there are no limits to the expansion of this kind of technical rationality, and that it can displace other forms of more concrete practical reason. Science, theory and technological knowledge abstract from particular contexts and their contingencies so as to provide general or universal knowledge and technical control. When we abstract, we isolate particular aspects of some object or situation, usually ones which are detachable in the sense of capable of existing in much the same form in different contexts, and hence generalizable or universal. We do this in everyday thought when we isolate particular aspects or qualities of more complex objects, for example when we call someone a consumer or taxpayer, or identify ‘reliability’ as a desirable trait. Abstraction can also be a physical process, as in the isolation of chemicals from an aggregate, or the separation of some specialized activity from the welter of activities that people might otherwise engage in: thus, the division of labour involves a kind of material abstraction of particular kinds of task from others. In markets, when buyers and sellers meet, each tends to abstract from matters such as the welfare of those who made the goods, or the personal lives of traders, in order to focus on the business in hand. These latter examples show that abstractions are not necessarily arcane or obscure; ordinary language and practice are full of abstractions (Sayer, 1992). When abstraction is limited to this process of isolating particular qualities, it does not divorce itself wholly from the object, merely from those aspects thought to be of lesser importance to the concerns of the observer (O’Neill, 1993).10 However, abstractions increasingly form

10

The logical relations among statements that are the focus of formal rationality can reflect ideas about necessity and contingency in the world. When we realize that object A necessarily has property B as essential to its being that kind of object then we may decide to make having B part of our definition of A. It then follows

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the conceptual and material building blocks of theories, sciences and technologies. Theories of things – such as viruses, capitalism or bureaucracy – attempt to identify the properties which are essential to them being those kinds of things – their structure, powers and susceptibilities, together with their necessary conditions of existence. Insofar as their objects do have some unity and generality, the theories may more or less adequately provide a way of systematizing their unity – the particular mechanisms and meanings which link their parts and explain their behaviour. A similar methodology can be used not only for understanding and explaining natural systems, but for constructing new systems, as in engineering and management.11 When this happens it is easy for our focus to shift from the logic of things to the things of logic, and turn away from the object that we are reasoning about. General technologies, models or procedures may save us having to think things through in each novel situation, but the focus can then easily switch from those contexts of application to the internal logic of the model itself. Money embodies this abstraction from concrete circumstances par excellence. It becomes central to accounting systems, in which we see perfectly the switch from handling the logic of things, to handling the things of logic; when members of organizations complain about ‘the accounting syndrome’ becoming dominant, they are alluding to this switch. We see it also in the tendency of economists to learn more and more about their abstract, ideal models, often at the expense of understanding actual economies.12

11

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logically that if A, then B. Thus, in such cases, what appears to be a logical relation is based on a synthetic judgement of what is the case; logical necessity may be based on decisions about natural necessity in the world. To be sure, formal rationality could start from purely hypothetical premises, as in algebra, and have nothing to do with objects, but it can also start from premises we believe to be adequate claims about the world, and hence our alternative conception of reason as being primarily attentiveness to the object need not exclude formal rationality. I am deliberately cutting corners here in this sketch of abstraction and explanation, so as to get to the main point. For a fuller discussion, see Sayer (1992). Of course, they usually reply that abstraction is necessary for any kind of serious thinking, which it is, but here abstraction has not started from the concrete and from the discipline of identifying its structure and conditions of existence, but primarily from the demands of logic in the form of devising analytically soluble equations (Fleetwood, 2002). Worse, these abstractions do not merely remain ideas in the heads of theorists but, as in capitalist organizations, become performed and objectified in practice (Callon, 1998; Miller and Carrier, 1998).


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Formal rationality involves this second, more extreme type of abstraction, in which form or procedure rather than content are primary. This kind of reason is characterized by logic and consistency – by certain kinds of logical relations among concepts or statements (Walsh, 1996, 2003). To be rational is then to be skilled in applying an abstract and formal kind of reasoning, or merely to be consistent; though powerful, its insensitivity to context and difference can be dangerous.13 The modernist conception of reason as reducible to formal or instrumental rationality might seem very different from the emotivist and conventionalist concepts of values that we criticized in Chapter 2, but they have something in common, namely a disengagement of reason or valuation from the realm of substantive objects. Neither reason nor valuation is defined in terms of what it is about. As Taylor notes, this is a central feature of modernist conceptions of reason and ethics. In the Kantian account, reason frees us from external pressures, tradition and authority, and indeed from nature, including apparently a-rational emotions and desires: ‘Rational direction is therefore seen as synonymous with freedom understood as self-direction, direction according to orders constructed by the subject, as against those which

13

Theodor Adorno, the critical theorist, used the term ‘identity thinking’ to characterize this tendency of formal abstractions to stand in for their objects, flattening difference (Adorno, 1973). Unlike the critical theorists, I argue that it is formal rationality, more than instrumental rationality, that is responsible for this problem. Instrumental rationality need not necessarily be formal, and while it is concerned with means rather than the ends in themselves, it requires a close focus on the objects which it uses as means, and on the end which it is trying to meet – not a turning away from the object. If it does not supplant other forms of reasoning, particularly those concerned with evaluating ends, which we discuss shortly, instrumental reason need not be problematic; in fact it is of course invaluable for achieving practical goals. However, where instrumental reason is also formal, as in the case of general technologies, it becomes more dangerous and morally indiscriminate, for to the prioritization of means over ends is added the detachment of rationality from its objects. The situation is all the worse where, as in mainstream economic theory, it is generally assumed that the rational economic actor is one who uses formal, instrumental rationality purely to pursue her self-interest (O’Neill, 1998; Walsh, 2003). The critique of identity thinking also attacks its abstraction from relationality, but this is a problem of bad abstraction rather than abstraction per se. Formal rationality suits categories which are fixed and only externally related, not phenomena which are internally related and subject to qualitative change, such as capital and labour. But one can develop abstractions that deal with this, as Marx did in Capital, albeit via dialectical reason rather than formal rationality.

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the subject is supposed to find in nature’ (Taylor, 1994b, p. 26; see also Calder, 2005). This way of thinking mistakenly views nature as wholly deterministic, and therefore has to associate reason with escape from nature. It also implies a dichotomous view of autonomy and heteronomy, that obscures their dialectical relation of interdependence and tension. Any kind of reason can be empowering, insofar as it enables us to understand what was previously opaque or taken for granted, and sometimes thereby to become more effective in our practical, including social, interventions in the world, and less under the sway of processes beyond our control. Reason can therefore seem to free us. As Peter Singer puts it, ‘the ability to reason is a peculiar ability . . . it can take us to conclusions that we had no desire to reach. For reason is like an escalator, leading upwards and out of sight’ (Singer, cited in Nichols, 2004, p. 68). Whether it takes us away from the nature of things or more deeply into them depends on the adequacy of the premises and concepts adopted and how they’re used. We now examine some other kinds of practical reason that are more concrete and engaged with their objects, starting with some examples from health care.

Reasoning and practice: phronesis14 As Patricia Benner notes, the practice of nursing and caring is one that is increasingly subject to attempts at rationalization of the kind we have noted: Modern commodified health care highly values what can be made into scientific and technical procedures and assumes that what has not yielded to means–ends analysis, objectification and procedural accounts is underdeveloped and only awaits scientific and technical formalisation. And until this scientific, procedural articulation occurs, all other aspects of our knowledge are considered private, inarticulate and of lesser epistemic warrant. (Benner, 1994, p. 138)

In examining how trainees become competent clinical nurses, Benner encountered processes which radically challenge this view of rational 14

I shall use these terms interchangeably, along with ‘practical judgement’. I shall also sometimes refer to ‘practical sense’ to note its more embodied forms. For an exhaustive analysis of the meanings of phronesis, see Dunne (1993).


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conduct.15 To start with they are taught certain basic rules and procedures – for example, how to assess the condition of a patient – and they try to memorize them. At first their efforts to apply these are stumbling, because they have to make the difficult transition from discourse to practical application and intervention, from knowing that to knowing how. Fast, competent action requires the actor to develop appropriate embodied dispositions, forms of sensitivity, awareness and response, so that, for example, the nurse does not have to stop and think which action comes next when assessing a patient. Appropriate actions need to flow seamlessly from the preceding ones and the circumstances they produced and encountered. To advance, the beginner must get beyond conscious rule following, as this stops them progressing to more demanding tasks. The trainee gradually acquires habits of thought and action, though this process requires continual monitoring and adjustment to ensure that good, appropriate habits are learned. However, while universal rules and procedures may help trainees get started, this is not enough for them to become competent nurses; the skills of expert actors go well beyond this, requiring extensive experience of different situations and their particulars, which allows them to develop an efficient and effective practical feel for the game. This knowledge or phronesis (practical reason, judgement or wisdom), Flyvbjerg argues, cannot be reduced to episteme (analytical knowledge) or techne (instrumental rationality) (Flyvbjerg, 2001). On the contrary, the rules and procedures tend to be clumsy and simplistic – not surprisingly given that they are based on abstractions from practices that vary continuously; each day’s work is different because there are different people and things to be dealt with. Moreover, they are attempts to represent in words practices which go far beyond what can be said. This knowledge of particulars is not simply something that is added on to the general rules and procedures; rather it tends to displace them to a significant extent, rendering them redundant – so much so, that the experienced nurse may not even be able to recall what the rules and procedures are. Instead of going through the whole prescribed procedure with each patient in turn when she goes onto the ward, she first scans them all for signs, and orders her actions accordingly. If anything seems 15

Here I draw on Bent Flyvbjerg’s discussion of Benner’s empirical research (Flyvbjerg, 2001). I am simplifying considerably here: the research is based on a model of five different phases in the progression from novice to expert.

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seriously untoward, she is able to identify it quickly. These signs are not merely ones which the formal training flag up for attention. They may be subtle combinations of symptoms and behaviours which the nurse has experienced before, or alternatively which seem strange precisely because she has not encountered them before. She may not be able to articulate just what these are very easily and often they may be registered at the level of unease about someone’s condition. Often, these intuitions develop on the basis of familiarity built up over a period of time with the particular patient, such that she notices that today they are looking different from before. This need to replace knowledge of formalized, discursive procedures and rules with a practical competence throws serious doubt on the wisdom of attempting to regulate existing experienced workers by imposing on them formal, standardized procedures. The process of becoming a skilled actor such as a nurse involves more than the acquisition of technical expertise. Initially, the relation of the novice to the practice of nursing is one not just of ignorance but lack of attachment to and involvement in the practice, because, inevitably, everything is strange. Gradually, the trainees’ relationship to the practice of nursing changes from an external, uncommitted one, to an inside relationship of personal involvement and responsibility. Beginners have to start with rules and norms, and their successes and failures are attributed to how they followed those rules and norms, and they are not given much responsibility. However, they are only deemed to be competent, fully trained, experienced nurses not merely when they have acquired the technical know-how to do their job, but when they have become individuals who are committed and responsible; their concern to take responsibility should have become part of their character or habitus and hence one of their virtues. Commitment in terms of willingness to take personal responsibility may not guarantee competence but it is a necessary element of it and is part of what we expect of a nurse; someone who was considered to lack it would be likely to be prevented from practising. This commitment has an emotional dimension, in that it is something that the nurse cares about, so that she is concerned about the condition of her patients, worried and upset by failure (and not only because of its impact on her reputation), and fulfilled by success. It’s clearly a form of emotional reason, because it is intelligently and knowledgeably attentive to the needs of the patients


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and aware of her responsibilities.16 Of course, as with all forms of practice, there is variation; nurses may achieve this competence and commitment to varying degrees, and sometimes insufficiently. In order to cope with life’s many demands, they also need to attempt to balance their commitment to the practice with other commitments they have. Where the activity is emotionally demanding, as it can be in nursing, they may also try to limit their individual emotional involvement, but this need not mean that they become callous, though some may do. As we shall see, such dilemmas and judgements are typical of practical reason, as is their fuzziness and vagueness. Where the practice is one involving a significant amount of social interaction, like nursing, caring and teaching, the quality of that interaction and the extent of mutual understanding within it become central to practical reason or wisdom. To varying extents, this depends on both parties: not only the nurse, but the patient; not only the teacher, but the student. If the practitioner tries to make the relationship monological and unilateral rather than dialogical and bilateral, it may render the practice ineffective on both sides; the nurse may miss important information that the patient has, and the patient may fail to assist in their own recovery. Benner notes how long-term patients can be helped where nurses take time to get to know them enough to discover what matters to them, since being able to engage with this sensitively may help their morale and will to recover (Benner, 1994). Similarly, teachers may find that their students learn more effectively if they take the trouble to establish a relationship with them as individuals, with particular biographies, characters and identities. This is not only a matter of being friendly and respecting them as ends in themselves, but of getting a feel for how best to help them learn. This extended example should give some idea of the kinds of reason, intelligence, skill, dispositions and wisdom that are commonly involved in familiar practices. They have an instrumental aspect to them, albeit not of the formal kind usually characterized as instrumental rationality, but they also involve the assessment of ends, and the consideration of people as ends in themselves. Similar observations can be made of a vast range of practices, from 16

Commitments are not merely preferences or desires but can have cognitive content, and hence be responsive to the characteristics of their object and to justifications and reasons about them (Lieberman, 2007).

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architecture to cookery, counselling, lawyering, musicianship, negotiating, parenting, social work or teaching. None of these complex, intelligent and valuable ways of thinking and acting can be reduced to rationality in the narrow form that has come to be so highly valued in modernity. My use of the terms ‘practical reason’, ‘practical wisdom’ and ‘phronesis’ has been catholic, embracing several different elements, which tend to be differently weighted in different accounts. I now identify four different but overlapping senses, all of which are important for understanding human action and value. (i) Practical reason as embodied and intuitive Agents may engage in reasonable forms of behaviour without being rational; they may engage in behaviors one can explain, as the classical philosophers would say, with the hypothesis of rationality, without their behaviour having reason as its principle. (Bourdieu, 1994, p. 76)

We know so much more than we can tell; indeed we may struggle to begin to explain how we do some of our most complex and skilled achievements. I do not mean only special skills like those of an expert violinist or tennis player, but the ordinary but remarkably complex skills involved in interacting with others and ‘reading’ social situations. These depend on a largely tacit set of practical skills, learned as we grow up, which allow us not merely to understand language but to sense others’ moods, intentions, and to know when to speak and when to listen. For some of these activities, verbal descriptions and explanations are quite unnecessary for doing them. Many people know hundreds of songs and can sing them without being able to read a note of music. Epistemology – the theory of knowledge – typically ignores practical knowledge or sees it as a product of discursive representation. To understand skilled, intelligent or reasonable human action we need to acknowledge the extent to which it need not involve conscious deliberation or consideration of reasons, arguments or facts. A major feature of Bourdieu’s contribution to social science is his recovery of this ‘practical sense’, and his far-reaching critique of the scholastic fallacy, which turns practical sense into discursive reason. He uses the example of the competent tennis player’s ‘feel for the game’ as a model of practical logic or reason (Bourdieu, 1994, 2000). Such a player has acquired the practical


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ability to move around the court and adjust her body and actions to return the ball without having to think how to do this, at least not in the way one might think, say, of how to undertake a long journey, calculating journey times, connections, and so on. In many situations, analytical reasoning, information gathering and deliberation are far too slow. The acquisition of the skill involves repeated practice – though note, not merely repetition, but repetition with concentrated monitoring, evaluation and effort; it is not entirely a process of osmosis through unmonitored repetition, as Bourdieu sometimes seems to imply (Sayer, 2005).17 Further, the ability of the player to respond to the ball, the court and the opponent is analogous to our concept of reason as attentiveness to the specificities of the object. It also fits with a conception of knowledge as being primarily – though not of course exclusively – a way of coping with the world, before it is a way of representing it.18 We would not call Roger Federer’s remarkable responsiveness to the ball a form of reason – and he almost certainly could not explain adequately how he does it – and indeed if he tried to convert his practical sense into a discursive representation it might introduce a distracting self-consciousness into his play. But we might think of such abilities as a kind of intelligence and wonder if our usual concept of intelligence is too constrained by another member of the fact–value family of dualisms – the mind–body dualism. Experts can often quickly take in the whole situation before them and respond appropriately without thinking; seemingly at one with their instruments, they don’t solve problems or make decisions, they just do what works (Flyvbjerg, 2001). For Bourdieu, practical reason derives primarily from the habitus, that is, from the set of dispositions that individuals acquire through repeated practice and experience, particularly in early life – their ‘formative years’ – according to their habitat or position in the social field 17

18

See also Noble and Watkins’s critique of Bourdieu’s model of the tennis player (Noble and Watkins, 2003). Although this is a different sense of practical reason from the Aristotelian one, it is compatible with Aristotle’s account of the development of virtues, at least in the sense of excellences. The metaphor of coping is associated with Rorty in his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, but unfortunately, having drawn attention to the practical character of knowledge as a way of coping with a wayward and often intractable world, he immediately drops it by focusing on discourse (Bhaskar, 1991; Rorty, 1979).

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(Bourdieu, 1994).19 An individual’s dispositions are adjusted to the particular experiences, environments and social relations that they are most exposed to. For example, a child whose parents belong to ‘the chattering classes’ becomes accustomed to listening to and joining discussions of current affairs, to adopting the standpoint of those who have some power over others and can expect to be listened to, and hence for whom it is worth discussing policy and politics. They thus become articulate and find the transition to school and university relatively smooth, and tend to develop a sense of entitlement and ease – a product of their secure economic position and status. By contrast, a child of a low income family is likely to acquire dispositions which are adjusted to having little power and status and to surviving in a difficult environment. They are likely to be more streetwise and tough than their middleclass counterparts, but to be less articulate and to have lower self-esteem and expectations.20 Those critics of Bourdieu’s account of practical reason who see it as too deterministic overlook the generative, creative power of embodied dispositions. They are intelligent dispositions, capable of responding creatively to a certain degree of variation. No two games of tennis, or two social situations, are the same. The expert musician or footballer or the socially skilled actor’s power derives from their practical sense and acquired dispositions, not from an ability to give a superior account of what they can do. Without this practical sense, we would be virtually helpless.21 It’s interesting that when we are in a social situation where we lack a practical feel for the game, and are awkward and inept, not knowing what to say or do, we ‘feel stupid’. As a partly non-discursive activity, undertaken in contexts which vary, the assessment of practical reason and action is a less precise business than the assessment of an argument or of a hypothesis about the behaviour of some object in a controlled experiment. What we seek 19

20

21

Bourdieu’s concept of habitus is supported by neurological and socialpsychological research on the development of the mind and its dispositions (Siegel, 1999). These are generalizations of course, and there is always considerable variation in habitus in relation to class or gender, but these variations can themselves partly be accounted for by other sources of variation in their dominant relations and environments (Sayer, 2005). ‘If only to make things more difficult for those who would like to see in the theory of habitus a form of determination, it will suffice to point out that the habitus offers the only durable form of freedom, that given by the mastery of an art, whatever the art’ (Bourdieu, 1999, p. 340).


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might, as Taylor suggests, be called ‘epistemic gain’, or a gain in ‘practical adequacy’, rather than a clear-cut discovery of the best account, so that our ability to do things, to understand and respond effectively to others, appear to improve as we gain experience; in practice we can manage quite well without perfection or transparency. Of course, sometimes our practice fails, but we can often realize this and change our behaviour accordingly, just as a tennis player can correct her tendency to overhit her serve. Nomy Arpaly provides some interesting reflections on the way in which people often act rationally without basing their actions on conscious, rational deliberation (Arpaly, 2003). One of her examples is from Mark Twain’s novel Huckleberry Finn. Huckleberry gets to know Jim, an escaped slave. As a product of his time – a time when slavery was not seen as unethical – Huckleberry sincerely believes that the morally proper thing to do is turn Jim over to the authorities. But while he intends to do this, when the opportunity arises, he finds he just cannot do it, and afterwards he feels bad about his moral failings in not turning him in. It seems that, in getting to know Jim, he had come to respect him, and to realize that he is a fully fledged human being, so that at a semiconscious level returning him to slavery didn’t seem right. Arpaly argues that this divergence between action and conscious reasons is not necessarily irrational (‘akrasia’ as philosophers term it), but a form of rational behaviour which the actor had not been able to articulate and justify at a discursive level. Many of our actions are not based upon decisions made through deliberation. We sometimes take even momentous actions without working through a list of pros and cons.22 Sometimes we go through an extended period of being troubled by something without being able to articulate quite why. Eventually we may ‘find ourselves acting’ in a way which we haven’t chosen consciously, such as volunteering to take on an onerous job. Such actions are not purely accidental and arbitrary; at a subconscious level they are likely to relate to previous experiences, musings and feelings, as a result of which we perhaps changed the balance of our commitments. We may later come to see these ‘decisions’ as rational, though not necessarily. Whether we come to view them as 22

As Arpaly notes, even where we do deliberate on something, such as where to go for our holidays, we don’t necessarily decide to deliberate on it on the basis of some prior deliberation; it may just ‘occur’ to us to do so.

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rational or as a terrible mistake depends less on whether we arrived at them by a process of deliberation than on the appropriateness of the actions. It depends less on the use of logic and inspection of evidence and arguments than on practical adequacy – on the actions’ relationship to the world.23 Arpaly also reminds us that sometimes things ‘just dawn on us’. Often we find the solution to some problem that has been bothering us not when we are thinking about it, but later when we are doing something quite different. Again, though this might seem an irrational process, in many cases it provides a rational answer to a problem. Moreover: Dawning processes are perhaps the main way in which people change their minds, especially concerning subjects they regard as important – the very subjects regarding which an attempt to argue with them and talk them out of the error of their ways is likely to encounter the sternest irrational resistance. Very few people who give up racist prejudices, for example, give them up in a process of deliberation. More often, the irrationality of their prejudice dawns on them after spending long enough with people of the relevant race and realizing, bit by bit, that they are very similar to themselves. (Arpaly, 2003, pp. 55–6)

Even if we do come to see that something we have believed is wrong through encountering a convincing argument and decide that now we should act differently, this in itself is unlikely to be sufficient to change our ways of thinking and acting completely. For example, even if the white racist comes to renounce her racism on the basis of argument, she may still find herself unintentionally making racist assumptions in everyday life – assuming that the new doctor will be white, that a black child cannot be academically gifted, and so on. Having become consciously and sincerely anti-racist she may feel ashamed about the persistence of these unreformed reflexes, but it can take many years of repeated experience and practice to re-shape these completely. The process involves not just acknowledging errors of thought and action,

23

I remind readers that, when I choose to say ‘we’ tend to do x, the ‘we’ is intended to be an inclusive one, that is, one that includes they/them. Thus these claims should be seen as of a piece with the claims social science makes about those it studies. If the claims don’t seem to apply to them or us, then we either have to argue that they are somehow different from us, or acknowledge that we have a theory–practice contradiction.


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but becoming a different person with different embodied habits of thought. The embodied character of practical reason, and its dependence on experience, thus give it a personal character, in contrast to the more impersonal and publicly accessible discursive reason. As Joseph Dunne puts it: In exposing oneself to the kind of experience and acquiring the kind of character that will yield the requisite knowledge, one is not the kind of epistemic subject that has been canonized by the modern tradition of philosophy. One is at the same time a feeling, and acting person, and one’s knowledge is inseparable from one as such. (Dunne, 1993, p. 358)

This form of practical knowledge is also more clearly related to the character of the knowing subject. When we describe someone as ‘wise’, ‘prudent’, ‘imaginative’, ‘thoughtful’ or ‘cunning’, we are describing them in relation to particular kinds of knowledge or know-how or skills or dispositions. Philosophy seeks transparent, logical reasoning, and in its normative role of recommending how we should reason it can easily lead us into the trap of assuming either that this is how we do it in everyday practice, or if not, that the more obscure processes by which we come to do things are irrational. Restricting concepts of reason or rationality to their discursive forms obstructs understanding of human thought and action – which, of course, is hardly a rational thing to do. Our practical sense needs first and foremost to be effective. (ii) Practical reason as knowledge of particulars Anyone who is about to have an operation would generally rather have it done by a surgeon who has lots of experience, and hence has dealt with many different cases, than by a novice equipped only with a knowledge of rules and instruction manuals. Similarly, when seeking advice on what to do in an unfamiliar situation, we are more likely to ask someone who has had plenty of experience of such situations, not someone who simply knows a set of general rules about them. Such examples indicate that at times we value a different kind of reason, one which knows not merely general laws, theories, rules or procedures, but particular, different cases. Practical reason requires experience of past cases, and attentiveness to the specificities of present cases and contexts. The relationship to

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particulars is of course not unmediated but depends on acquired concepts, schemata and dispositions. Nor is knowledge of particulars fragmented; on the contrary, it is relational and contextual. The particular symptom identified by the nurse is construed as relating to other conditions, and only makes sense in terms of a wider understanding. Practical judgement thus involves gestalts – a form of understanding or apprehending the world in which we seemingly instantaneously impose patterns on events, just as the lines drawn on a sheet of paper may be seen as a cube. At the same time, practical wisdom is not incompatible with rules of thumb. The counsellor meeting the new client uses some familiar methods to start the session and develop a relationship, such as asking open questions and signalling engagement and interest through appropriate body language, though invariably with adaptations according to what she observes and how the meeting proceeds. Practical reason is responsive to and able to cope with difference. No two patients or students are the same; the experienced nurse or teacher expects this and adjusts to their differences, largely intuitively. The variation is not limitless; students tend to have much in common, just as tennis games have common features. To some extent, it’s the ability to deal with the variation that distinguishes the better from the worse teacher, nurse, manager or tennis player. (iii) Practical reason as concerned with ends Whereas rationality in the modern technical and instrumental form focuses on developing means towards ends which are taken as given, practical reason includes assessment of ends themselves. People may deliberate on how to value and balance different incommensurable activities, like work, socializing, and providing care; governments have to decide on what goals to pursue, and how to balance their responsibilities. As different ends, with different qualities, their evaluation requires different criteria, and the qualities cannot be given a numerical value on a single scale (Anderson, 1993). They cannot be traded-off against each other precisely because they are ends in themselves, not means to other ends, though balancing them may require sacrifices. These judgements tend to be required within particular practices as well as in terms of our lives as a whole. Thus, a researcher is not expected to pursue the goal of studying some group without regard for their dignity. Undertaking research therefore involves making


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judgements among different, incommensurable ends. Researchers who imagined they could trade-off their subjects’ dignity against the pay-offs in terms of superior research findings would be failing to treat them as ends in themselves. As we shall see, practical reason therefore often takes an ethical form.24 To some extent people make judgements about ends by reference to assessments of well-being – whether of individuals, institutions or other things (the environment, for example) – recognizing that the conditions for well-being are plural and cannot be reduced to some kind of single, hedonic index, such as ‘utility’. When we feel that our well-being is restricted by a lack of balance among our different needs, wants and concerns, for example as is popularly though inadequately exemplified in concern with ‘work–life balance’, and reflect upon that, we are engaging in practical reason. This is not some kind of inscrutable, arational intuition, but a form of reflection which is reasonable in the sense of being responsive to the object in its diversity and specificity and to our own capacities and susceptibilities. It is context-sensitive, but also guided by rules of thumb – not precise formulae or algorithms – based on experience, whether personal or shared (O’Neill, 1998). The rules of thumb come from folk wisdom and personal experience – like ‘your kids need you to be there for them’ – and of course they are fallible and often vague, but they are not necessarily therefore unintelligent. They are not expected to be followed slavishly regardless of circumstances, but to be adjusted to the specific context – to particulars. It is tempting to dismiss such judgements as ‘subjective’, rather than rational or even reasonable. For example, in assessing the diverse qualities of job applicants, appointment committees may be swayed by irrelevant considerations, such as attractiveness or race, and by empire-building among the committee members. But there can also be a process where the members offer arguments for and against particular judgements in terms of criteria that are relevant for the post in question, and we demean ourselves if we discount our activities in doing this as not involving reason. On academic appointment committees, diverse, incommensurable qualities such as research skills and originality, teaching and communication skills, 24

Not all practical judgements among different ends involve ethical issues; for example, decisions in architecture and design may involve assessing functionality and aesthetic considerations as ends.

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administrative skills, leadership qualities and collegiality have to be balanced against perceived research needs, teaching needs, etc. Unlike the regular kind of practical judgement of the experienced nurse on the ward, this kind of infrequent and collective practical judgement is obviously more dependent on contemplation and careful deliberation. The fact that different, incommensurable ends are being assessed puts this kind of reasoning beyond the scope of the concepts of rational choice theory and Weberian concepts of rationality (e.g., Goldthorpe, 1998), but it is characteristic of practical reason (O’Neill, 1994, 1998; Salkever, 1990).25 (iv) Practical reason as ethical As we saw earlier, everyday uses of the word ‘reasonable’ in describing someone often imply ethical qualities: they are sensitive to other people’s needs. Many of our practical judgements are ethical ones, involving treating others as ends in themselves and in a way which is responsive to their particularities. Such ethical judgements are a subset of reasoning about ends. Phronesis involves not only a disposition to act virtuously but an ability to identify the ethically salient aspects of situations (Oakley, 1992, p. 82). It implies that ethics is not something that can be understood adequately just by learning norms – indeed the unchecked, rigid application of norms can lead to unethical practice; the practical, social experience of relating to others in different situations is an important source of ethical wisdom. We can see this most clearly in the case of care: a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach will not help the patient get better as well as a more responsive one. Personal experience may also usefully inform relations with others; for example, once we have experienced bereavement ourselves, we can better understand and help others in that situation.26

25

26

Although Weber uses concepts of ‘substantive rationality’ and ‘value-rationality’, these turn out to be varieties of instrumental reason, not practical reason, for they both are concerned with how ends or values, taken as given, are met. For this reason, Aristotle thought that one couldn’t expect the young to have much insight into ethical matters: ‘Whereas young people become accomplished in geometry and mathematics, and wise within these limits, prudent young people do not seem to be found. The reason is that prudence is concerned with particulars as well as universals, and particulars become known from experience, but a young person lacks experience, since some length of time is needed to produce it’ (Aristotle, 1980, The Nicomachean Ethics, 1,142a).


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In the case of care given within an enduring relationship, there is something more than responsiveness to the particularities of the person that is important – there is the quality and durability of the relationship between the carer and cared-for itself. Unlike fleeting relations, for example between a child and doctor, the relationship between parent and child involves a form of attachment and commitment that is constitutive of who the child and parent are. Hence the carer needs not only to attend to the child’s immediate needs but to reproduce the relationship itself in a way which is conducive to their well-being (Held, 2006; Tronto, 1994). The appropriate behaviour is judged not only in terms of the current needs of the person being cared for but in terms of the past and future of their relationship. The child needs not only good care, but durable attachments – good care from carers with whom it has established long-term relationships of trust and unconditional love. There is both an interdependence and a possible source of tension in such relations; the parent’s happiness is both partly dependent on that of their child, but also sometimes at odds with it. As the feminist ethic of care literature argues, the well-being of the carer also matters, and while care-giving can be a source of fulfilment in itself, it can become oppressive for the carer if she has no escape from the burdens it involves because no-one else is willing to do it, so that it makes her little more than a means to the ends of the person for whom she is caring (Kittay, 1999; Sevenhuijsen, 1998; Tronto, 1994). This situation highlights the need for practical judgement about the various ends involved and to work out how best to meet them, respecting the particularities of those involved. This may be difficult, sometimes impossible, but that does not mean that it is beyond the scope of reason. Again, we would doubt not only the ethics but the ability to reason of someone who was unable to make any such judgements about care. Such relationships are radically different from the relations which are assumed to hold between adult, liberal (implicitly male) individuals operating in the public sphere, which so much moral and political philosophy takes as the norm in thinking about morality and ethics. As Joan Tronto puts it: ‘From the perspective of caring, what is important is not arriving at the fair decision, understood as how the abstract individual in this situation would want to be treated, but at meeting the needs of particular others or preserving the relationships of care that exist’ (Tronto, 1989, p. 176). Thus, in relations of care, ideas of justice as an abstract principle applied to everyone, ‘without regard for

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persons’, are not appropriate, though the idea of ‘doing justice to’ the particularities of an individual is closer. Nevertheless, it would be peculiar to conclude that the practice of caring for someone close falls outside the domain of ethics, for durable relationships of love and care strongly affect individual well-being. We all depend on care for substantial parts of our lives, and we cannot become even moderately selfreliant adults without it. Of course, there are likely to be tensions between the parent’s devotion to their own child and justice in terms of fairness with respect to others, especially where there are major inequalities among parents, but then the problem of how to balance these concerns or different ends is precisely one of things that practical judgement is about. I do not wish to imply that practical judgement necessarily leads to effective and ethical action, for whether it does depends on power – on whether people can bring about what they believe to be right. For example, in actuality, in liberal, highly unequal societies with little commitment to equality, middle class parents can hide their maintenance of their privileges and power for their children behind their concerns as caring parents; they are simply doing the best for their children, ‘as anyone would’.27 Working class parents also make practical judgements about ends and want the best for their children, but have less material and symbolic power to realize their goals. In such cases, we can see that practical judgement has not only an ethical but a political dimension. Yet, practical judgement is difficult even in the absence of the distortions of structural inequality and the tendency of self-interest to trump justice: no-one said life would be easy. Note how all four aspects of practical reason are evident in the work of care, such as parenting. Firstly, knowledge of particulars: the parent has to attend to the specificities of each child; what is best for an independent child may not be for an insecure child. Again, attentiveness to the object – this time another human subject – is characteristic of reason (Tronto, 1989). Secondly, parents have to use their embodied practical sense to intuit what is not said. Thirdly, they have to treat their children as ends in themselves, not merely as means to their own ends, if their children are to flourish, and they have to make judgements about different ends – for example, developing their physical capabilities, 27

See Reay et al. (2007).


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helping them get on with other children and learning about their culture. Fourthly, it exemplifies the melding of reason or rationality and ethics in practical judgement. Imagine some repressive and unforgiving parents who expect perfect behaviour from their child and always find something to criticize in whatever it does, with the result that it becomes fearful and lacking in self-esteem, and hence tends to behave awkwardly, thereby confirming the parents’ low valuation, and triggering more negative responses. We might feel of such parents that their treatment of their child is not only unethical but unreasonable: how can they expect their child to become well-adjusted, capable and confident if they never compliment it or allow it to make mistakes? Likewise, if someone were to get angry with a person who they knew to be deaf for not being able to understand spoken language, we would regard them as acting both unethically and irrationally. This reaffirms what we argued in the previous chapter: that value-judgements, including ethical judgements, and reason are conjoint rather than radically different, incommensurable things. Many of our practical judgements have this dual character, defying any fact–value, or reason–value, dichotomies. Insofar as social science is a theoretical enterprise rather than a practical one, it has less need of knowledge of particulars than do the actors who it studies; it also rarely needs to respond quickly to the irreversible flow of events, simply because the researcher is generally a spectator rather than a participant. Insofar as social research tends to focus on particular aspects of lives rather than whole lives, it is less likely to appreciate the need for practical judgement in the sense of evaluation of different ends that give shape to whole lives. Where it is primarily interested in common, general processes and objects, it tends to regard variation and difference as a nuisance, as ‘noise’, to be ignored or reduced by better choice of variables. All of these differences between the practice of social science and everyday life tend to lead to variants of the scholastic fallacy, in which social scientists focus on those aspects of everyday life that fit best with their own outlook, and therefore to devalue or ignore practical reason. Similarly the ‘management’ scientist’s interest in finding successful general procedures can easily lead them to miss the value of practical reason and experience in organizational life. Successful practice depends on ability to deal with variety, as well as common features, and the former comes from experience.

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Practical reason, fallibility, power and conservatism Practical reason or phronesis is indispensable; we cannot be competent actors, interacting successfully with our social, material world, without it. Even in the most rule-bound, rationalized spheres of action, practical judgement is needed to decide how to apply the rules in variable contexts. Even those who have to perform rationalized actions, such as call centre workers following scripts, have to use their practical sense and interpretive skills to some extent. In its embodied, tacit form, practical reason can be wondrously effective and economical, enabling people to respond to subtly changing contexts and to do remarkably complex things that machines cannot. However, like any form of reason, it is fallible. While there is something remarkable about the gestalt character of our more spontaneous practical judgements, it is not necessarily successful. Just as we can experience optical illusions, we can misread situations by imposing an inappropriate template on them. Practical judgement can fail to take account of relevant things and misjudge situations, not merely randomly and occasionally, but recurrently. For instance, we might sometimes suspect that the teacher who claims to have twenty years’ experience of teaching may largely have repeated their first year’s experience nineteen times, blaming any recurrent problems on the students. They may repeatedly fail to give students time to think when answering questions, or intimidate them, perhaps unintentionally; they may unknowingly discriminate against certain kinds of student. As the example of sexism shows very clearly, forms of unreasonable treatment can be based on everyday habits of thought of action that have become commonsensical and unnoticed. When we discover that female students get better marks where their assessments are marked anonymously than when they are identified, we realize that, whatever academics may intend and believe, the goal of neutrality with respect to identity in academic judgement has not been achieved. The introduction of anonymous marking in response to the discovery of this failing is a classic rationalization response, designed to ensure consistency and fairness, and it throws up typical dilemmas in balancing rationalization and practical judgement. On the one hand, anonymization helps to ensure fairness, but tutors may also be concerned that it creates a barrier between them and their students so that they are no longer able to respond to them as individuals, with specific qualities and learning paths; the tutor can no longer write things like ‘well done


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Chris, this essay is much better structured than your last one’. There is no easy answer to such problems. Such examples show that the shortcomings of phronesis are not merely a matter of oversights, but power – and one that is hidden precisely because of the partly tacit nature of practical reason. While social science needs to take phronesis more seriously, both in the social practices it studies and in its own practice, it also needs to avoid idealizing it (Flyvbjerg, 2001). In effect, and in different ways, feminists, Bourdieu and Foucault have drawn attention to the presence of often hidden and subtle forms of power and domination in phronesis as well as in formal, rationalized systems. Insofar as it is practically adequate, any form of knowledge – discursive or practical – can empower its holder, at least in the minimal sense of knowing what to expect and how to respond, though it is contingent whether they have the resources and influence to realize this potential. The results may be benign or oppressive but part of the danger of practical reason lies in the fact that it is often not transparent. Thus, we might suspect that the appeal to phronesis in the face of rationalization may be the refuge of those who think they have nothing more to learn – and too much to lose in terms of their power and comfort. The defence of practical reason and the critique of rationalization has indeed often taken a conservative form. Such suspicions might be harboured both by managerialists who want to rationalize everything in the hope of making it more efficient, and by those who care about social justice and equal opportunity. Much of the appeal of Kant’s rousing call to reason (‘dare to know’) in his What is Enlightenment? lay in its rejection of deference to tradition and authority (Kant, 1985); we must escape from the ‘immaturity’ of accepting others’ beliefs, and reason for ourselves. From this perspective, phronesis can easily look like no kind of reason at all. However, in some cases, such failings in the practice of experienced actors could be argued to arise not from the limitations of practical reason as such but from failures to pursue practical reason properly, so that instead of continually learning from each new situation, the experienced actor becomes indifferent to their specificity and novelty, and assumes that she has ‘seen it all’. As Joseph Dunne puts it: The essential point is that phronesis is a habit of attentiveness that makes the resources of one’s past experience flexibly available to one and, at the same time, allows the present situation to ‘unconceal’ its own particular

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significance – which it may do comfortably within the terms of one’s experience or else only by evincing insights which, while it could not occur without one’s past experience, still transcends, and so enriches, it. (Dunne, 1993, pp. 305–6, emphasis in original)

Hence, we can still defend phronesis. An experienced practitioner – say a teacher – who objects to attempts to rationalize her work through audits and the imposition of inflexible rules might welcome critical evaluation of a different, more phronetic kind – that is, criticism of her work by other experienced teachers who have tried other methods, who take the trouble to see how she undertakes her role for long enough to witness how she exercises practical judgement in different contexts, taking into account particulars such as the attitudes and social composition of the student community.28 A formal audit would be quicker and more ‘efficient’, but the alternative would be more reasonable, and more effective, though of course more costly too. It is likely to be not only better for helping learning but ethically superior in paying the teacher the respect of attending closely to what she actually does, and giving her feedback from peers she in turn respects. Such discussions in which practitioners share experience do sometimes take place in organizations, but the managerialist rationalizing tendency is to formalize the conclusions into models of ‘best practice’ which are then used unilaterally to assess diverse actual practices, without regard for context, rather than dialogically and contextually. The early critics of rationalism and defenders of practical judgement were mostly conservatives and liberals, like Burke and Smith, who opposed grand plans for rationally planning society or its parts, whether because they valued tradition, hierarchy, private property or individual freedom.29 Later, liberals such as Weber, Popper, Hayek and von Mises opposed rationalization in the form of centralized socialist planning because of its suppression of local knowledge and its 28

29

As Marilyn Strathern notes, audits are a model of how not to do social research; any student who claimed that they could understand and evaluate what goes on in a university department just on the basis of the kind of information required by audits would be quickly disabused of such an absurd notion. If we want to evaluate the practice of teaching properly, then we need ethnography (Strathern, 2000). Burke argued that the rationalism of the French socialists led to the terror of 1793–4. See Oakeshott’s Rationalism in Politics (1962) for a more recent conservative critique.


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totalitarian tendencies, and their criticisms seem to have been borne out by the experience of the former Soviet economies (Hayek, 1991; Nove, 1983; Popper, 1971). Critical theorists such as Habermas, Horkheimer and Adorno have also developed critiques of the dominance of formal or technical rationality in modernity (Habermas, 1971; Horkheimer and Adorno, 1972). In the last thirty years, some socialists have accepted parts of Weber’s and Hayek’s critique of socialist planning, and Foucault’s critiques of disciplinary power, while Bauman argued that rationalization led to the Holocaust (Bauman, 1989; Foucault, 1977). Postmodernist critics of grand narratives and proponents of local knowledge are also hostile to rationalization. Thus, whereas rationalization of whole societies was once the great hope of socialists, many people who oppose rationalism now would regard themselves as radicals and progressives. In most cases, these critics are not opposed to all applications of formal and instrumental rationality, but to their overextension, such that they suppress difference, local knowledge and freedom. However, as we shall now show, not all the critics of rationalization are defenders of practical reason of the concrete, informal kind we have explored. Other critics of rationalization: Weber and the critical theorists Critiques of the tendencies of formal, instrumental and technical rationality to dominate modern life, so that ironically the epitome of rational action comes to suppress precisely the freedoms which modernity’s rejection of tradition promised to enable, are common in social science. Weber brilliantly analysed the dilemmas of rationalization, acknowledging both its capacity for freeing us by making activities more efficient and for introducing procedural fairness into new spheres of life, and its tendency to produce unintended irrationalities and enslave us (Du Gay, 2000; Weber, 1978). At the same time he felt that the rise of science and secularization disenchanted the modern world by undermining the authority of religion and tradition in defining our ends and values, leaving us anchorless, without any basis for our most fundamental beliefs and values. Ironically, despite his extensive, critical analysis of rationalization, Weber fell prey not only to an emotivist and subjectivist conception of values, but a tendency to reduce reason to this narrower form of rationality. He did not see that practical reason in its ethical form – not values beyond reason, or charisma – provides a counter to the excesses of formal and instrumental rationality. Since, in modernist

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fashion, he saw values as opposed to reason and not about anything, his conclusions were pessimistic; we are left with a Nietzschean struggle to assert our own apparently a-rational values against those of others – indeed Weber appears to have understood ethical and political discourse as unavoidably strategic rather than open to the force of the better argument (MacIntyre, 1981; Weber, 1946). His categories of rationality have a predominantly instrumental character: although ‘substantive rationality’ and ‘value rationality’ gesture beyond instrumentalism, in neither case are they concerned with reasoning about ends themselves, merely reasoning in accordance with those apparently arbitrary ends or values. There is no space for practical reason in the Aristotelian sense of reasoning about particulars, and valuing and balancing incommensurable goods or ends (O’Neill, 1998). Since he divorces reason from what it is about, its only remaining characteristics are formal ones of consistency and logical coherence. However, once again, this tendency is not only Weber’s mistake but a feature of modern liberal society, including the very processes of rationalization which he analysed. Some followers of Weber believe he did understand and value phronesis, pointing to his affirmation of the importance of interpretive understanding and the meaningful character of social action (e.g., McCarthy, 2003). While our ability to understand and to share meaning has some features in common with phronesis, in that it involves gestalts and particulars, the relation of meaning in social life to its objects or referents is unclear. Further, the reduction of practical reason to discursive consciousness reflects a scholastic fallacy; there is more to practical reason than the ability of people to communicate. The critique of the rise of rationalization or ‘technical rationality’ in modern societies was developed further by the early critical theorists and, later, Habermas. However, I wish to argue that their diagnosis and response to this situation was unsatisfactory. Here I am indebted to Joseph Dunne’s sympathetic critique of Habermas in his Back to the Rough Ground (Dunne, 1993). Dunne notes that, in an early work, Habermas identified how the empirical, analytical sciences produce technical recommendations, but they furnish no answer to practical questions . . . Emancipation by means of enlightenment is replaced by instruction in control over objective or objectified processes. Socially effective theory is no longer directed toward the


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consciousness of human beings who live together and discuss matters with each other, but to the behaviour of human beings who manipulate. (Habermas, 1974, pp. 254–5)

This tendency is clearest in the ‘policy sciences’ and economics, but it is implicit in much other social science too. Further, reason ‘has lost its critical sting, its commitment, its moral decisiveness and has been separated from such decision as from an alien element’ (ibid., p. 258). Habermas argued that modern science attempts to assimilate praxis – acting with others according to understandings and values which are shared and connected to life experience – to technique, in which action is instead reducible to a means to an ulterior end. Moreover, the critical theorists argued that technical rationality is not value-free or neutral with respect to the human good, as it purports to be, for it tends to reduce interaction to the strategic pursuit of given, individual ends, so that not only things but others become means to our ends. Thus, ‘by its very denial of praxis it involves a substantial redefinition of just what it is to lead a human life’ (Dunne, 1993, p. 225). Acting with others requires not technical knowledge oriented to prediction and control, but an orientation to achieving shared understanding. Praxis is not reducible to instrumental action, because the actions are valued partly for themselves; I value my friends’ wit and humour not as a means to some other end, but as a good in itself. We appreciate friendliness not only because it makes our lives more pleasant but because we feel it is good in itself – something that is good to be. The kind of cultural understandings which we share or seek to grasp depend on our culturally embedded biographies. In view of these differences between technical rationality and praxis, the invasion of the latter by the former disorients people and inhibits their ability to decide what ends to pursue. This is important because, while we might want to subject tradition to reasoned argument, we are always dependent on tradition too, and can use only the conceptual materials available to us in our particular culture. Failure to acknowledge this can ‘induce a kind of historical weightlessness in which our identity becomes all too abstract’ (Dunne, 1993, p. 215). Habermas came closest to the position developed in this book when he noted how [i]nterest and inclination are banished from the court of knowledge as subjective factors. The spontaneity of hope, the act of taking a position, the

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experience of relevance or indifference, and above all the response to suffering and oppression, the desire for adult autonomy, the will to emancipation, and the happiness of discovering one’s identity – all these are dismissed for all time from the obligating interest of reason.30 (Habermas, 1974, pp. 262–3, emphasis added)

However, this relationship of reason to concern, value and well-being was lost in Habermas’s subsequent work, where reason or rationality are seen not in terms of what Rorty calls their ‘vertical’ relationship to what they are about, including our capacities for flourishing and suffering, but ‘horizontally’, as internal to discourse. Habermas argued that the imperialism of technical rationality overlooked and suppressed communicative rationality, in which people interact not merely according to existing norms, but seek agreement, whether on matters of fact or how to act.31 Any conversation has at least a potential rationality in which what people come to agree upon depends on the force of the better argument, rather than the ‘argument’ of force. In a hypothetical ‘ideal speech situation’ in which all participants have equal standing and power, including linguistic competence, the only force is that of the better argument. In actuality, communication is often ‘systematically distorted’, not only by inequalities in people’s competence and power, but by strategic or eristic arguments, in which the participants’ aims are not mutual understanding and finding the best claims and arguments, but winning – achieving preconceived goals. Such an attitude precisely lacks the quality of openness to discussion that characterizes undistorted communication. Insofar as it fails to be guided by the force of the better argument, it is irrational. Insofar as modernity has allowed people more freedom to challenge authority and demand reasons or justifications for anything and everything, it represents an increase in the rationality of society – ‘the rationalization of the lifeworld’, as Habermas terms it (Habermas, 1984); this is a growth of communicative rationality rather than the instrumental rationality identified in Weber’s analysis of modernity. 30

31

Note, however, the liberal, masculinist emphasis on autonomy as independence, and neglect of the need for dependence and connection. One of the strengths of Habermas’s approach is that it treats factual and normative claims as equivalent. However, it does so not by addressing what is similar about their relationship to their objects but by reference to the similarities in the communicative interaction involved in discussing them, that is, ‘horizontally’, rather than ‘vertically’.


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According to Habermas, successful speech acts and communications are underpinned by three implicit ‘validity claims’; they must be (a) truthful in the sense of sincere or non-deceitful, (b) appropriate or right in terms of the relationship to the hearer and context, and (c) true or practically adequate in relation to their object. If we doubt any of these when we are talking to someone then the communication will be unsuccessful. For example, if we feel that someone is arguing something not because they believe it’s true, but because it is merely to their advantage to get us to accept it, then even if we have to go along with it because of the risks of dissenting, we know that this is a sham. Someone might be ‘persuaded’ to acknowledge publicly that pigs can fly, if the dangers of disagreeing were great enough, but they would still know that it was false. Notice that, in identifying what is rational about this, Habermas is implicitly agnostic about truth in the everyday representative sense; he does not appeal to representational semantics, or vertical relationships, to what the conversations might be about, but the pragmatics of the horizontal relations between speakers. Accordingly, until recently, he has assumed a kind of consensus theory of truth; what is true is that which is or would be agreed upon in an ideal speech situation; what matters is apparently only that the interlocutors agree on what is true. For Habermas, rationality is basically procedural and discursive, identified by how it deals with disagreements internal to argument rather than by its relationship to the world. The latter is always relegated to the background – as one of the criteria to which rational communicative interlocutors might appeal. The problem with this is obviously that it is possible for people engaged in this open communicative action to arrive consensually at mistaken, indeed delusory, positions. Further, Habermas’s approach involves what Bhaskar terms an ‘epistemic fallacy’, for it confuses questions of being with questions of epistemology or how we know things, as if, for example, the shape of the earth itself depended on whether human beings thought it was flat or round (Bhaskar, 1975). Note also how embodied practical skills, which enable them to intervene in the flow of events and make things happen, are pushed into the background in Habermas’s analysis of action. Praxis is presented as talk – in fact, talk on the model of the academic seminar, not as doing anything in the everyday sense. This is a congenial view for those who feel guilty about merely engaging in radical talk without doing anything

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about it, for it enables them to imagine they are involved in praxis or ‘theoretical practice’, but it exemplifies the dangers of the scholastic fallacy. Of course, talk is a kind of action, but not all action is talk. If we think about actions involving cooperation, whether it be cooking a meal together or organizing a political campaign, people need to do more than talk – they need to be competent, socially skilled actors, able to do complex things and take responsibility for their actions, that is, exercise their practical sense, reason and wisdom. We quickly become dissatisfied with those who can only talk and who fail to act in these ways. As Bourdieu notes in his angry critique of Habermas, the reduction of praxis to discourse is not only a misrepresentation of action, but functions to preserve the elevation of the leisured life of contemplation and discussion above embodied practice (Bourdieu, 2000).32 This is not to reject Habermas’s insights into the implicit or potential rationality of communicative action; indeed it is important to incorporate them into a wider understanding of the nature of reason. However, reason or rationality are not exhausted by technical and communicative forms. Dunne wonders whether Habermas has ‘rescued praxis from the rationalist encroachments of technique only to deliver it over to another kind of rationalism – that which is at work in what he now unabashedly, and “in a thoroughly positive sense”, calls the “rationalization of the life-world”’ (Dunne, 1993, p. 202). But phronesis goes beyond what can be said or recovered discursively. Habermas half acknowledges this inasmuch as he sees the life-world as the taken-for-granted, the background, which can never be wholly brought to consciousness; so the rationalization of the life-world will always be limited. Our ability to act rationally or reasonably depends not simply on communicative rationality nor on technical, means–ends rationality, but on having embodied dispositions, skills, virtues and habits of thought that we have developed through extensive practice and experience, that are attuned to the relations and contexts in which we live, and on having developed a practical wisdom in assessing the diverse ends which are open to us. Thus, experienced, ‘good enough’ parents are able 32

This social distinction of mind over body, and conception and execution, is reinforced by an extreme form of abstraction from ordinary concrete matters – Habermas and his followers rarely deign to give empirical examples; hence the elitist character of so much writing in critical theory (Bourdieu, 2000; see also Eagleton, 2008). In this context it would be interesting to see how the social background of followers of ‘critical theory’ compares to that of empirical social scientists.


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to guide their children to balance their various needs and wants and their own so that they are healthy, able to learn and to develop good relations to others and to themselves. While they might discuss what’s best to do with others and read books on the subject, much of their ability involves tacit knowledge acquired through experience. Quite simply, we have to take responsibilities and act, often in contexts which have features that are not anticipated in discourses about them, and it is neither possible nor desirable to postpone action until we have publicly deliberated on everything; practical reason goes beyond what can be articulated and made transparent, and in some ways is much more efficient and effective.33 Many thinkers, from Hume, through Kant and Weber, to the present day, resist the idea of reason and valuation being in some way tied to substantive objects and their nature. If natural processes were governed by deterministic laws that could be discovered by science, then only reason disengaged from nature, from any substantive identification, could free us from natural determinism and the status quo. In premodern times, at least according to a common modernist retrospective view, reason and valuation appeared merely to legitimize existing social arrangements and conditions. Thus, what it was to be a good priest or teacher was given in the social definitions of the roles, which in turn were seen as belonging to a divine order. With the dissolution of premodern society, questions of what ought to be were disengaged from questions of what is, giving the reasoner freedom to construct her own rules and to allow a radical critique. Hence also the rise of formalistic conceptions of rationality (Taylor, 1994b). This combination of deterministic causation of physical processes and contingency of reason and the realm of meaning is implausible, for it renders practice impossible.34 How could we intervene in the world if it were already predetermined? And what is the point of this disengaged, formal reason or indeed communicative rationality if it cannot enable us to intervene in material processes? On this view, practical action is rendered incomprehensible; 33

34

Even in situations approximating an ideal speech situation, we have to take much on trust, as authoritative, hoping that the authority is that of those with genuine specialist expertise, and not mere privilege (O’Neill, 2007). This is clearest in the Kantian tradition. Richard Rorty, despite his view of knowledge as a means of coping with the world rather than representing it, reaffirms this bizarre dualism of determinism and contingency, and reduces practice to discourse.

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on the one side we have deterministic natural processes, on the other, ‘free’ reason and discourse, in which people are merely free to reinvent themselves by creating new discourses, with no space for practice which changes anything materially (Bhaskar, 1991).

Conclusions: from reason back to values The problems of understanding values that we discussed in the previous chapter lay in their divorce from reason. However, we can now see that those problems were reinforced by a narrowing of concepts of reason and rationality. It is not only values that have been rid of their descriptive, evaluative and reasonable content by being divorced from what they are about, but to some extent reason has been attenuated by being divorced from what it is about too. Thus, while much of modernist thought counterposes reason to values, they have both come to be understood in ways which weaken their relationship to their objects, the things reasoned about and valued. This has made it harder to understand the ways in which reasoning and valuation overlap. Much of contemporary social science not only divorces emotions and values from reason, but misses the role of reason in everyday practical actions and evaluations. If reason is reduced to the application of deductive logic or instrumental rationality, and knowledge of the world is seen as based on sense experience rather than reason, as in Hume, then reason has nothing to say about ethics or how we should live. Even leading critics of modern rationality like Weber and Habermas, in different ways, divorce reason and value from what they are about. The very success of theory, science and capitalist technology has encouraged the illusion that abstract theory and formal technical reason can displace phronesis. The shift from a conception of reason centring on a relationship to the object to a conception based on intradiscursive relations, to logic and to communicative rationality, echoes certain further kinds of detachment or estrangement in modernist thought; the divorce of reason from nature in general and the body in particular, so that reason comes to be associated with a strong notion of autonomy as freedom from these, as mind over matter, and culture over nature. Once normativity is divorced from what it is about, so that it is primarily conceptualized in terms of ‘oughts’ and empty terms like ‘good’ and ‘right’, and ceases to be related to well-being, it becomes reduced to pure decision, and morality becomes a matter of finding


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ways in which people with different ‘conceptions of the good’ can get along with one another.35 Normativity then becomes reduced to disengaged, subjective values deliberated on by stepping out of the flow of experience into a realm of freedom in which decisions are made. What is lost here, but is emphasized in the concept of practical reason, is the idea of reason and value as properly embedded in the flow of experience, albeit in a way which is continually attentive to that experience and quality. The models of rationality with which we began this chapter break this relationship and substitute abstractions, models and procedures, making it appear that normativity is primarily a matter of procedures and decisions. However, as Iris Murdoch put it: . . . if we consider what the work of attention is like, how continuously it goes on, and how imperceptibly it builds up structures of value round about us, we shall not be surprised that at crucial moments of choice most of the business of choosing is already over. This does not imply that we are not free, certainly not. But it implies that the exercise of our freedom is a small piecemeal business which goes on all the time and not a grandiose leaping about unimpeded at important moments. The moral life, on this view, is something that goes on continually, not something that is switched off in between the occurrence of explicit moral choices. What happens in between such choices is indeed what is crucial. (Murdoch, 1970, p. 36)

We should think of normativity more in terms of the ongoing flow of continual concrete evaluation, and less in terms of norms, rules, procedures, or indeed decisions and injunctions about what one ought to do. Having discussed normativity in relation to value, valuation and reason, it is time to turn to the question of why we value anything at all. Why are we evaluative beings?

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Coyness about the good – attempting to decontextualize it from particular life experiences and cultural settings – ‘distorts practical reason beyond all recognition. By its very nature practical reason can only function within the context of some implicit grasp of the good, be it that mediated by a practice to which the good is internal or by practices which contribute to it as cause and constituent, or by contact with paradigm models, in life story, or however. The error of modern rationalism is to believe that such thinking must inevitably be a prisoner of the status quo, that our moral understanding can only be revisionist at the cost of being disengaged’ (Taylor, 1994b, pp. 35–6).

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It is not even known at all to us what the human being now is, although consciousness and the senses ought to instruct us in this; how much less will we be able to guess what one day he ought to become. Nevertheless, the human soul’s desire for knowledge snaps very desirously at this object, which lies so far from it, and strives, in such obscure knowledge, to shed some light. (Kant, cited in Allen Wood, Kant and the Problem of Human Nature)

Introduction Why do people care about things? Why do things matter to them? In particular, why do they have ethical concerns about how people treat one another, and perhaps other species too, and concerns about how their social world is organized? Or, to put it more formally, what is it about people that makes them both ethical subjects and objects of ethical concern? Some sociologists might be tempted to say that it’s norms or discourses that make people do these things, not their human nature, and hence that all these things are socially constructed. But while norms and discourses are important they don’t seem to work on non-humans – on lumps of rock or plants – so there must be something about humans that makes them susceptible to such norms and discourses. Some of the answers to these questions are already implicit in the last two chapters; here I shall make them explicit. I shall argue that we need to start from an account of human social being, albeit one which incorporates rather than ignores cultural being and cultural diversity. Human beings have both things in common and respects in which they diverge. It’s impossible to avoid making assumptions about human nature in social science – even those who believe we are purely socially or culturally determined presuppose that we are susceptible to such determination – so it’s better to make these assumptions explicit, rather than risk leaving them unexamined. We need a philosophical 98


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anthropology – not one that posits universal uniformities to the exclusion of difference, but one that identifies commonalities and sources of difference. Without this, we are not likely to understand why the ethical aspect of social life matters so much to people. In particular, we are likely to resort to subjectivist, conventionalist and relativist characterizations which produce an alienated view of morality and ethics in everyday life – one which is at odds with our own practice. Much moral and political philosophy discusses at length how people treat or should treat one another while saying remarkably little about what kind of being people are, in terms of their capacities and susceptibilities, beyond having a capacity for reason, and even less about the societies in which they live. This is not merely a matter of disciplinary limits: in some cases it is a matter of principle. Many philosophers and social theorists regard the whole idea of trying to describe human social being or ‘human nature’ as mistaken – perhaps even dangerous – and that far from helping us understand ethics it will merely result in ethnocentric generalizations from our own limited cultural and historical perspective, flattening difference in the process. In critical theory, the very idea of a ‘metaphysics of human nature’ is deemed to be mistaken. There are several reasons behind these objections, but I think they are all suspect, so I shall first list the objections and provide brief responses. Then, notwithstanding Kant’s doubts, I shall ‘snap desirously’ at the topic, and outline those aspects of human social nature that make us beings for whom things matter, in a way which I believe avoids the problems raised by the critics. Given the importance of the objection that cultures trump the commonalities of human social being in shaping ethics, I then turn to examine some claims of cultural relativists in anthropology, and conclude.

Objections pre-empted (1) The fear that universalism entails the suppression of difference Many fear that universalism implies uniformity and the denial of the extraordinary variety of human life. Yet we can note similarities without denying differences. The common (post)modern emphasis on difference itself presupposes similarity, for there is no point in attaching significance to the differences between things which are radically

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different, such as epistemology and potatoes; rather it is differences among things which also have something in common which are interesting, such as the cultural differences among human beings. We might usefully compare Hindu and Muslim religions, but we might wonder about the sanity of anyone who wanted to compare either with toothpaste. Conversely, it’s hardly interesting to talk about what two things have in common unless they also have some differences (it would be pointless to discuss what two copies of this book have in common, for example). In other words, our interests in difference and similarity, or particularism and universalism, are dialectically related. Analogously, disagreement presupposes some shared understandings; without the latter there is just mutual incomprehension, not disagreement. Similarity makes difference significant. As we shall see, our extraordinary differences presuppose things that we have in common.

(2) The charge of biological reductionism As in any debate of this kind, much depends on what we mean by the basic terms, and in this case many assume that to discuss human nature is to reduce the human to the biological. Clearly we should not do this, for we are not merely biological beings, but social beings who develop through acculturation and vary historically and culturally. Because we make sense of ourselves and the world through particular cultures, our very identity comes to depend not only on biology but culture. Thus, we can agree with Alasdair MacIntyre that we cannot simply ‘look to [biological] human nature as a neutral standard, asking which form of social and moral life will give it the most adequate expression. For each form of life carries with it its own picture of human nature’ (1998, p. 259). But our cultural nature doesn’t mean we can ignore our biological nature. We don’t have to swap one kind of reductionism for another. Nor does the fact that any conception of nature is cultural mean that nature is wholly cultural, as if viruses and rivers would not exist if cultures did not conceptualize them.1 Later we shall ask whether the fact that each culture carries ‘its own picture of human nature’ 1

To suppose that nature is nothing but a cultural construction is cultural studies’ own imperialist variant of the epistemic fallacy of confusing questions of knowledge with questions of being. It confuses construal with construction, and ignores the constraints on construction presented by construction materials (Sayer, 2000b).


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means they have nothing significant in common, or that any picture is as good as any other. Our cultural being is an emergent property of our biological being, presupposing certain biological conditions, such as the cerebral cortex. The fact that only species with certain biological characteristics can develop cultures shows that, far from contradicting the idea of human nature, cultural variation presupposes it; we must be the kind of beings that are capable of cultural variation. Differences in upbringing and socialization may also affect how infants develop physically, including neurologically. ‘Culture’ and ‘nature’ should therefore not be dualistically opposed to one another. So let me make it clear that by ‘nature’ I definitely do not mean simply biology, but nature in two inclusive senses. Firstly, there is ‘nature’ as everything that exists, of which people and their cultures are part: we are not outside nature.2 Secondly, there is the more abstract sense assumed when we ask someone to explain the ‘nature’ of something unfamiliar: we simply want a description of its key characteristics. Where humans are concerned, these include culture.

(3) The charge of ethnocentrism This claims that any attempt to summarize universal or common features of human nature will actually result in ethnocentrism through the naturalization and normalization of our own local cultural characteristics, thereby rendering other characteristics as unnatural, abnormal or not properly human. The Enlightenment thinkers were particularly prone to this, with the result that, far from providing an inclusive basis for thinking about humanity, they produced a selective account which normalized western societies and their inhabitants and rendered others as in various respects deficient and not fully human. Although this tendency has weakened in academia with the critique of racism and orientalism, it is far from dead in popular culture. In Zygmunt Bauman’s words, ‘modern societies practice moral parochialism under the mask of promoting universal ethics’ (Bauman, 1993, p. 14). Yet as Kwame Anthony Appiah points out: 2

As Kate Soper notes, there is a further common elision between concepts of nature which include the human, and concepts of nature which exclude and are defined in opposition to them (Soper, 1995). It is mainly the former sense that I use here. See also Benton (1993) and Mill (1874).

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Hume’s or Kant’s inability to imagine that an African could achieve anything in the sphere of ‘arts and letters’ is objectionable not because it is humanist or universalist but because it is neither. What has motivated this recent antiuniversalism has been, in large part, a conviction that past universalism was a projection of European values and interests. This is a critique best expressed by the statement that the actually existing Enlightenment was insufficiently Enlightened; it is not an argument that Enlightenment was the wrong project. (Appiah, 2005, p. 250)

The problem exhibited by Hume, Kant and many others was that their universalism was inconsistent. Theirs were misconceptions of human nature. Whether any universalism is tenable depends on what is actually claimed to be universal. Significantly, universalism has been revised precisely in response to successive identifications of improper exclusions, whether on the basis of race or cultural prejudice, so that it has expanded to incorporate those formerly excluded. On the other hand, to respond that the whole idea of universalism is mistaken invites precisely those kinds of denial of humanity to certain groups just noted. A recent variant of this objection is pitched at a more abstract level: that merely creating a category of the human must depend on simultaneously creating a category of an other – the non-human. Yes, of course it does – simply because all categorization does this. A human being is not a pebble or a goat, just as an ocean is not a tree. Such categorizations help us cope with the world in all its variation and intractability – or at least they do if they successfully identify differences. All communication involves making distinctions – some sharp, some fuzzy. We can’t say anything otherwise. Nor could we intervene successfully in the world. If you don’t know whether a switch is on or off, you could risk electrocuting yourself. The fact that some distinctions are fuzzy does not mean that they are false or useless; I’m not sure where to draw the line between the front of someone’s head and the back, but I can tell the difference, and it’s useful to be aware of it. There are only problems if the discursive distinctions fail to enable us to cope with the differences we have to deal with in practice, for example by presenting things which are similar in significant respects as radically different. Racism does this in dividing human beings into races – a form of categorization based on superficial differences that have none of the implications that racists assume. Again, there is something deeply ironic about responding to inconsistent forms of universalism that excluded certain groups, and hence were racist, by replacing them with denials of fundamental


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similarities between human beings which can only give succour to the racist. The proper response to inconsistent or incomplete universalism is to make it consistent.

(4) The fear of determinism A further source of the antipathy to elaborating a conception of human nature is the belief that nature is deterministic, and that only in the sphere of human reason and language do we have any freedom. A poststructuralist variant of this worries that any concept of nature will confirm the legitimacy of the status quo (Calder, 2007, p. 99). The fear seems to be that whatever is characterized as natural or as having essential features will be assumed to be unchangeable, and that only by rejecting all attempts to theorize human nature, only by embracing a thoroughgoing ‘anti-essentialism’, and by asserting the power of discourses to create whatever they name, can we escape from determinism. The fear is based on a view of the processes of the material world as predetermined, and as having a regularity or ‘constant conjunction’ kind of causality, in which event c is always followed by event e. This account of causation cannot make sense of scientific and other practical interventions in nature, which make a difference to what happens, for it can represent practice only as already predetermined, and thus not something we can will. Kant’s dualism in which human beings are part of nature and determined by causal laws while being self-determining in the sphere of reason is ‘ultimately incoherent’ (O’Neill, 1991, pp. 180–1). The same impossible dualism underlies Rorty’s work (Bhaskar, 1991, p. 52; Calder, 2007). Not surprisingly, in the last few decades, these views have come under heavy fire in the philosophy of science. The natural is not immutable. Certain realist philosophers now argue that objects, including people, have causal powers, many of which can lie unactivated, and which, if activated, have effects which depend on contingently related conditions. The causal powers themselves depend on the presence of certain structures, be they mental or physical, whose existence is itself contingent. The material world is therefore characterized in terms of both necessity and contingency, thus rendering our interventions in the world intelligible (Bhaskar, 1975, 1998; Harré and Madden, 1975). Hence, to identify properties of objects is merely to say what they can and can’t do, not what they will do, this generally being

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dependent on contingent conditions. For example, you, dear reader, are probably physically capable of inflicting violence on someone, but it doesn’t follow that you will ever activate that capacity. And having that capacity depends on the contingent matter of your survival. To learn a language a child must have the appropriate neurological capacities, but it is contingent which of the world’s hundreds of languages it learns. The deterministic view of nature goes with what Andrew Collier terms an ‘out-of-gear’ concept of freedom, in which what we want to do has no purchase on anything (Collier, 1994). By contrast, on the critical realist ‘in-gear’ conception, ‘More or less freedom then means more or less effective interaction in one’s world – not disengagement from the causal processes operative in the “outside world” as in . . . Kantian ethics, and in Cartesian, Sartrean and Rortyian metaphysics’ (Collier, 2003, p. 15). Despite his espoused pragmatism, Richard Rorty, an influential opponent of universalism, reduces practice to the use of language, where we are apparently free merely to re-describe ourselves. As Marx argued, we act on nature as one of its own forces, and we can conceive of our interventions before we make them. As causal agents, we are always in interaction with a range of other things with causal powers. The relation that holds between us and our contexts is always one of forces in tension, in which we push and pull, and are pushed and pulled. It is only by being connected, by being in-gear, that we can do anything. Further, as Mary Midgley notes, we need to resist the common tendency to regard causes as always enemies and never friends, as constraining our freedom rather than enabling it; they may feed, empower and stimulate us (Midgley, 2003, p. 11). We should also avoid thinking of autonomy and heteronomy in dichotomous terms. A concept of human nature thus need not be deterministic and is quite capable of providing us with grounds for challenging the legitimacy of the status quo, for the status quo is just one of many possible outcomes of social processes. To describe an object’s essential properties, that is, the properties that make something one kind of entity rather than another, does not mean that we cannot acknowledge that it also has other properties which may vary, perhaps significantly (Sayer, 2000b). Similarly, making claims about the particular capacities of human beings does not mean that they are all manifested equally or in the same way everywhere and never change. Historical change and universalism are not incompatible:


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if human beings have a history which gives rise to the most fabulous variety of shapes and forms, it is because of the kinds of beings they, all of them, are; human nature plays a part in explaining the historical specificities . . . (Geras, 1983, p. 108)

(5) The argument that there are irreconcilable differences among different societies’ conceptions of human nature Anthropology and history show that societies differ significantly in their conceptions of human nature (Strathern, 1980). Some, for example, might want to argue that men and women are fundamentally different, others that they are very similar. To some extent people become different as a result of understanding themselves in different ways and acting on these understandings. The desire of critical theory to avoid ‘metaphysics’ or ‘ontology’ and find ways of harmonizing human conduct which do not invoke any particular conception of human social being echoes this. But this doesn’t mean that people can become anything they wish, or that any account is as good as the next, and that there is no way of sorting out better from worse accounts. They may imagine themselves to be superior to others when they are not. The pessimistic belief that different views on these matters can never be resolved is contradicted precisely by the decline of racist beliefs in science in response to the criticisms of Enlightenment thinkers just noted; misunderstandings of human nature can be identified and corrected. We may want to argue that societies should be free to decide on their own conceptions of the good, but it does not follow that every one – racist or non-racist, misogynist or feminist – has equally adequate conceptions.

The indispensability of the concept of human nature All these objections to universalism as such clearly imply that we could avoid any universal assumptions in discussing human society and ethics. This is not even possible. We cannot help at least implying or secreting some such conception in any account of social life, though it may remain unnoticed. Habermas, for example, attempts to avoid such ‘metaphysical’ assumptions, but his ‘discourse ethics’ inevitably implies that people are language-using beings capable of reasoning in a certain way, and beings for whom the better argument has force. Often these unexamined conceptions imply that people – ‘people with no nature’ – are

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blank slates on which anything cultural can be written, and hence are indifferent to what happens to them, or insofar as they resist or accept, their resistance or acceptance are purely products of their culture. Yet if people were blank slates, and harm and flourishing no more than cultural constructions, then that could imply that anything goes when it comes to how we treat people, for harm can always be defined away by ‘culturally constructing it’ as good, through collective wishful thinking. Even Rorty, the scourge of universalism and concepts of human nature, calls for a transcultural solidarity based on the hope ‘that suffering will be diminished, that the humiliation of human beings by other beings may cease’ (Rorty, cited in Calder, 2007, p. 105). This presupposes a universalist assumption that the common nature of human beings is such that they are susceptible to suffering and humiliation. Should we refuse to assume that others are like us in these respects, for fear of imposing a local judgement on them? Again, far from protecting others from oppression, it would remove any inhibitions about oppressing them.3 It is hard to say anything much about people or indeed interact with them without presupposing something about what they have in common. In their everyday practice, ordinary people – and indeed offduty anti-universalist social scientists, philosophers and cultural theorists – rarely have any trouble distinguishing humans from nonhuman animals or objects. They know and assume much about human nature in their everyday actions: they know people are both capable and needy, that someone in her twenties is likely to be more vigorous than someone in her nineties, that people are susceptible to peer pressure, shame and humiliation, and so on. Far from being suspect and dangerous, such knowledge is invaluable. The fact that people may also have some mistaken ideas about human nature does not mean that there is no such thing as human nature to know; on the contrary, it presupposes there is something of which our understanding is more or less adequate. It is frankly absurd to imagine that we can make much sense of the social world without some understanding of the nature of human beings. To suggest we should suspend such beliefs rather than 3

Rorty argues further that people from different societies don’t have to accept a common worldview or conception of human nature in order to work out ‘how to coexist without violence’ (Rorty, cited in Appiah, 2005, p. 250). They probably don’t, but why presuppose that they would want to avoid violence unless they had a similar susceptibility to it?


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examine and improve upon them is extraordinary – indeed, a kind of academic affectation. The notion that we could dispense altogether with the concept of human nature is fashionable but it is not . . . actually an intelligible one at all. It would involve a depth of scepticism, a deliberate ignorance which its proponents do not seem to have noticed . . . [Those who oppose it usually want] to get rid of certain quite limited mistaken views about human nature, in particular its resistance to historical change. (Midgley, 1984, p. 105)

Philosophical anthropology has to acknowledge both what we have in common and what differentiates us, and the relation between them – both the remarkable cultural differentiation and the common features which enable that diversity. If I had been taken at birth from my parents in London, transported to Tokyo, and then brought up by a Japanese family, I would speak Japanese and in all but appearance be Japanese, and of course a different person from the one I have become. The remarkable fact that virtually any baby can be taught any of the world’s languages shows both just how similar they are, and how different they can become. It does not mean babies are blank slates on which anything can be written, rather that they have the necessary capacities for language learning and acculturation. Even these can vary: some people find language processing easier than others. (Again, universalism need not assume uniformity.) But there are still similarities; for it to be possible for a culture to influence a given group of people in fairly consistent ways, they must have similar susceptibilities and capacities. Philosophical anthropology must therefore acknowledge and explain human diversity partly by reference to what we have in common. It must provide a bridge between its focus on commonalities and the concrete societies at particular places and times.

Human social being and ethical capacities Here I set out some features of human social being, including acculturation, that are relevant for understanding the capacity for ethical action. Some of the following will be familiar and obvious, but are often overlooked in social science and philosophy.4 This is only a sketch of such an 4

I shall not venture into the matter of how the capacity for ethical being evolved. On this see Joyce (2007).

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explanation. I put the key features forward as universals, though I am not equally confident that all of them are. I invite readers to suggest where they may not be. As we saw in noting the interdependence of universalism and particularism, this need not be at odds with our defence of reasoning about particulars in Chapter 3. Many of the features are highly interdependent so the order in which they are introduced is inevitably somewhat arbitrary, and it will be necessary to loop back occasionally to comment on some of the main connections.

(1) Variation is normal Like any class of objects, human nature always encompasses variation, as well as commonalities. Our shapes, sizes and susceptibilities and powers differ; some are born with disabilities or are exceptionally endowed in some way. There are not only men and women, who are in differing degrees different and similar, but some intersex people, albeit not many (New, 2005). There are also many different sexualities. It doesn’t make sense to describe any of these variants as ‘unnatural’ or less natural than others, for they all occur in nature; the category ‘unnatural’ is empty.5 Variation is also crucial for evolution. The human characteristics which I cite below are present to different degrees in individuals and can take different forms. If we are to avoid some of the dangers of earlier conceptions of human nature, we have to acknowledge this variation and incorporate it in our conception, not evade it. However, we should not assume that ‘innate’ differences are necessarily prior to the influences of society, for these and other environmental influences can affect the foetus and even have effects prior to conception.

(2) Human animals and embodiment Any account of human being must acknowledge not only those qualities which seem to be unique to human beings but those which are not. A claim about the nature of humans is not any less true of them just 5

‘. . . nothing that exists by nature can form a habit contrary to nature . . . Neither by nature, then, nor contrary to nature do the virtues arise in us; rather we are adapted by nature to receive them, and are made perfect by habit’ (Aristotle, 1980, The Nicomachean Ethics, II.1). See also Mill (1874).


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because it also applies to certain non-human animals. We are not just bearers of reason; other less distinctive qualities are relevant to our ethical capacities too, particularly our capacity for suffering and flourishing (MacIntyre, 1999). We should take the fact that we are animals seriously, rather than denying it, as if those characteristics which were similar to those of other species were somehow unimportant – or worse, as something we should repress or ‘rise above’ in order to be civilized or ethical. We cannot be rational animals unless we are animals (Midgley, 2003).6 Again, nature is not a realm of determinism and heteronomy from which we must escape through reason. As Ted Benton notes, ‘[a] combined dread and contempt for bodily existence and function is barely disguised in much philosophical dualism’ (Benton, 1993, p. 44; see also Assiter, 2003).7 Often, as feminists have argued, mind and body or culture and nature are seen as masculine and feminine respectively; the hierarchy is gendered (Strathern, 1980). It is bizarre to suppose that bodily mechanisms, needs and compulsions that are more or less independent of conscious influence are bad because they are not products of human reason; the latter is fallible anyway and needs to take account of those needs if we are to flourish. Nor, like the more extreme (culturalist imperialist) versions of the turn to discourse, should we reduce the body to an effect of discourse. As Kate Soper comments: the body is neither simply the effect of discourse nor simply a point of ‘brute’ resistance to it, but a centre of experience which is actively involved in the construction of discourse itself . . . Instinct and feeling, both physical and emotional, everywhere intrude to influence what is said – just as the things which come to be said intrude back upon feeling. (Soper, 1990, p. 11)

(3) Human becoming and care Human nature is different from the nature of, say, a mineral, because it consists not only of structures and powers, but structures and powers 6

7

The desire to separate humans from other primates as much as possible led Linnaeus to make an exception to his classificatory principles in dealing with homo sapiens so that we were not put in the same genus and family as other apes (Singer, 1995). If one assumes that nature is deterministic rather than merely determining and determined, closed rather than open and hence capable of development through emergence, then the body has to be seen in this way too.

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some of which depend on contingent forms of interaction for their very emergence, development and exercise. That is, it includes not only innate powers, but potentials for contingently developing further emergent powers, according to what happens to us. Humans are born extraordinarily immature and cannot survive more than a few hours without care. They need and seek attachment to a carer or carers, and the quality of that care is important not only for their physical health but their subsequent psychological well-being and emotional and intellectual development (Bowlby, 1969; Cassidy and Shriver, 1999).8 The baby’s vocal cords enable it to cry, and its cerebral cortex gives it the potential to learn a language, but whether it ever learns to speak one depends on how it is brought up.9 And once it has learned a language, whether it ever learns to write depends on whether it is brought up in a literate rather than an oral culture. And if it learns to write, whether it will ever learn to write poetry depends again on contingent forms of socialization. As Margaret Archer puts it, ‘all of our human properties (e.g. our capacities to walk, to reproduce, to make things manually, to become language speakers) exist only in potentia; adverse circumstances can jeopardise every one of them’ (Archer, 2000a, p. 42, emphasis in original). We should therefore think in terms of human becoming rather than human being as a given state, where becoming is contingent, path-dependent and open-ended rather than towards any particular goal. It therefore follows that human life takes a vast variety of forms, some allowing people to develop and exercise a wide range of powers, some allowing only a limited range, only partially meeting needs, and some causing suffering. Presumably, new forms of human social being will emerge in the future that we can scarcely imagine now. As Sartre argued (exaggerating), the human essence is the property of having no essence. This capacity for becoming – for developing in a host of different ways, and for acquiring new skills and dispositions – is a striking feature of human nature, one that is seemingly more developed in humans than other higher animals; our capacity for development can beat paths in more directions than we can imagine. We can also stagnate 8

9

Through the interaction of neurobiology and social experience, early relationships and experiences, particularly attachments, affect the development of the mind, with lasting consequences (Siegel, 1999). About 1 in 2,000 foetuses are anencephalic, that is having a brain stem but no cortex, so that they have no consciousness and can feel nothing, even though their heart, lungs and reflexes can function (Singer, 1995). Again, everything varies.


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or regress. Rather than take this as grounds for refusing any notion of human nature, as Kant and others have done, we can include it in our conception, as Aristotle did.10 Social development and acculturation are emergent properties dependent on, but irreducible to, biological and social influences and their interaction. What we call the mind is a co-product of physiology, culture, action and language. Thus to talk of human nature is not usually to refer just to the newborn’s powers and liabilities, or indeed its needs and drives, but to the dependence of those needs and drives on society for their satisfaction, development and supplementation. Humanity is a condition of shared incompleteness (Nussbaum, 2006). As Kathryn Dean argues, following Arendt, our development as social actors from a state of radical incompleteness and indeterminacy as newborns always depends on ‘cultural parenting’ (Dean, 2003). The social environment is not merely a source of ‘triggers’ which set in motion specific already-constituted powers, but a co-constituent of a vast range of novel powers. Like John Dupré, I do not want to privilege internal over external causes a priori here, or indeed, vice versa (Dupré, 2003). We don’t need to flip from a reductive biologism to an imperialist culturalism. Acculturation only works on beings who have a particular biology – it does not work on anencephalic infants for example – and while it changes that nature, it does so in accordance with the laws of nature. For example, reproductive technologies change the way nature works, but only in accordance with its properties; that’s why it’s so difficult! Our nature as social beings consists in far more than the fact that we live together and tend to develop divisions of labour. Not only in childhood but for many other parts of our lives, we need the care of others to survive illness, develop and flourish: care is essential for human life (Tronto, 1994). The ability to care does not rest on a calculation of rational self-interest, but is a common natural social disposition, albeit varying in strength among individuals (Midgley, 1991). In many cases, we are not in a position to give back all or even some of the care we have received to those who provided it, which of course means that many of us will give care to people who will never 10

See also Chomsky’s defence, in a debate with Foucault, of a concept of human nature as open (Chomsky, 1971).

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be in a position to reciprocate. These asymmetries are unavoidable conditions of human social reproduction and flourishing (MacIntyre, 1999). An exchange-based view of social relations cannot comprehend them. Being able to receive and give care is therefore central to human social being and not – as so much philosophy and social science has assumed – a matter of marginal interest (Held, 2006; Kittay, 1999; Lynch et al., 2009; Sevenhuijsen, 1994; Tronto, 1994). The need for care is a universal. Our ‘moral education’ consists not merely of learning or absorbing norms but developing our awareness, emotional intelligence and ethical practical reason, both within relations of care and outside them.

(4) Neediness, vulnerability, capability and concern The human being as an objective, sensuous being is therefore a suffering being, and because he experiences this suffering, he is also a passionate being. (Marx, 1844, XXVII, p. 118)

While many accounts of what it is to be human highlight our most impressive and distinctive capabilities, nevertheless, like other animals, we are not only capable but vulnerable, dependent and needy. Why else would anything matter? It is because of our vulnerability as well as our capability, and because the future is open-ended, that our relationship to the world is partly one of concern. However, because of social science’s positioning as observer rather than participant, it can easily overlook this relationship of involvement, and project its detached scientific relationship to the world onto the people being studied. To avoid suffering we need to replenish and reproduce ourselves continually. Yet however pressing and basic some needs may be – for food, for example – our ways of meeting them are heavily mediated by specific cultural forms and symbolic qualities, though notwithstanding the wilder claims of culturalist imperialism, this does not make all our needs cultural rather than natural. As needy beings we can distinguish at least roughly between flourishing and suffering, or more specifically between hunger and sufficiency, disrespect and respect, hostility and friendliness, boredom and stimulation, and so on. Just what constitutes a good life as a whole is surely elusive, but that doesn’t prevent us from being able to distinguish better from worse experiences and situations and hence some of the elements of a good life. To some extent, those


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who suffer may adjust to their situation and lower their expectations but this does not mean that they necessarily become wholly unable to see anything problematic about it. While the extent to which individuals flourish or suffer throughout their lives varies considerably, even the most fortunate are likely to gain some inkling of what is involved in at least mild suffering or ill-treatment. The force of the ought of the starving person’s desire for food functions as a natural defence or alarm mechanism that drives her to find food and restore her well-being. Conditions like hunger and longing simultaneously involve deficiency and a drive to remedy it. They are goal-oriented, but there is no guarantee that their goals will be reached. There is therefore a sense in which the force of the ought is objective – that is, a feature of life – though sometimes we may find it wanting and override it. While some such drives or compulsions seem rational in that they direct us towards well-being, some are not: addictions or delusions may lead us into harm. Some physical sources of harm, like radiation, get below the body’s radar, and there are many social sources of harm that people do not even notice, perhaps because they have never experienced anything better or because they blame themselves for things that are not their doing. But while compulsions, desire and longing are fallible, it would be foolish to dismiss all of them, for without the more adequate ones life would be difficult: those who cannot feel pain are more vulnerable than those who can; those who have restricted emotional responses find it difficult to read others’ moods and intentions and participate in social life. Because of our neediness, and the possibility of developing many faculties, as social arrangements allow, any conception of human being is at least in part implicitly normative, a matter of hope. To be ‘fully’ human, or even just to survive, we need to develop certain powers. The condition of human beings can range from suffering to flourishing. The children discovered in Romanian orphanages who suffered from extreme neglect were physically and psychologically damaged to the extent that they were unable to communicate and interact and spent much of their waking hours rocking obsessively in their beds or hunched on the floor. We might describe their treatment and resulting condition as ‘inhuman’ as it prevented them from becoming ‘fully human’ – not, of course, to imply that they have lesser moral value than others, but to indicate that they have not been given the chance to develop and flourish.

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However, motivation is not limited to the relief of suffering. Like most animals we tend to be curious about the world around us so that we have some interest in exploring the unfamiliar, even where we do not need to, though social restrictions, dulling routine or bad experiences may weaken this response. We are playful beings, not just in the childish sense but in the sense of finding change and experiment appealing. Play is exploratory and releases us from felt needs and extends our range of pleasures beyond the satisfaction of needs, and can help establish new attachments and commitments (MacIntyre, 1999, p. 85). We tend to seek not only to satisfy our needs and make up deficiencies but to exercise our faculties and extend them, and to emulate others whose skills we admire. As C. S. Lewis put it, ‘we seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves’ (Lewis, cited in Oakley, 1992, p. 52). We are susceptible to boredom and try to avoid it. At the extreme, sensory deprivation disorients and harms us: hence its use as a punishment. Other things being equal, we tend to enjoy activities that are skilled, varied and complex more than simple, repetitive ones (Rawls, 1971, p. 431). Aristotle, and later Marx, argued that flourishing consists partly in being able to develop and use a wide range of our faculties, and this implies varied relationships, practices and situations.11 Again, these are generalizations, and they seem to apply to some degree to non-human animals (hence the opposition to battery farming and zoos that restrict animals’ freedom). Thus, human flourishing consists in more than the absence of suffering – it has extensive positive content. Again, in emphasizing the presence of a tension between the actual and the possible, I do not wish to imply that society as a whole is moving to realize some kind of optimum state. As with Adorno’s ‘negative dialectics’ (Benhabib, 1986), I reject the idea that there is an immanent tendency towards emancipation. Even where people succeed in meeting their needs, wants or desires, this does not necessarily emancipate them or secure their well-being: (a) because their understanding of well-being is fallible; (b) because they do not necessarily harmonize with those of others; and (c) because of unintended consequences and unforeseeable events. 11

Rawls called this ‘the Aristotelian principle’ (Rawls, 1971, p. 431). See also Marx (1844, 1975, p. 361) and Marx and Engels (1970, p. 33). In more individualistic fashion, it is echoed in contemporary ideals of self-actualization.


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(5) Reasoning beings The capacity to reason through our use of language is usually seen by western philosophers as the most distinctive feature of human nature, though our moral tendencies do not rely on this capacity alone.12 The mind is inseparable from the body, though emergent from it, that is, dependent on it but irreducible to it; hence we should avoid reductionism in either direction, on the one side to sociobiology and on the other to ‘over ambitious assertions of transcendental status’ (Midgley, 2003, p. 34). We have highly developed capacities for communication; we are meaning-makers and self-describing beings, though again, the realization of these capacities depends on our upbringing.13 Meanings serve not only as external descriptions of the world but are constitutive of social practices, enabling people to act together in ways that would be impossible in the absence of those meanings. For example, to use money we must understand what coins, notes, cheques and credit cards mean; we must have shared ideas of what can properly be done with them. We learn not merely by rote, but by understanding the logic of arguments, the point of rules; stopping at the red traffic light may become a reflex, but we understand the rule behind it. While some elements of moral sensibility may emerge before we acquire language, ethical conduct depends on having a language in which we can learn common understandings of how we are supposed to behave towards others (Searle, 2005). Discourses provide the terms in which we think of ourselves and the world, and according to which we act, though not all consciousness is discursive (prelinguistic babies can respond to the world effectively in a number of ways). We are certainly powerfully shaped and positioned by discourses, though to say that we are ‘discursively constituted’ is to risk implying that they can always infallibly produce what they name. Discourses are rarely univocal; they typically include arguments and contradictions that provoke critical engagement (Billig, 1996). Language is thus far more than a medium of communication. Our ability as meaning-makers enables our extraordinary capacity for cultural variation and the development of wondrously complex literary, artistic, technical, economic and scientific practices, which figure so 12

13

See Midgley (2003) for a critique of this reductionism in the context of understanding ethical being. This universal capacity for self-description is invoked by Richard Rorty (1979) even though he claims that universalism can and should be rejected.

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importantly in our lives. The way we understand ourselves and others is significant, both as subjects and objects of ethical concern. We have – or rather can develop – a capacity for reflexivity, not merely in terms of monitoring and evaluating what is happening, but in being able to evaluate our own understandings, criteria and goals by ‘talking to ourselves’ (Archer, 2003, 2007). In particular, deliberating over our goals, values and criteria appears to be one of the things that distinguishes humans from other animals (Taylor, 1985). As MacIntyre shows, this capacity for ‘independent practical reasoning’ is contingently acquired in childhood, depending on the quality of the care we receive (MacIntyre, 1999; see also Winnicott, 1964). Reflexivity further enables us to be creative in our practice and relationships with others. It also enables us to be narrative beings, reflecting on how our evaluations have changed over time in light of what has happened to us, and making sense of what we are doing in terms of stories. Such reflections may highlight the relationships, experiences and commitments which appear to have been important in shaping our character and orienting our concerns. Hence people tend to have a sense of ‘leading a life’, which may include moral learning, revising and developing their commitments, a sense of movement combined with trying to control and guide it in a way that makes sense and is valued by them, though of course it may not be controllable. This sense of self is not only an influence on our own moral outlook but can be something we feel we need to understand in others, at least where we form close relationships with them, so we know how to behave well towards them. People’s internal conversations are important not merely as facts about them, but as sources of claims about their needs and wants that invite evaluation. Their accounts face social scientists’ accounts as both object of study and possible rival. Social scientists often edit out lay reflexivity in their explanations. Positivists tend to treat it as mere ‘noise’ concealing law-like regularities in human behaviour, or assume that it is simply the complex product of those supposedly invariant regularities. But there are also non-positivist forms of determinism, whether structural (people as mere bearers of roles within social structures) or discursive (people as wholly discursively constituted). The sociological metaphor of ‘internalization’ of norms can lead us to overlook the capacity for reason and reflexivity. To some extent people evaluate whether to accept or refuse particular beliefs. The deterministic approaches produce a theory–practice


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contradiction in that they require the theorist to exempt herself from their supposedly general account of human action. Some approaches which do assume a capacity for reflexivity, such as rational choice accounts, make highly reductionist, insultingly simplistic assumptions about the life of the mind of the actor, taking them to be merely narrowly self-interested. In more avant-garde literature a certain limited reflexivity is sometimes conceded but a more searching ‘social reflexivity’, that is, reflection on the influence of discourses and social structures on the very way we think, is presented as so difficult that only the most ‘critical’ researchers can begin to achieve it.14 Yet social reflexivity is not absent in lay thought; for example, many ordinary people become atheists by deliberating on the religious discourses that unsuccessfully attempt to colonize their thought; workers sometimes become concerned about how managerialism is affecting how they understand themselves. To acknowledge humans’ capacity for reason should not lead us to exaggerate the extent to which we have clear beliefs or think and act consistently. As Raymond Geuss puts it: People have no determinate beliefs at all about a variety of subjects; they often don’t know what they want or why they did something; even when they know or claim to know what they want, they can often give no coherent account of why exactly they want what they claim to want . . . [P]eople are rarely more than locally consistent in action, thought, and desire, and in many domains of human life this does not matter at all . . . (Geuss, 2008, pp. 2–3)

This is consistent with Bourdieu’s ‘Pascalian’ view of action: much of the time we act on automatic, and consistency of action in different domains is often unnecessary for practical success. To these points we should recall that emotions are part of reason rather than in conflict with it, and include moral and immoral sentiments like benevolence or jealousy. They are responsive to different circumstances and register the quality of our relations to others, affect our psychological well-being, and motivate us to respond to them. This makes them a fundamental component of our capacity for ethical – and unethical – conduct.

14

This is arguably implicit in some versions of critical social science, particularly those of a Foucauldian provenance (see Chapter 7). Iain Craib sharply identified both the contradictions and the arrogance of this common sociological stance (Craib, 1998).

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Finally, in considering our capacity for reason and its ethical implications, we need also to include the practical reasoning involved in work and avoid the idealist or scholastic tendency to reduce activity to communication. As Marx emphasized, through work we not only develop skills, but change ourselves and our environment, and hence the material conditions that influence our ways of thinking and acting, so that we become different kinds of being – historical beings. These capacities for communication, reasoning, learning, reflexivity and making things give a historical quality to human becoming. Most of the work we do is for and with others, and the quality and quantity of the work that we do and the psychological and economic rewards it brings have a major impact on our well-being. While work is a means to an end, it is not only of instrumental value; it can be a source of fulfilment. For these reasons, the nature of the work that we are allowed or required to do has considerable ethical significance.15

(6) Fellow-feeling Fundamental to the ethical dimension of social life is the capacity for ‘fellow-feeling’. At its most basic level it is evident in the tendency for moods to be contagious within groups. Even prelinguistic babies are affected by the mood of others around them, and these non-verbal processes of recognition of others’ moods continue in later life (Nichols, 2004).16 This basic characteristic of human sociality featured strongly in the literature of the Scottish Enlightenment.17 It also takes a linguistic, hermeneutic form in terms of a capacity to understand to some degree how others feel and what is happening to them, though we may not necessarily approve of or sympathize with them (Smith, 1759).18 Fellow-feeling is fallible – the spectator may misunderstand the other’s situation, and even when she does understand it, her experience is not the same as it is for the actor; she may also sometimes simply 15 16

17 18

On this, see Breen (2007), Gomberg (2007), Murphy (1993) and Sayer (2009). One of the striking differences between psychology and sociology is how uninterested sociologists are in when and how we acquire such capacities for social interaction. Disciplinary parochialism comes at a cost. See Eagleton (2008) for some interesting contextualization of this theme. Smith uses the term ‘sympathy’ for this fellow-feeling, and distinguishes it from the more common sense of sympathy as involving commiseration, though he does also sometimes use the term in the latter sense.


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be indifferent. Nevertheless, without some capacity for fellow-feeling, we would struggle to function as social actors, certainly as ethical actors. For Adam Smith, sympathy arises more from being able to understand the other’s situation by imagining ourselves in it, than merely from identifying their feelings alone. This enables us to formulate our own view of what has happened rather than relying wholly on what we can discern from the other’s feelings (Griswold, 1999, p. 87). Thus, when we see that our friend is upset, we generally want to know what has upset them. In short, fellow-feeling is crucial to our social being, though like all these human characteristics, there is some variation in its strength; significantly, those who lack it through autism find interaction with others difficult.

(7) Relationality and the self: beyond egoism and altruism Taking the foregoing points together enables us to illuminate further our deeply social nature. The relational character of human being – our dependence on others for our individuality and sense of self – is fundamental, though this is inadequately acknowledged in the liberal conceptions of human being dominant in modern western society (Held, 2006). There is not first an individual who then contingently enters social relations; relations are constitutive of the individual and their sense of self. Donald Winnicott, the paediatrician and psychoanalyst, argued that there can be no such thing as an individual baby; no baby on its own could last more than a few hours (Winnicott, 1964). To survive and develop they must be in relation to their mother or other carers, and they require that physical and psychological relation to develop their sense of self. Our ability to act autonomously and with self-command is dependent not only on others letting us do so, but on our ability, learned through interaction with others who recognize us as a subject, to see ourselves as subjects. Without appropriate care in early life, we cannot acquire that ability; the relation between the social and the psychological continues to be symbiotic throughout life (MacIntyre, 1999; Norrie, 2000). Individual agency develops through relationality and difference; what we are is dependent on but irreducible to such relations. We are emergent products of specific social relations, in which we continue to act, reproducing or transforming those relations in the process. True, each of us lives those relations in our own ways, personalizing them, but our ability to do so is still dependent on these past and present relations

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(Archer, 2000a). ‘Individual identity is both distinctive and inseparable from those other social entities (language, culture, structures, institutions) which constitute its relational context’ (Norrie, 2000, p. 199). According to Charles Taylor, the self is dialogical – formed through internal and external conversations with real and imagined others, blurring the psychological distinction between self and other: one cannot be a self on one’s own. I am a self only in relation to certain interlocutors: in one way in relation to those conversation partners who were essential to my achieving self-definition; in another in relation to those who are now crucial to my continuing grasp of languages and self-understanding . . . A self exists only within what I call ‘webs of interlocution’. It is this original situation which gives its sense to our concept of ‘identity’, offering an answer to the question of who I am through a definition of where I am speaking from and to whom. The full definition of someone’s identity thus usually involves . . . some reference to a defining community. (Taylor, 1989, p. 36)

While this discursive contribution to the formation of the self is important, we must also look behind this rather scholastic, masculine emphasis on discourse; our identity is also shaped by being held, loved, hurt, ignored, shamed, played with, celebrated, etc.19 To define who I am I have to say something about the key relationships and practices that have shaped me. As the South African saying goes, ‘a person is a person through other persons’. Even in liberal societies, in some cases, identification with others may overwhelm the relation to self; for example, women with heavy care responsibilities may find it difficult to dissociate their feelings about themselves from their feelings about their loved ones and their fortunes, suggesting that the boundaries between selves can be more blurred than western social science and philosophy tend to acknowledge: even if the sense that one is a self is presupposed, the specific content of the sense of self comes from without. The formation of self-image, even selfrecognition, consists to some extent of locating ourselves on a grid of attributes, concepts, comparisons, judgements, etc. that belong to the collective consciousness . . . Some of our most personal, private and intimate decisions have a public or external origin; their intelligibility is a general intelligibility: falling in love is no more personal than getting married. (Tallis, 1988, pp. 66–7)

19

Linda Woodhead (personal communication) and Archer (2000a).


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Recognition can be given only by another subject, and it cannot be achieved simply through unilateral demands. Nor can it come purely from objectifying ourselves through work by producing things, for objects are not capable of reflecting back to us our conception of ourselves as subjects, having some degree of freedom and responsibility. Only other persons, also subjects and having some degree of freedom and responsibility, can do this. These points about our social nature do not require us to deny the existence of subjects or selves. We may be far from unitary subjects, because we are shaped by many, often disparate, relations and experiences, but we have some ability to reflect upon the very relations on which we depend, and take some responsibility for our ideas and actions. There must be a subject even to consider the idea of the fragmented, decentred subject (Bartky, 2002; Soper, 1990).20 Individuals are not only economically and socially dependent on others but psychologically dependent on them for their support, sociality and approval, as Adam Smith argued (Smith, 1759). The quality of relations to others is essential to well-being, forming much of what moral sentiments are concerned with (e.g., pride, shame, guilt). The fact that solitary confinement is a severe form of punishment reminds us of the necessity of interaction with others for sustaining well-being. Similarly, feelings of nervousness or belonging, empowerment and acceptance in the presence of others indicate how dependent our sense of ourselves is on others. Recognition not only enables the development of the self but, in the form of respect, allows us to develop selfrespect (Honneth, 1995). Given their psychological dependence on others and their need for their approval, individuals frequently monitor their own actions and those of others, by reference to how they imagine others would evaluate the situations in question. There are other further striking indications of our social nature: the common experience of finding that a problem shared is a problem halved; or that something which is highly personal and perhaps shameful should become less painful when confessed to a sympathetic ear who still respects and values us and helps us restore some self-respect. Similarly, as Hume observed, there are few pleasures that cannot be enhanced by being 20

The critique of the idea of the unified, self-contained subject is not a recent postmodernist phenomenon; in the eighteenth century, David Hume observed that when we look inside ourselves all we can find is ‘a bundle or collection of different perceptions which succeed one another with an inconceivable rapidity and are in perpetual flux and movement’ (Hume, 1969, I, IV, vi).

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shared (Hume, 1969, p. 412); even to witness remarkable, beautiful things on one’s own is often inferior to sharing the experience, at least with a valued other, and having to live without anyone to bear witness to one’s life is hard. Given this deeply social nature and dependence on others for our sense of self, our evaluations are strongly comparative: we measure ourselves not so much against absolute standards but against what others are like, particularly those with whom we associate most, and we form expectations accordingly. Thus, it may be painful to be treated differently from others in one’s reference group, at least if there seem to be no good reasons for such differential treatment. Comparing ourselves with others is a major part of the ongoing work of attention, on the basis of which evaluative judgements and decisions emerge. This comparative orientation is fundamental to morality, being crucial to the feelings of justice and injustice, resentment, envy, pride and shame. It should already be apparent that any account of human social beings which attempts to cast people as overwhelmingly self-interested, so that even apparently altruistic acts are products of wily calculation by egotistical individuals, is inadequate, for it ignores our social, relational character and our dependence on care. Yet those who believe this can be extraordinarily persistent, interpreting any instances of behaviour cited as oriented to others as actually egotistical. There are many responses to this kind of interpretation; here I shall just note three.21 Firstly, those who advocate it frequently exempt themselves from the account, being embarrassed to be thought of as purely self-interested in all their actions. Secondly, if we ask if they advocate the thesis simply because it’s in their self-interest to do so, or because they think it’s true, then if they answer that it is the former, then we know we need not take it seriously, and if they answer that it is the latter, then we know that there are exceptions to it. Thirdly, a common trick of advocates of the thesis is to refuse to define in advance what would constitute a counterinstance – a non-egotistical action – so that any such instances can retrospectively be re-interpreted as egotistical ‘at base’. But if all possible actions are egotistical, including ones done for or out of appreciation of others, then the term becomes meaningless; it fails to identify anything distinctive.

21

For example, see Blackburn (1998, pp. 135–44).


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If we consider the emotion of gratitude, we may feel grateful to someone for inspiring us or for allowing us into their lives so that we can enjoy their charm, wit, warmth and intelligence. Such feelings could of course be interpreted as egotistical, except that it is them that we value. Part of what we might appreciate in them is their otherness – the fact that they are not simply what we expected and egotistically hoped for, but nevertheless surprise and delight us. As Smith noted, the fact that this pleasure may be unexpected implies that it was not sought egotistically. More generally, an evaluation which offered no justification in terms of the properties of the object being evaluated would make no sense whatsoever. Morality is often thought of as being strongly associated with altruism; indeed it is sometimes defined in such terms. This can have the effect of making egoism seem amoral or immoral, especially where altruism is construed as involving self-sacrifice. However, while self-interest and the interests of others may sometimes be at odds, they are not always so; indeed expecting all actions to be either egoistic or altruistic belies an insufficiently relational concept of human social being. Altruism need not involve self-sacrifice or be opposed to self-interest (O’Neill, 1992). It may be prompted by fellow-feeling, especially distress at others’ distress. It implies that an individual has a conception of themselves not only as ‘I’ but as a person like others, having much in common with them in terms of capacities and susceptibilities, including an ability to reason. Thus in principle, values and reasons have force for anyone, independently of any particular individual’s interests. Some kinds of egoism which involve looking after oneself may not merely be unselfish – for example, making sure one has a good diet – but actually benefit others by avoiding burdening them with having to care for us. Self-interest and morality are sometimes congruent (Scheffler, 1992). Some actions defy categorization as either self-interested or altruistic. In the case of persons in relations of care such as parent and child, they can act ‘for self-and-other together’, as Virginia Held puts it (Held, 2006; see also MacIntyre, 1999). Being friendly and generous is not merely something we do in the hope that others will reciprocate, although unrequited benevolence can be disheartening. They are things we can do because they are themselves forms of well-being, involving a happy relation to self as well as to others.22 Some activities are cooperative and creative. Having a friendly, 22

For an argument that they are virtues because they are constitutive of human flourishing, see MacIntyre (1999).

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humorous conversation with someone is not merely in both our interests, but involves jointly creating something new. Jokes and wit tend to be more enjoyable when shared with others and we may find ourselves coming out with witticisms that we had not thought of before; the humour becomes a collective, mutually beneficial, emergent social product. A sociable evening with friends can best be enjoyed not by worrying about how you are feeling or what you are getting out of it, but by letting go and melting into an ‘imaginative unity with the affective life of others’ (Eagleton, 2008, p. 35). None of these remarks about egoism and altruism is meant to imply that self-interested motives are unimportant; they are, of course, but as Smith argued, self-interest is complex and differentiated, including prudence, self-command and fellow-feeling.23 Nor is it merely to be identified with what we prefer, for we can be mistaken about what is in our self-interest. Further, sentiments such as a sense of justice, and feelings of friendship, loyalty, compassion, benevolence, gratitude and care, seem to be no less common features of our differently cultivated natures, even if individuals are mostly self-interested when very young (Griswold, 1999; Midgley, 1991; Smith, 1759).

(8) Attachments and commitments The relational quality of human social being is further evident in the capacity of individuals to form attachments and commitments, whether to ideas, causes (for example, political projects), traditions, practices or other people (Archer, 2000a). Early attachments to primary care-givers are crucial for our subsequent psychological character and well-being (Bowlby, 1969; Siegel, 1999). As we grow up we can become attached to people, routines or favourite places or objects, and may, in different ways, love some of them.24 Commitments involve a more conscious and normative relation to things; some mainly evoke a sense of duty, some 23

24

‘The wise and virtuous man is at all times willing that his own private interest should be sacrificed to the public interest of his own particular order or society’ (Smith, 1759, VI.ii.3.3, p. 235). Smith included this in the sixth and final edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, published in 1790, a year after the fifth and final edition of The Wealth of Nations (see Smith, 1976), which is widely misrepresented as substituting a self-interested model of the individual for the ethical individual of The Theory of Moral Sentiments. See Carol Smart’s excellent discussion of the relationship between commitment and love and her critique of social science’s difficulties in acknowledging love (Smart, 2007).


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more a sense of love. They involve cognitive beliefs about the world, including well-being (Lieberman, 2007). They usually emerge gradually and partly unintentionally, through continued immersion in relationships and activities, so that they become embodied, and come to involve us. We do not wake up one morning and decide that we are committed to a political party or jazz or a certain person. It takes time and repeated involvement, and learning. It would be absurd for someone to claim that they were a political activist before they had gained any experience of political activity, or a musician before they had acquired some skill in making music. Commitments come to constitute our character, identity and conception of ourselves, such that if we are prevented from pursuing them, then we suffer something akin to bereavement, for we lose not merely something external, but part of ourselves. I am that person who is committed to these values and causes (I am a socialist), these practices (social science, cycling, etc.), these relationships (father of . . ., partner of . . ., friend of . . ., etc.). A person who lacks any commitments lacks character; they are likely to feel rootless and lost, and have little interest for others (O’Neill, 1998). ‘[W]e are who we are because of what we care about: in delineating our ultimate concerns and accommodating our subordinate ones, we also define ourselves’ (Archer, 2000a, p. 10; see also Taylor, 1985). Hence our own flourishing comes to be dependent on the flourishing of our commitments. If someone attacks them, we may feel personally threatened because they help to make up who we are. We may be depressed by the decline of an institution to which we have become committed, or by the loss of a loved one. There is thus no clear distinction between our own flourishing and that of our commitments; they are fused. Because of this relation to well-being, commitments involve emotional attachments, though this does not mean they are necessarily irrational or unreasoned. They are stronger than mere ‘preferences’, and go beyond self-interest, narrowly conceived. In their study of Guatemalan smallholders who have made the transition from growing traditional crops to cash crops, Fischer and Benson show how the farmers’ psychological investment in cash crops goes beyond material gain and simple ‘self-interest’ as this tends to be understood in modern economics. While they had to give up their commitment to traditional practices in order to avoid poverty, they became committed to their new practices, for like the traditional ones, they involved the labour of their families, providing them with a sense of unity and

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common purpose, and it was this, as much as the extra money, that they valued (Fischer and Benson, 2006). As this example shows, the relationship between self and commitments and strongly valued goods is not static; we feel ourselves moving closer to some or falling away from others. For some, balancing their commitments may be a major problem. People may change the balance not only for pragmatic reasons but because their strong evaluations of their relative worth have changed (Taylor, 1985). In the process, they themselves also gradually change. Although the distinction between commitments and preferences is a fuzzy one, it is not merely one of strength of attachment, for there are important qualitative differences too.25 Where preferences are concerned we are generally willing to substitute something else for what we prefer. I would prefer to do x (stay with my current bank), but if I discover y (another bank) is better I might give x up for y. If I am committed to, say, my child or certain political beliefs, then they can’t be sold or swapped for something else. I am committed to certain people, ideas and causes and I can’t be bought off, for they are ends in themselves, not merely means to other ends, and commitment to them, in all their irreplaceable specificity, has become part of who I am. Further, precisely because we become committed to a variety of things, we cannot simply choose between them where they conflict as if they were external to us; we inevitably experience such conflicts as an internal conflict, and they become dilemmatic. Commitments and identity are not playful. Nor are they contractual: as John O’Neill points out, parents are not likely to tell their 18-year-old children that their parental contract has come to an end and that they no longer wish to be parents (O’Neill, 1998). People assess commitments via socially available criteria, though we can question these too, and our involvement owes much to the encouragement and approval of others. If we are committed to a certain practice, like music or karate, the primary focus of our activity is neither ourselves nor others, but the internal goods and standards of that practice. Recall the example of the experienced nurse who becomes committed to her job – so she becomes a nurse – and can meet and further the internal standards of nursing (MacIntyre, 1981). As a result, the performance of her duty to others becomes part of her identity and 25

See Blackburn (1998, Chapter 1) on the gradations.


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something which she may find satisfying, rather than something which is counterposed to her self-interest simply as an external burden of altruism. This is not to say that all duties are like this; some may seem like external burdens or necessary evils. Alternatively, we may be motivated by a concern to act justly, which again need not mean sacrificing ourselves for others. In trying to mark students’ essays fairly I am neither pursuing my own self-interest nor merely being altruistic (it does not involve giving them the marks their authors would like!); I am trying to achieve certain standards of fairness that are upheld by the practice of teaching. We can be oriented to principles, objects and practices for their own sake as well as to ourselves and others. Not all our commitments may be in our self-interest: some might become so important to us that we sacrifice our self-interest for them.26 Some, like a commitment to a fascist party, might be oppressive. Culturally emergent practices may sometimes cause ill-being. This capacity for developing attachments and commitments that come to figure prominently in our well-being makes us highly vulnerable, should they be lost or we become unable to pursue them. Many other species appear to suffer from the loss of offspring, partners or other companions, but the sheer variety and depth of attachments and commitments that individual human beings are able to develop gives them the possibility of multiple sources of both flourishing and suffering.

(9) Autonomy and heteronomy Social science and philosophy have traditionally emphasized and valued our capacity for autonomy or freedom, but often in a way which fails to understand this in relation to our social being. Feminism has been rightly critical of the supposedly universal model often assumed in moral and political philosophy, of the masculine, adult individual, unencumbered by relationships and commitments to particular others beyond those with whom he chooses to contract (Cooke, 1999). It is an impossible model, for human beings could not even survive according to it, let alone flourish. Any social science, ethics or political philosophy which incorporates it and makes light of our relational nature is falsely based. 26

Taylor calls these ‘hypergoods’ (1989, pp. 106–7).

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Autonomy should be understood not as complete independence of others but as self-command and capacity for agency within the context of relationships and responsibilities that afford us some support. Responsibilities both tie us to others and require us to exercise our capacity for self-command, albeit in a way which takes account of others. ‘Acknowledgement of dependence is the key to independence’ (MacIntyre, 1999, p. 85). Relationships based on mutual respect are different from relationships based on coercion, domination and uncritical submission to tradition. Someone who has commitments and evaluates and tries to adjust them is tied to them without necessarily lacking autonomy (O’Neill, 1998). Someone who makes sacrifices to devote themselves to a cause they believe in is exercising autonomy or self-command, even though it limits their freedom. Yet while our autonomy depends on others, overly demanding responsibilities can be problematic too, as is evident in the loss of sense of self experienced by women who have to devote themselves completely to the care of their families (Kittay, 1999; Sevenhuijsen, 1998). We can lose ourselves at one extreme through complete self-abnegation, and at the other through loss of our most important and lasting relationships. We might try to reconcile recognition of the relational character of social being with the ideal of freedom by arguing that we should be able to choose the relationships into which we enter. However, while this might seem appealing, it is absurd to imagine that we could choose all of our influences and attachments. We are born into unchosen positions, relationships and environments, which, in our early years, shape us deeply. Some may be supportive and empowering, some oppressive. Subsequently, we can exercise some reflexivity and choice, though just how wide it is depends on these circumstances. Without committed parents – not necessarily biological parents – committed to particular children as their responsibility, children may fail to form the attachments that are so important for their development as social actors. It is therefore unrealistic and ethically absurd to propose that all relationships should be chosen. There is every reason to react with alarm to the prospect of a world filled with self-actualizing persons pulling their own strings, capable of guiltlessly saying ‘no’ to anyone about anything, and freely choosing when to begin and end all their relationships. It is hard to see how, in such a world, children could be raised, the sick or disturbed could be cared for, or people could know each other through their lives and grow old together. (Scheman, 1983, cited in Kittay, 1999, p. 49)


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Note that this is not simply a purely normative argument; it is also a description of a possible, though disastrous, state of being. Parent–child relations are radically different from the contractual relations that libertarians value, and since the capacity for independent practical reason depends on how we are looked after in childhood, these noncontractual relations are crucial for well-being. We are dependent on our carers for bringing us up in a way which allows us to develop a sense of self-respect and confident agency; overly protective and restrictive parenting may lead to helplessness and lack of self-confidence; too few limits may lead to a sense of abandonment and insecurity, and lack of fellow-feeling. Dependence can be good or bad, empowering and supportive or disempowering. Liberal individualism tends only to note the latter, and hence views dependence one-sidedly as heteronomy. Autonomy and relationality are dialectically related – in some ways complementary and interdependent, in others in opposition.

(10) Virtues, vices, evil and social context We saw in the last chapter how we tend to acquire dispositions to act in certain ways through repeated practice. Thus by repeatedly acting generously (selfishly) towards others, we gradually acquire the habit or virtue (vice) of generosity (selfishness), and become a generous (selfish) person. As Smith argued, this process is strongly influenced by the approval and disapproval of real or imagined others in response to our actions. Through the informal moral education provided by everyday social interaction, including these responses of others, the child acquires dispositions and habitual responses towards them and to familiar situations. They become virtues (or vices), in the sense that the individual habitually behaves well (or badly) without necessarily having to think about it. The acquisition of such dispositions and skills can involve some conscious monitoring and discursive reasoning, but while discourses providing instructions may help in learning them, they are never enough on their own. We have to learn how to make friends by trying to do it. The kinds of virtues and vices people acquire are strongly influenced by the cultural, social and material character of particular societies. Particular social arrangements encourage certain behaviours and discourage others and affect what is deemed appropriate and acceptable. Thus, markets encourage individualistic competitive

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behaviour, whereas deliberative democratic forums encourage more consideration of the public good. The most fundamental level at which this social shaping of behaviour occurs is that of the habitus – the set of embodied dispositions that people acquire through habituation to particular kinds of role and relationship; in other words, it influences the mix of virtues and vices that individuals develop (Bourdieu, 1994). People can be both cooperative and competitive; which behaviour is dominant is influenced by the kind of society in which they live and their particular place within it. In the Hobbesian social order of a ghetto, altruistic behaviour may be highly risky, and those born into one are likely to develop dispositions attuned to dealing with scarcity, racism, domination and intimidation. As Robert Jackall showed in his study of corporate managers in the United States, corporate organizations are instrumental, highly competitive milieus that provide possibilities for both success and failure; success depends on a combination of hard work and opportunism. Benevolence and loyalty are likely to lead to failure, and hence competitiveness, dissembling and pragmatism are common traits of managers (Jackall, 1988). These social influences imply that the distribution of ethical (or unethical) dispositions and the experience of different kinds of (im)moral sentiment are likely to vary across the social field somewhat, in accordance with the nature of institutions (Sayer, 2005). Virtues and vices can be changed, whether through changes in the external context and social relations in which we live or through conscious self-change. In either case, it again takes practice and time. Thus, by taking on successively bigger challenges, we may become more courageous and resilient. The teacher who repeatedly puts on an authoritarian manner to control unruly pupils gradually becomes authoritarian. Jonathan Glover shows how a capacity for evil tends to develop through a series of successively more vicious acts, each of which makes the next one seem less objectionable; thus, to train soldiers to kill they generally have to be brutalized through a series of drills which give them practice in acting brutally, and in suppressing compassion, guilt, shame and fear (Glover, 2001). Sometimes this moral or immoral training through practice is hardly noticed; if we are lucky and are brought up in a friendly and caring environment we are likely to become friendly ourselves without thinking about it. Nevertheless, we may intermittently ‘take stock’ and evaluate our virtues and vices, or more simply our character, as Margaret Archer’s research on internal


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conversations shows (Archer, 2007). We may feel we must be more assertive, more outgoing, less lazy, etc., and try to change ourselves through repeated practice in the hope that we become habituated to acting in these ways, so that it becomes ‘second nature’. This can be difficult not only because of the inertia of our existing embodied dispositions but because it may fail to bring the hoped-for effects and positive feedback. Thanks to their susceptibility to suffering and this reflexivity, the social influence on people’s character and actions is not so great, nor are people so malleable and gullible, that they happily comply with any social order in which they live. Not only their self-interest, but their moral sentiments and ideas, and their reflexive deliberations on them, provide sources of resistance; indeed some ability to resist social pressures is normally expected in everyday life.27 As Michael Walzer puts it: The moral world and the social world are more or less coherent, but they are never more than more or less coherent. Morality is always potentially subversive of class and power. (Walzer, 1989, p. 22)

Social orders are invariably heterogeneous so that their members experience various forms of flourishing and suffering throughout their lives, though of course there are extraordinary inequalities between individuals in these respects. These experiences are a crucial element in the largely informal moral education people gain throughout their lives, influencing how they respond to and evaluate things. Thus the experience of some minor personal injustice in childhood may sensitize a comfortably off person to other, more serious, forms of injustice suffered by others in less advantageous positions (Smith, 1759, Chapter I). Our moral education may also include the vicarious experience of the suffering and flourishing of others through literature and images. To the extent that moral or immoral behaviour is significantly influenced by social forms, these forms can and should become objects of moral concern. For example, a common moral objection to neoliberalism is that it tends to make people become more individualistic 27

Commonsense understandings typically make excessive, unreasonable expectations of this ability – for example, expecting those in disadvantaged positions to compensate for their disadvantages through heroic efforts.

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and competitive, and less inclined to consider the public good. Perhaps the most common failing of both lay moral judgement and moral philosophy is to ignore or underestimate this social shaping and to focus almost exclusively on individual behaviour in abstraction from such structures. An unjust social order tends to generate more antisocial behaviour than a just one. Much of the avoidable suffering produced by particular forms of social organization is unintended and often indirect. For example, in market systems, uncoerced transactions between individuals can easily lead to extreme inequalities and concentrations of power that allow domination. Moral philosophy’s concern with individual actions or character, and its habit of abstracting from particular forms of social organization, leads to a kind of moralism where some of the prime sources of flourishing and suffering are overlooked. A capacity for evil is a striking feature of human nature. It seems likely that even those who have never knowingly harmed anyone are at least familiar with having evil thoughts – perhaps of inflicting pain on someone they particularly despise (Midgley, 1984; Vetlesen, 2005). As I shall argue later, this capacity for harming others is a good reason for not attempting simply to ground ethics in a conception of human nature, though this is not a good reason for disregarding human nature in trying to understand ethical being. Evil is not merely the absence of the good (as sometimes said in philosophy), or a failure to act well, for it involves knowingly harming others or being complicit in the harming of others. Some commentators have noted that in modernity this often occurs where the perpetrator does not directly witness the suffering of the victim. Bauman argues this was the case in the Holocaust; the construction of a rationalized division of labour that separated means from ends, and those who gave orders from those who carried them out, made it easier for individuals to participate in genocide (Bauman, 1989). But as Arne Johan Vetlesen shows, this is not the only circumstance in which evil occurs (Vetlesen, 2005). Sometimes evil involves inflicting suffering face to face, where the perpetrator knows precisely that the victim is a human subject capable of immense suffering – and often, as in domestic violence, a familiar person.28

28

Vetlesen (2005) refutes Levinas’s argument that the presence of the other, symbolized by the face, makes a moral claim of responsibility on the subject.


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Following Alford, Vetlesen argues that, in such cases, the evil is a means by which the perpetrator attempts to remove his own vulnerability by shifting it onto the victim, and feels empowered in so doing, at least briefly; being human involves being in a relationship with evil in the sense of being aware of ‘the impulse to hurt others, with thoughts, images, and fantasies about what such hurting would mean in terms of attaining relief from the burden of being human and so vulnerable’ (Vetlesen, 2005, p. 109, emphasis in original). This awareness may only exceptionally lead to evil actions, but it is something all are likely to acquire. Sometimes evil may also be facilitated by the dehumanization of others, so that prohibitions on mistreatment of them are suspended. Throughout history, organized violence against others has been based on the assumption that certain others’ lives are worth less than those of the perpetrator’s own group. Some forms, such as domestic violence, may be sanctioned by social norms in some societies. The social causes of violence are complex (Glover, 2001). On the one hand, it may result from oppression; violent criminals typically have had deeply painful and troubled childhoods and been denied love and recognition, and harbour shame about their consequent inability to form adequate relations to others and to the self (Gilligan, 2000). On the other hand, violence – often of a more continuous, less striking and less deprecated kind – may be exercised by the powerful and advantaged. The roots of such behaviour lie in particular forms of social organization; hence their uneven distribution. Evil might be seen as a kind of deficient response to social being. It may involve using detailed knowledge of what produces suffering in others, but it implies ignorance in imagining that our vulnerability, shame or suffering can be eliminated by making others suffer, ignorance of how far our own well-being is dependent on that of others, and ignorance of the value of others’ lives. Sociology sometimes reduces evil or immorality to contingent, identity-sensitive variants like racism, homophobia and sexism, as if they exhausted the problematic behaviours common in society. Important though these are, there are other forms of vice or evil; one might still be selfish, abusive and vicious in a way which was indifferent to race, sexuality or gender.29 These more ordinary vices are not 29

Equally, the converse applies; someone who is racist or sexist might be generous and respectful in many situations; virtues and vices are often combined.

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sociologically unimportant just because they do not favour or disfavour any particular social group; they are common in all parts of the social field, albeit sometimes unevenly. Vices (and virtues) may vary between and within societies, and they may be differently understood and valued in these different locations, but they are common to all.

(11) Well-being: objective and plural, but not relative The argument so far calls into question the subjectivist view of wellbeing or flourishing as merely a state of mind. Although we are sometimes unsure of why we feel good or bad, we can usually give reasons for how we feel in terms of what has been happening to us and the things we care about. So our subjective feelings seem to be about things which are objective in the sense of independent of them. It is precisely because of this independence that we can sometimes realize that our evaluations of our situation have been mistaken – that we had a false sense of security, or that we had underestimated how much we were appreciated, and so on. If well-being were merely subjective, then our views on it would be infallible. To some extent we may try to make it a matter of will; if there is no way you can get something good, it may be less painful to say you wouldn’t want it anyway than to long for it. The poor, in particular, may have ‘adaptive preferences’ and refuse what they are refused (Bourdieu, 1984; Sen, 1999), yet the fact that they may still suffer from the lack implies an objectivist concept of well-being. Well-being should therefore be thought of in terms of objective states of being which people strive to discover, achieve or create.30 It includes some aspects which people understand well, like getting enough food and sleep, or being respected, and which we hence tend to seek to achieve. It includes others of which we are unsure; is it better to devote oneself to family and friends or pursue a life of individual achievement? Is a life of ‘good nights out’ a good life? As we saw in the last chapter, in using practical reason about our ends and concerns, we generally find that there are limits to the extent to which different ends which are basic to our well-being can be traded off against one another: having the support and respect of others may help us bear pain, but it does not remove it. As we shall see in Chapter 7, some philosophers and social 30

Note the connection between this ontological sense of objectivity and a fallibilist view of epistemological objectivity (see above, pp. 45–9).


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scientists have tried to identify these different, seemingly nonsubstitutable elements in developing a theory of the ‘capabilities’ that we need to flourish. This objectivist conception of well-being does not assume that there is only one good way of living; it is compatible with pluralism, but not with relativism. Pluralism in this context is the view that there are many kinds of well-being, but that not just any way of life constitutes wellbeing. This is different from relativism – the idea that what is good is simply relative to one’s point of view, so that if some people think female genital mutilation is good, then it is for them. Different cultures provide different kinds and mixes of flourishing and suffering. Simply as human beings we don’t need to pray or watch television in order to flourish, but because we necessarily always live within particular cultural forms, such as religions and modern media, our well-being is affected by their nature and our place within them. To be denied access to the particular set of cultural practices to which we have become attached, through which we make sense of ourselves and construct our narratives, and without which we cannot earn the respect of our peers, is likely to cause suffering. Thus, from Smith, through Marx, to the more recent theory of relative deprivation, it has been argued that what is acceptable as a minimum standard of living depends on the prevailing values and practices of the society in question; if participation in social life depends on having a mobile phone, then lack of one may limit our flourishing. Different cultures also have different conceptions of flourishing, and indeed different misconceptions of flourishing, such as the common belief in western culture that consuming vast numbers of commodities is the key to well-being. An objectivist view of well-being does not imply that there is only one kind of well-being, nor does it imply that western culture has any monopoly of them (Collier, 2003; Nussbaum, 1999).31 While it might seem easy to accept that cultures can be wrong about human physical capacities for flourishing (for example, promoting foods which cause heart disease) it is perhaps harder to accept this might be true of the more culturally autonomous practices which seem to be more self-confirming. Here we need to beware of an overly strong social constructionism. For example, Axel Honneth argues that, 31

I shall discuss whether different cultures might have radically different ethics in the next chapter.

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since the good ‘is always culturally defined, it is only by hermeneutic reference to a society’s self-understanding that social functions or their disorders can be determined’ (Honneth, 2007, pp. 34–5). There is a danger here of an epistemic fallacy: from the correct point that human well-being is always culturally defined or conceptualized – via particular cultural discourses – it is wrongly inferred that the condition that they define is itself successfully and exclusively determined by those discourses, so that cultural discourses can never be mistaken. The process of subjectification, as Foucault termed it, is not automatically wholly successful, for our inclinations are not simply ventriloquized by dominant discourses. If we equate flourishing and suffering with whatever any given culture defines these as, then we have a form of relativism. To be sure, society shapes us, thus giving cultural conceptions of the good something of a self-confirming character – but only partly. The basic needs of young children are socially defined in various ways but the definitions are fallible interpretations of their physical and psychological constitution. One doesn’t have to be a non-westerner to see that many western beliefs about what constitutes flourishing are mistaken. The diversity of cultural forms does not disqualify or relativize ethical theory but just presents it with more difficult judgements. Pluralist objectivism acknowledges that individuals vary and become adapted to different ways of being; what suits the quiet and studious may not suit the gregarious and physical. In addition, since human becoming or development is open-ended, it is always possible to discover and create new forms of flourishing, or indeed suffering. Thus, historically novel practices such as universal guaranteed education and health services, or more limited ones like yoga or the sharing of music videos on the internet, can enhance our flourishing. Even though these are clearly social constructions, their success is conditional on how they fit with the existing objective, acquired capacities and susceptibilities of those who take them up; hence many attempted innovations fail. The historical character of human being implies that we may become different people as a result of cultural change, such that what would be most conducive to future generations’ wellbeing may differ from our own. While this suggests an ‘ethics of creativity’, as Foucault termed it, following Nietzsche, it cannot be divorced from an ‘ethics of authenticity’ in which new forms of flourishing or suffering are emergent from – i.e., irreducible to but nevertheless dependent on – our existing nature (Foucault, 2000; Nietzsche,


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1996).32 To disregard claims about our capacities for flourishing and suffering now, on the grounds that we could become different beings, could license the most horrific kinds of repression. But while some things about human beings change, others seem remarkably constant, as we find with literature that speaks to us across the centuries. Aristotle’s writings, for example, contain both ideas that seem strange or obnoxious and others that would not look out of place in contemporary literature. Any understanding of well-being as an objective state has to recognize that it is unevenly achieved; there are extraordinary differences in the quality of life, both within, and more dramatically between, countries. Furthermore, the suffering and flourishing of different groups are frequently interdependent, as a result of various forms of domination and exploitation. We might call this ‘selective flourishing’. Ideally, we might want to argue that this could only be inferior to an inclusive form of flourishing, free of domination and exploitation, in which all benefit. Can the fortunate really count themselves happy under such conditions, especially where they benefit from injustices that cause others to suffer? Could this be called a situation of well-being (Foster, 1997; O’Neill, 2007)? A second argument for deeming selective flourishing inferior appeals to recognition. Adequate recognition that anyone can take seriously must be bilateral or multilateral and it requires equality among subjects. This is one of the implications of Hegel’s celebrated account of the problems of recognition among unequals, in the master–slave dialectic. Imagine a servant A who has been allowed only an inferior education relative to that had by their employer, B: then A is unlikely to be able to make a worthwhile judgement of B, so recognition by them would have little value for B. ‘What does A know about it?’ B might ask. In addition, if A lacks the security to make an independent judgement, her recognition is worthless to B, for she cannot be expected to say what she really thinks. Putting these points together, we can see that nothing that a subordinate says or does towards the dominant can match the recognition in words and deeds that an equal can give. To be adequately recognized by the slave, the master would have to abolish the relation of domination and cease to be a master. The development of a sense of selfworth therefore requires mutual recognition among subjects who are in 32

For discussions of the concept of emergence see Archer (2003) and Elder-Vass (2010).

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a strong sense equal and free to exercise autonomy, not merely formally in terms of their rights but in terms of their capabilities for living in ways they have reason to value. In principle, this argument seems to imply that our need for recognition requires equality among persons, but in practice, localized conditions for recognition can also be partly met within social strata, among peers in highly unequal societies, and indeed can coexist with misrecognition of others; thus the dominant may be content with recognition within their own class while stigmatizing outsiders. Such a response of course implies ignorance – perhaps wilful – of their dependence on the exploitation and domination of others, highly limited moral imaginations and a failure to generalize ethical ideas consistently. The stratification and segregation of societies is both cause and partial consequence of this failure of moral reasoning, producing small reference groups of similarly positioned people who provide each other with recognition while not noticing their place within relations of domination. Particularly where global relations are involved, the dominant may not even be aware of the subordinate classes. However, though uncommon, it is possible even for members of dominant groups to come to see that their domination not only restricts the flourishing of others, in a way that lacks justification, but restricts their own flourishing by preventing them from enjoying good relations with those over whom they have advantage. In effect, they acknowledge Hegel’s point.33 It is hugely important that there are not only working class but also some middle class egalitarians, not only female feminists but some male supporters, and so on. Such cases show that egalitarianism is not necessarily a product of resentment on the part of the dominated.34 They may be in a minority but they are not aberrations. These egalitarians are not simply altruists or people who can acknowledge injustice even where they have benefited from it; they are also likely to sense that they too would benefit further from more equal relationships because they would be able to enjoy recognition untainted by deference, resentment, guilt and inequality, and also enjoy the happiness, flourishing and achievements of those who they formerly 33 34

This is also recognized by Marx, Mill and contemporary feminism. The accusation of resentment – as if resentment could never be justifiable – is a standard response of the right to egalitarianism. Nietzsche’s critique of ressentiment on the part of the dominated towards the dominant is part of a polemic which naturalizes and legitimizes class, gender and racialized inequalities and discounts concepts of justice (Nietzsche, 1996).


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repressed. Of course, the flourishing of the dominated is more restricted than that of the dominant, but even the latter is restricted somewhat. In practice, of course, these ethical challenges to selective well-being based on domination are generally swept aside, but without them we are left with ‘might-is-right’.

Social ontologies and models of social action The above arguments have profound implications for social science. Consider the following approaches to social research: The first, exemplified by behaviourism and positivism, has a narrowly material, causal conception of action, focusing only on material states and processes. Typically, its explanations take the form: x is caused by y; e.g., educational performance is a function of parental income and status, etc. This approach fails to recognize the constitutive character of meaning in social action, that is, how the nature of practices in society depends on how actors understand them. The second has a hermeneutic conception of society and focuses purely on understanding actors’ understandings, hence reducing action to meaning and de-emphasizing the materiality of social processes (e.g., Winch, 1958). Approaches that reduce practice to discourse might be seen as a more recent variant of this. The third combines causal and hermeneutic approaches by including reasons and discourses among the range of causes of change. While Weberian and critical realist approaches combine them consciously (Bhaskar, 1998; Collier, 1994; Sayer, 2000b), in practice most social scientists do this, even if unknowingly. Some recent social research on ‘embodiment’ and ‘practical sense’ also fits this third approach, countering the tendencies of hermeneutics to view actors as disembodied meaning-makers or products of discourse (e.g., Bourdieu, 1998). Although the third approach overcomes the problems of reductionism in the first and second models, it leaves the problem of the alienation of contemporary social science. To overcome this we require what might, for want of a better term, be called a ‘needs-based conception of social being’, viewing actors not only as causal agents and as self-interpreting meaning-makers, but as needy and dependent, having an orientation of

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care and concern about some things, and capable of flourishing or suffering. ‘Needs’ here is used as a shorthand that also covers lack, want and desire, and includes culturally acquired or emergent needs. Failure to acknowledge human neediness and vulnerability invites misattributions of causality or responsibility, so that, for example, discourses are treated as capable on their own of motivating people. We do not merely have causal powers, like other objects, and understandings; we also have a relation to the world of concern. Remarkably, the literature on social ontology rarely gets beyond discussions of structure and agency and fails to recognize humans as needy and vulnerable social beings.35 Hence, on its own, the concept of agency implies an ability to choose to do things, but gives no indication of why we should want to. Whatever kind of rationality or reason we are interested in – theoretical, instrumental or substantive and practical – it is not merely a matter of logic or consistency or efficiency or goodness of fit to the world, for it presupposes this orientation to the world of care or concern, otherwise it is not clear why we should want to be rational or reasonable; all forms of reasoning have to be driven by something. Emotionality exemplifies this orientation: ‘. . . if “instrumental rationality” is devoid of emotionality, then what supplies the “shoving power” which motivates the maximizer? It would be a very odd kind of “preference” whose maximization leaves us “better off”, but whose attainment leaves us feeling we “couldn’t care less”’ (Archer and Tritter, 2000, p. 6). Equally, quite why we might want to assess different goods or ends, as in practical reason, would be incomprehensible were we not needy, evaluative beings. We live between the positive and the normative, on the slippery slope of lack, able to climb up it, and indeed to extend it upwards by constructing new forms of flourishing and protection, but we are unable to resist sliding down except by continually climbing back up and defending and seeking to improve our situation. 35

Margaret Archer’s work is an exception. One of the interesting questions for critical realists concerns the relation of needs and lack to causal powers and liabilities and to natural necessity. On this see Andrew Collier’s discussion of the concept of appetitus in Aquinas (Collier, 1999a, pp. 67–8). There is also a broader precedent in the concept of conatus. I avoid using this term in order to avoid unwanted baggage that goes with it. Nor do I wish to make any connection with Nietzschean ‘will to power’ or Lacanian psychoanalytic concept of lack, which come from very different, and my view deeply flawed, philosophies.


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There are some common sources of reluctance to embrace such a conception. One is the fear – often driven by sociological imperialism – that acknowledging needs, drives and the like implies essentialism and psychologism.36 Yet, as we have seen, reference to needs and the like does not have to imply a reductionism to inborn bodily or psychological requirements; many needs and wants are effectively culturally autonomous and irreducible. Nor does it entail determinism, which is what many anti-essentialists fear, for needs, lack and vulnerability presuppose precisely the openness of the world, and hence the possibility of failure to satisfy, fulfil and endure. Nor does it entail a homogenization of human needs and wants, for to the extent that values and valuations are world-guided, they can be responsive to diversity. The treatment of meaning within the needs-based model goes beyond that of hermeneutic approaches in that it deals not only with signifiers and the signified, shared understandings and rule-following, but significance or import. This is what people refer to when they talk about ‘what something means to them’ (Sayer, 2006; Taylor, 1985). It exemplifies our evaluative relation to the world. An ethnographic study might explain, in a matter-offact way, how the members of a certain group understand and act towards each other in terms of meanings primarily as conventions or shared interpretations, but give little indication of just why they care about some things. Thus, even a supposedly interpretative approach can still be somewhat alienated (Rosaldo, 1989). Describing ‘what something means to me’ cannot reasonably be glossed merely as expressive of the speaker’s feelings; it is about something: their well-being or ill-being, and that of their attachments and commitments. Any account of social practices which gives no indication of their implications for well-being, if only in terms of correcting a misapprehension, invites responses like ‘so what?’, ‘what’s your point?’ The editing out of significance, perhaps because it is felt to be ‘unscientific’, or in the case of interpretive or hermeneutic approaches, because wellbeing is reduced to its local description, is a central cause of the alienated character of so much contemporary social science.

Conclusions It is because of the body, not in the first place because of Enlightenment abstraction, that we can speak of morality as universal. The material body 36

On essentialism and anti-essentialism, see O’Neill (1994) and Sayer (2000b).

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is what we share most significantly with the whole rest of our species, extended both in time and space. Of course it is true that our needs, desires and sufferings are always culturally specific. But our material bodies are such that they are, indeed must be, in principle capable of compassion for any others of their kind. It is on this capacity for fellow-feeling that moral values are founded; and this is based in turn on our material dependency on each other. (Eagleton, 2003, pp. 155–6)

I hope to have shown that, in answering the question of what it is about people that makes them evaluative, ethical beings, it is possible to avoid the pitfalls often identified with philosophical anthropology – such as ethnocentrism, determinism, and suppression of difference. We can live only as social beings, and our social being is always developed in particular cultures. Far from risking oppressive determinisms, it avoids the greater risk of the freedom to inflict harm bestowed by denial of human nature. Our ability to treat each other well or badly depends on how we relate both to what we have in common and what we have that differs. It is not liberal universalism, based on the notion of the adult, unencumbered, implicitly male, individual subject acting in the public sphere of modern societies as a citizen, and characterized by his capacity for reason (Assiter, 2003). Nor, pace (Young, 1990), does it abstract from the body, feeling and emotion, or privilege reason over emotion, or male over female or ignore care; on the contrary! The problem with such conceptions is not that they are universalist, but their universalist claims are too narrowly based. When feminists argue that everyone needs care, they are making an important, valid, universalist claim about human nature. We have identified some of the things which enable us to be evaluative, ethical beings, and indeed unethical beings, but we have not said much about how ethical ideas and actions arise from these circumstances. While philosophical anthropology is necessary for getting us started in thinking about this, it is only a beginning. In the next chapter, we shall focus more directly on the ethical dimension of life.

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Conventionality is not morality . . . To attack the first is not to assail the last. (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, 2nd edn, preface)1

Introduction How are we to understand the ethical or moral dimension of everyday life? That is, the way in which people’s actions are influenced by ideas and feelings regarding how they should behave with respect to each other, how they should live together? In the foregoing chapters, we have already introduced some of the building blocks for understanding the ethical dimension of everyday life, such as emotions, virtues, practical reason, commitments and other aspects of human social being. In this chapter I will bring these and other elements together and discuss their interaction. We are ethical beings, not in the sense that we necessarily always behave ethically, but that as we grow up we come to evaluate behaviour according to some ideas of what is good or acceptable. We compare and admire or deplore particular actions, personal traits, social practices and institutions. How people behave and should behave with respect to one another is undeniably important to us, indeed it is hard to imagine anything more important, yet social science tells us little about our sense of what is good or bad in these matters and why it is so important to us. Its third person descriptions typically drain away the normative force of such considerations, making it appear that we are mere pursuers of selfinterest, creatures of habit, followers of conventions and norms or puppets of power (Archer, 2007). It is not that these interpretations are entirely wrong, more that they are extraordinarily one-sided. Given the care and attention people sometimes give to deciding what to do for the best in their dealings with others, given the subtlety and difficulty of 1

I am grateful to Dimitri Mader for drawing this quotation to my notice.

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some of the issues that they agonize over in running their lives, and given the power of moral and immoral sentiments such as respect, compassion, gratitude, shame, guilt, pride, hate, disgust and resentment, this bland rendering of the ethical dimension of social life is almost insulting. If we encounter someone who is disrespectful, dishonest, callous or selfish we are likely to react strongly. Even if we wish to be tolerant and non-judgemental about others’ actions, characters and lifestyles, this too is a moral stance. As social beings, we simply cannot live without developing some sense of how actions affect well-being and how we ought to treat one another. As Seyla Benhabib puts it: The domain of the moral is so deeply enmeshed with those interactions that constitute our lifeworld that to withdraw from moral judgment is tantamount to ceasing to interact, to talk and act in the human community. (Benhabib, 1992, p. 126)

Almost any kind of social role presupposes shared ideas about how people should properly treat others. The moral values or judgements may not be articulated particularly clearly – often people’s dispositions, their practical sense and their ‘values-in-use’ may be more important than their espoused ideas in guiding what they do – but they can be intelligent and enable people to harmonize their conduct with others and live well, though they may also fall short of this. I shall argue that they are related not merely to people’s awareness of social norms – of what is deemed proper in their society – but to their understanding of, or feel for, the well-being of those involved. The focus here is on understanding ethics or morals in everyday life, imperfect as they are, rather than on developing normative philosophical theories of how they should be. We need to pay attention here not only to moral actions but moral emotions or sentiments, virtues and vices, and character, relating these to social context and well-being or ill-being. There is more to morality than mere ‘values’ or ‘norms’. In trying to identify the key features of the ethical dimension of social life it will be impossible to avoid thick ethical descriptions – and irrational to try – so it will be to some extent also an evaluative account. Although the task might be referred to as one of ‘descriptive ethics’, lay ethics is of course itself normative in that it involves ideas about what is good and how we should live, and it both influences and is influenced by more academic normative ideas about ethics. The fact that our espoused moral beliefs and our actual practice – or our ‘values in use’ – often


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diverge is not a good reason for disregarding the former as they are also part of the object of study and usually have at least some influence, and may sincerely be believed to be legitimate by actors. We live between what is and what could or should be; ethical ideas themselves are related both to the kinds of beings we (think we) are and the kind of beings we (think we) should become through our actions. Lay ethical practice is always flawed; in fact there would be something contradictory in calling a society ethical if every action of every person were guaranteed to be perfectly ethical against some normative criterion, for in such a situation, ethical ideas would be redundant. We can be unethical too, but that presupposes ethical standards by which to judge behaviour as unethical. People are ethical to the extent that they are concerned about how to act with regard to others’ well-being as well as their own, precisely because they know they can easily act in ways that cause harm. Ethical being therefore presupposes awareness of the possibility of unethical being, from petty selfishness through to monstrous forms such as genocide. We have to acknowledge the selectivity and myopia of moral concern, our moral ignorance, whether wilful or not, our capacity for evil, and the sheer messiness of everyday ethical life, albeit without veering towards an excessively negative account of it. Ethical life is something which is unevenly realized, and always at risk, and hence normative for us. That people are ethical beings is therefore partly an empirical claim, partly a hope. Given people’s capacity for flourishing or suffering, their self-command, their vulnerability and dependence on others, and their recognition of these qualities in others, it is likely that they will be ethical to some degree. As we saw, the nature of suffering already includes the desire to escape it; the latter is not a separate ‘value’ that people may simply happen to have that is only contingently related to the ‘fact’ of their pain. The modernist tendency to imagine that all questions are either factual or normative, and never both or something in between, makes it difficult to understand sentient being in terms of a tension between the two, and hence to understand the nature of social being, neediness, suffering and flourishing. Unless we can break the hold of this dualistic framework over our thought, we will not understand the ethical dimension of human social being, or indeed, more generally, why things matter to us. Philosophy tends to be perfectionist – seeking abstract principles that can be applied without exception. Lay ethical practice is not easily reconstructed in such terms, for it is concrete and governed by practical

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reason as well as by rules; it is messy, concrete and practical rather than tidy and concise. Precisely because lay morality is deficient is there a role for normative ethics, but this still needs to be related to a descriptive ethics if it is to have any purchase on lay practice. Moral philosophy is inclined to dismiss too quickly those aspects of behaviour which do not measure up to its normative criteria. In particular, normative ethical theories that attempt to rely upon a single principle are too abstract and reductionist to grasp the nature of ethical being.2 A more worldly, ‘bottom-up’, empirical approach can be found in literature of a broadly Aristotelian provenance, in Adam Smith’s theory of moral sentiments, in literature on the ethic of care, and in moral psychology. These approaches are notable for taking human flourishing, embodiment and the social embeddedness of actors seriously, and it is these that have most influenced my account here.

The elements of ethical being The elements of ethical being are multiple and strongly interrelated. While I shall pick out moral sentiments, virtues, norms, ethical reflection and so on successively, in practice they work together.

Moral sentiments As we have seen, moral (or immoral) emotions – or ‘sentiments’, as Smith termed them – involve not only particular feelings, such as benevolence, compassion, gratitude, sense of justice, respect, guilt, shame, envy, resentment and contempt, but are an important source of information about our behaviour and that of others in relation to well-being (Archer, 2000a; Nussbaum, 2001; Oakley, 1992; Smith, 1759). Emotions are also significant in motivating people to act, though there are many situations in which we can act ethically without emoting too. In considering moral sentiments we need to keep in mind all three dimensions of emotions: my guilt informs me that I have hurt someone needlessly; it makes me feel bad; and it motivates me to find some way of repairing the damage. They play an important role in guiding our behaviour, and although their guidance is fallible, social life would be difficult without them. Hence: 2

See Appendix.


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Instead of viewing morality as a system of principles to be grasped by the detached intellect, and emotions as motivations that either support or subvert our choice to act according to principle, we will have to consider emotions as part and parcel of the system of ethical reasoning. (Nussbaum, 2001, p. 1)

From the point of view of social science, people’s moral emotions illuminate not only the subjective experience that happens to accompany action; it also illuminates what is objectively happening to them and has happened in the past. Hence, in my book The Moral Significance of Class, I tried to show how the moral sentiment of shame could not only be a debilitating feeling but a sensitive indicator of someone’s social position and the lack of respect that they have received (Sayer, 2005). Moral sentiments can’t be ignored because (a) they matter greatly to individuals, (b) they tell us something about both the individual and her situation, including her well-being (indeed this accounts for a), and (c) they make a difference and are part of the object of study. Moral sentiments may seem more elusive than moral ideas; a focus on the latter tends to deal with their content and to explain them in terms of what people are taught. As John Deigh notes: Being neither implanted in the mind like ideas and beliefs of the instructed nor native to it like the instinctual responses of beasts and babies, moral feelings and motivation are a puzzle that invites both philosophical and psychological investigation. (Deigh, 1996, p. vii)

Although some basic, primitive emotions, like fear and contentment, seem to be innate, more complex emotions like embarrassment, indignation or humility are only acquired as the infant grows up. The latter appear to be contingently emergent phenomena, dependent on mutually constitutive processes of cognitive development and socialization. The puzzlement expressed by Deigh can be reduced by noting the cognitive content of feelings, and by acknowledging that they may be intelligent responses to circumstances. Sentiments and thoughts are not as different as he implies. Both are a product of acculturation, but then acculturation cannot be wholly indifferent to extra-discursive circumstances. They can be responsive to the world. Acculturation is not merely the hypodermic internalization of a contingent set of understandings that underpin social interaction; cultures also provide particular ways of coping with an only partly malleable world, including people and other cultural objects.

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Moral emotions are part of everyday ethical reasoning. They also prompt reflection, and this in turn feeds back to emotional responses, moderating or intensifying them or perhaps altering the particular mix of emotions evoked by a situation or memory. In responding to someone in dire need, an individual might move, through reflection, from an initial feeling of pity to a sense of injustice and anger at the causes of their neediness. Moral and immoral sentiments figure prominently in what Iris Murdoch termed the work of attention: The moral life, on this view, is something that goes on continually, not something that is switched off in between the occurrence of explicit moral choices. What happens in between such choices is indeed what is crucial. (Murdoch, 1970, p. 36)3

As we argued in Chapter 2, normativity is not to be reduced to imperatives – to what Darwin called ‘that short but imperious word ought’ (Darwin, 2004, p. 120). It also consists of our ongoing monitoring and evaluation of how people are acting towards one another, and how we and others are faring. Occasionally we do this in a very focused way – ‘just what do I think of Amy and what she did?’ – but we also do it more continuously and semi-consciously through our emotional responses to the flow of experience.

Socialization and formation of ethical sensibilities The formation of individuals with ethical sensibilities, dispositions and concerns depends on their socialization, not merely in terms of the learning of rules, but from the experience of living, as sentient social beings – embodied, capable, dependent and vulnerable – with others in various kinds of social relations.4 In particular, it depends on the quality of care and the formation of supportive attachments that both protect and nurture the development of responsible autonomy. The experience of being valued, cared for and loved – or being neglected, abused and unloved – shapes how we value others and our relation to self, and hence our ability to relate to others and form mutually beneficial attachments. While relations of care, usually with parents and siblings, are the most important, the quality of ‘thinner’ kinds of social relations with 3

See above, p. 97.

4

The German term for this formative process is bildung.


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others also matter too. In all cases, the crucial learning process comes from the ongoing conscious and semi-conscious work of attention, and the feelings, especially the moral sentiments, that accompany that experience. It comes from engaging with concrete others – not an abstract ‘other’. It has a strong, non-discursive element that may or may not chime with what we hear and read in terms of prescribed norms. For example, norms of mutual respect and goodwill may ring hollow to young people who have experienced little of either in their own upbringing. The tendency of academics not only to project an exclusively discursive relation to the world onto others, but also to be embarrassed by things such as babies, love, being held, and playing with others, means that much of what makes us ethical beings is missed, so we are left with stiff-collared norms and sanctions, or over-reliance on academic abstractions such as ‘the other’. The liberal, masculine exclusion of relations of care from the domain of moral philosophy screens out the very processes that make us moral. Extraordinarily, sociology, the discipline that most clearly ‘owns’ the concept of socialization, neglects our most formative years and, by ceding them to psychology, lacks an adequate explanation of how it occurs and how people are enabled or damaged by their childhoods.

Virtues again, and character Just as particular valuations both influence, and are guided by, sedimented values, emotional responses influence and are shaped by emotional dispositions, including ethical (or unethical) dispositions. Thus, someone who has invariably been trusted and generally found others trustworthy is likely to develop a trusting disposition, while someone who has often been deceived in the past may develop a suspicious disposition. The equivalent could be true at the level of particular social groups: the responses of a group for which some past form of oppression is part of its identity and collective memory are likely to differ from those of groups with happier pasts. These background emotional dispositions form ‘active stances towards the world’.5 They are thus the product of experience, albeit an experience that is generally mediated by

5

Linda Woodhead (personal communication).

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individuals’ reflections, so that to some degree they can decide how to interpret their circumstances and how to respond (Archer, 2003, 2007). More specifically, individuals’ moral responses are influenced by their virtues and vices, and these, in turn, are shaped by past experience and choices; socialization and past practice influence whether someone has the virtue of courage or the vice of timidity, and these dispositions affect how they respond to threats. A benevolent person may more readily feel compassion than a mean-spirited person. These dispositions enable people to respond in particular ways spontaneously, without first having to reflect, though as we saw in Chapter 3, this does not necessarily mean that the responses are irrational or unreasonable. We would have doubts about someone who had to think through whether they should go to the aid of an elderly person who has just had a fall before doing so. Even though they may often act spontaneously, individuals generally have some understanding of why their actions are reasonable and defensible (or not). Where they do think about their actions, individuals may sometimes override their dispositions; the timid person may decide the time has come to stand up to the threat. As Andrew Collier notes, virtues can be considered as a form of knowledge, as is evident in virtue terms like ‘considerate or inconsiderate, thoughtful or thoughtless, sensitive or insensitive . . . highly perceptive or downright ignorant’ (Collier, 1999a, p. 16). Note also how ‘thoughtful’ implies ‘kind’; again, the reasonable person is attentive to the specific needs of the other. Altruism and care, if they are not to be misdirected, require an attempt to understand the other, as she is, rather than as we would like to assume. The implication that Collier draws from this is that the best way to live a morally better life is by coming to have truer ideas about life. This is not merely the pronouncement of a philosopher engaging in normative ethics; it often applies to the reflections of ordinary people on how they should live. Thus, the reformed racist may seek truer ideas about ‘race’ and people from other cultures. The role of virtues and vices in guiding action is reflected in the importance we attach to them in other people; it is not only the ethical or unethical quality of specific actions that matter but the vices and virtues that make up individuals’ – and perhaps institutions’ – characters. We are often keen to know whether someone is ‘good-natured’, bad-tempered or selfish. In effect, this is a concern with ‘virtue ethics’. People have good reason to be concerned about the character of those in whom they place their trust; for example, organizations need more than


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rules and customs or even a prescribed ethos – they also depend heavily on the virtues of their members and hence require character references when recruiting staff. The effectiveness and reputation of the organization can be threatened if it recruits people lacking the appropriate qualities. The common sociological emphasis on rules, conventions and discourses tends to overlook this. Particularly if we need to trust people, we assess whether we can do so not just through induction, through having found them reliable so far, but according to whether we feel they have good will, and that it is ‘in their nature’ (i.e., their socialized nature) to be trustworthy. This is also different from strategic calculation of how others will behave according to what we imagine to be their own strategic calculations in pursuit of their self-interest. It has more to do with assessment of their ethical dispositions and commitments. The embodied nature of virtues and vices is acknowledged in everyday life. If someone has committed a significant crime, it is not just the specific action we condemn but the actor and their characteristic, embodied dispositions, and we judge them accordingly.6 Often merely confessing and apologizing are not enough. They may say they are contrite and have reformed but we may remain sceptical until they have come through a long probationary period in which they have demonstrated consistent good behaviour; we want to see evidence in the form of deeds rather than words that they have changed – and hence that they are now indeed ‘a reformed character’. In wanting them to ‘learn their lessons’ we do not merely mean a simple intellectual acknowledgement expressed through statements, but an accumulation of evidence of actions which show that, through repeated practice, they have changed their embodied dispositions and inclinations, and hence undergone a deeper, emotional and bodily learning. And again, echoing our comments on embodiment through practice, in thinking about a murderer who claims to be reformed, we might wonder – having killed once, isn’t it all the easier to kill again? In these ways, commonsense ethical understandings of the importance of character and dispositions can be superior to scholastic interpretations of ethics which transpose everything into discursive form, as if we were disembodied rational actors, merely needing to recognize the force of the better argument in 6

I accept, nevertheless, that a purely individualistic blaming that ignores the social context is problematic (Norrie, 2000).

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order to change, and as if we need only worry about the morality of particular actions, not people’s virtues and vices. Sometimes people evaluate not only individuals’ characters and actions, but the social relations, discourses and context in which they live, and the particular virtues and vices that they tend to foster, for example trusting someone who comes from a certain background. Different social contexts or cultures may encourage the development of some virtues and vices while discouraging others; for example, a situation that tends to encourage a capacity for hard graft, toughness and self-discipline may fail to encourage sympathy, compassion and open-mindedness. Someone from a ‘tough’ neighbourhood may be feared and suspected of being hostile to others. Often, of course, these evaluations are highly prejudiced, but not necessarily; social workers, for example, responsible for assessing adults wanting to adopt a child, have to evaluate the quality of the social context in which the child would be embedded – whether it would be safe and provide sufficient support, and so on. This kind of evaluation points to a more relational view of moral agency and responsibility (Norrie, 2000). In Modernity and the Holocaust and subsequent works, Zygmunt Bauman offers a hyper-Weberian view of modernity as almost completely dominated by rationalization (Bauman, 1989, 1991, 1993). He argues that the Holocaust was primarily a product of the rise of formal and instrumental rationality, which allowed those responsible for it to suspend their consciences. However, he reduces reason to formal and instrumental rationality, leaving no place for reason as attentiveness to the object or for reasonableness. He is therefore unable to see that the Holocaust had more to do with the eclipse of reason than its triumph, at least if we accept the broader concept of reason that we have been outlining here (Fine and Hirsch, 2000).7 Complementing this overwhelmingly rationalized view of modernity is a romanticized view of morality as the opposite of reason or rationality, and as pure conscience. This in turn complements a Weberian treatment of emotion as antithetical to reason, indeed as irrational (Barbalet, 2001, 2008). To support this conception of morality as conscience, Bauman cites the reports of those 7

Regarding Eichmann, Fine and Hirsch note that ‘when he became a Nazi, [he] selfconsciously gave up on “practical reason” (thinking for himself, developing his reflective capacities, judging on the basis of universal criteria) and replaced it with mere obedience to orders, social conformity, rigid duty to order’ (2000, p. 194).


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Germans who helped to protect Jews that they did so spontaneously rather than as a product of deliberation. I suggest a different interpretation: they had acquired virtues which led them to act in this way spontaneously, without the need to reflect and deliberate on what to do. These dispositions were not beyond reason, but reasonable and intelligent in that they were responsive to the specific situation – the suffering of the Jews they encountered, and the force of the ought of that suffering. By contrast, those Germans who did not notice or disregarded the suffering of the Jews lacked this virtue. Conscience is a form of reason.

The role of ‘norms’: conventional versus harm-based morality Most social scientific treatments of ethics give centre stage to norms regarding how we should evaluate actions and behave. It is clear that many such norms are culturally specific, but some cultural differences are just different ways of responding to universal needs or goods, such as the need for respect. In acknowledging the importance of norms, we need to pay attention not just to the prescribed actions but to their functions, intentions and legitimations, for these are what give them their normative force. Important though norms are, we cannot explain the ethical dimension of life simply by reference to their absorption by individuals, or their being ‘hailed’ by them. The moral education that we get works by co-opting and hooking onto our relationship to the world of concern. Although someone may learn to abide by rules or norms, this presupposes some kind of concern to do so, whether motivated by the belief that doing so is the right thing to do, or by fear of the consequences if they do not, or both. Either way, at least on some occasions, they have to engage with them and seek to understand and evaluate their point. Sociology, particularly in the Durkheimian tradition, tends to represent morality in terms of social norms which govern the way people act; indeed their very values are seen as internalizations of social norms (Durkheim, 1973). Although this ‘conventionalist’ account provides a useful corrective to ‘undersocialized’ philosophical treatments of morality and values and helps us acknowledge the diversity of norms and values across different societies, it is also problematic. Firstly, ‘norms’ tend to be at least as much the products, or ex-post rationalizations, of practices as their

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determinants.8 Some norms may be largely formalizations of common, phronetic moral responses of individuals to situations that have come to be validated publicly as forms of wisdom. They may function simply as verbal prompts intended to help in the acquisition of more complex, embodied practical skills, as we saw in Chapter 3 in the case of the training of nurses. We learn more by doing than by learning norms: our informal moral education consists mainly of learning from experience of concrete situations and responding to their specificities. Some norms are more categorical and strictly enforced than others. Strict general rules tend to be formulated where rights or matters of distributive justice regarding scarce resources are concerned. Rights are social constructions designed to ensure that certain conditions that are deemed necessary for our most basic functioning are universally met; in so far as they have any force it derives from awareness of the seriousness of the harms that result from their infringement. In the case of distributive justice, relying on individuals’ own judgement of what is justifiable is likely to invite unfairness not only because of the risk of selfishness and favouritism but because of the lack of a common standard and because individuals tend not to know how much there is to distribute and how much others are getting. At least in public life in modern societies, there tend not to be strict rules about benevolence, its absence being merely a matter of regret, whereas the violation of justice is viewed as a much more serious matter ‘for it does real and positive harm to some particular persons’ (Smith, 1759, II.ii.1.5, p. 79). Collier argues that the role of rules in ethics is limited to obvious things like prohibitions on torture and murder and the like. The main body of ethics cannot be formulated in such rules, but will consist in recognising the complexity and specificity of every human being . . . Moral codes which consist of do-s and don’t-s serve mainly to excuse their adherents from thinking about how they should treat this particular being in this particular situation. (Collier, 1999a, p. 91)

Once again we see phronesis counterposed to formal rationality. One of the reasons ‘moralizing’ is problematic is its tendency to prescribe fixed

8

Here I am moderating Bourdieu’s claim that norms always follow dispositions and practice.


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codes of conduct in the face of such complexity.9 Collier goes on to argue that it is more important to be ‘nice’ by being responsive to others (in our terms, being reasonable) than it is to be ‘good’ in the sense of obedient to moral rules. A fundamental problem of the conventionalist account of moral norms is that it fails to distinguish moral from non-moral normative matters. The latter concern forms of coordination of behaviour that have no serious implications for well-being, but just happen to be particular ways of doing things – particular understandings of how to go on. The norms of grammar or the layout of products in a supermarket would be examples of this. As Midgley argues, morality is distinguished from such matters by its seriousness for actors’ wellbeing (Midgley, 1972). Moral norms have not only a conventional aspect but are generally supported by claims that certain behaviours and social arrangements are legitimate – and not merely by appeal to tradition and authority (‘because x says so’), but by claims and evidence that they are good or fair for all. General rules, such as ‘the golden rule’ of treating others as one would want to be treated oneself, have some influence, though their normative force derives not simply from authority and convention or from their generalizability, but from their being (seen as) fair and beneficial. Social scientists often miss this, whether through a desire to remain neutral, or a desire to adopt a sceptical attitude, which is often an unrecognized strategy of social distinction that elevates the ‘reflexive’ social scientist above the sheep-like masses. Reducing moral norms to conventions negates the force of the ought that derives from what they are about.10 Morality – in the old, broad sense, rather than as distinct from ethics – presupposes some conception of the good. Without it, norms prohibiting torture, for instance, would be merely conventional; the only reason for observing them would be to avoid sanctions. Not surprisingly, reductionist sociological descriptions

9

10

Blackburn gives the example of politicians who refuse terminally ill patients the opportunity to use marijuana to ease their pain, because of irrational certainty that it is always wrong (Blackburn, 2001). While this is the dominant view of morality in Durkheim, he does at times depart from it and relate moral sentiments to flourishing and suffering, including psychological well-being, as in his analysis of suicide (Durkheim, 2002). There is a difference between Durkheim and ‘vulgar’ Durkheimian positions, as Wilkinson (2005) points out, but the latter have become dominant in sociology. See also Abend (2008).

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of people as norm-following have a bland, demeaning and alienated character. The very concept of norms thus tends ironically to have a denormativizing effect, removing or ignoring the force of moral beliefs. We believe child abuse is wrong not merely because it transgresses our norms or conventions, but because we know that it harms children. This implies a fundamental distinction between the moral and the merely conventional. Shaun Nichols reports an interesting study by Nucci of Amish children in the United States in which it was found that 100 per cent of them ‘said that if God had made no rule against working on Sunday, it would not be wrong to work on Sunday. However, more than 80 per cent of these subjects said that even if God had made no rule about hitting, it would still be wrong to hit’ (Nichols, 2004, p. 6). This is especially significant given the extent to which such a community has a strong, consensual moral code. It indicates that the subjects were able to distinguish between conventional or authority-based norms and morality based on avoidance of harm and promotion of flourishing.11 Other studies of children have shown them to be able to distinguish the moral from the merely conventional by their third birthday (Nichols, 2004, p. 78).12 Interestingly, studies of psychopaths have shown them to be incapable of distinguishing the moral from the merely conventional. They recognize that there are conventions against harming others, but cannot distinguish these from conventions about trivial matters; to them harming others is only wrong because it goes against authority and convention. Thus, killing and spitting are equated simply as transgressions of conventions. Insofar as they use moral terms they do so in an ‘inverted commas’ sense, that is, without committing themselves to the judgements they involve. By contrast, non-psychopathic criminals are able to appreciate that their actions were wrong not merely because they transgressed norms or conventions, but because they were morally wrong in the sense of harming others (Nichols, 2004, p. 76). Psychopaths also 11

12

This is not to say that all morality is about avoidance of harm. Unlike Simon Nichols and many others, I do not see emotion or sentiment and reason as opposed. Nevertheless, as he hints at one point, his sentimentalist account might be compatible with a more realist account (Nichols, 2004, p. 161n). This applies also to children with autism or Down Syndrome. It is also noteworthy that autistic children can understand and respond sympathetically to distress in others, despite having little capacity for reading others’ minds and taking their perspective (Nichols, 2004, p. 79).


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differ from non-psychopaths in failing to respond affectively to others’ distress (ibid., p. 81). How interesting that some sociologists should support the idea that certain actions are only wrong because they are socially defined as wrong! Sociologists and anthropologists may sometimes cite actors’ moral terms in inverted commas to indicate that they are not endorsing the judgements those terms imply, but it is a mistake to allow this methodological device to become an ontological assumption that they are just conventions rather than (conventional) judgements about well-being and the harmonization of conduct (Davydova and Sharrock, 2003). Thus, if we take the example of a funeral, then there is certainly a conventional element to the proceedings, in the sense that those attending generally behave in accordance with the conventions of the culture to which they belong, and cultural interpretations of death and how it should be dealt with vary significantly. But the funeral goers are not necessarily merely going through the motions; their emotions indicate the import of the situation for them, and the conventions may help (or perhaps hinder) them in reflecting on this. While the norms-based view of morality challenges vulgar liberal views of values, it opposes only their individualism, not their subjectivism. Like subjectivism, it fails to acknowledge that values are about something objective or independent and are capable of being responsive to the things they are about. It therefore affirms only what Rorty terms the ‘horizontal’ relations among ideas, ignoring the vertical relations to their referents. The conventionalist emphasis on norms in sociology and anthropology has become reinforced by those disciplines’ lamentable enthusiasm for conventionalist epistemologies in which claims about what is the case or what is good are seen as merely conventional, rather than as being influenced by what they are about. It is as if my belief that it rains more in Scotland than in the Sahara had nothing to do with the fact that it does. Often this extraordinary epistemology is justified on the grounds that our observations and factual claims are conceptually mediated – which they are – as if that meant that our observations were therefore entirely conceptually determined. This makes nonsense of the way in which our very survival depends on using our conceptual schemata to discern things which do not depend on whether we observe them, like whether there is a car coming when we cross the road. If we take seriously the idea – endorsed by Rorty – that knowledge is primarily a way of coping with the world, then that presupposes that the world has properties and tendencies with which we have to cope if we are to

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survive and flourish, and which are not merely the product of collective wishful thinking, as implied by conventionalism. We view the prospect of violent attack or cruel deception with concern not merely because it is conventional to do so in our community, but because we fear objective harm. There is a kind of idealism in regarding ideas and values as simply subjective or conventional, or as merely products of discourses, rather than as discursively expressed values that attempt to make sense of objective matters, and are to some extent open to empirical check, for it makes it appear that actors could function successfully with any beliefs. But ordinary people seem to be realists in the sense that they regard their ideas as being about something independent of those ideas, and as being aware that the success of their actions depends on the practical adequacy of the ideas informing them. If Anne says of Brian, whom she met recently, that he seems a kind person, she implies that his generous and compassionate disposition has existed independently of her own experience of it. She may have used conventional criteria for kindness in making her assessment but the criteria are again about something that could exist independently of them. Hence, not unreasonably, people tend to view moral judgements as ones which can be correct or incorrect, or right or wrong.13

Stories, dilemmas and exemplary individuals Along with norms, stories of moral dilemmas, heroism and evil are a part of the discourses of any society, be they religious or secular. In modern society, literature, films and soap operas provide a rich diet of explorations of human value and the ethics of everyday life, inviting us to engage with dilemmas and evaluate the actions and characters of the people they represent. They offer various conceptions of good and evil, of how to live, and of exemplary, ordinary and despicable individuals. They show us alternatives – possible different ways of acting of people like or unlike us. The differences, disagreements and arguments they explore are a normal, not an exceptional, feature of life, and many of 13

‘We do not wish to “judge” or assess our surrounding merely as a kind of expressive activity carelessly projected onto the world, but we wish to evaluate the world “correctly”, i.e. in accordance with what it truly is, and the desire to know is directed at determining what the world truly is’ (Geuss, 2008, p. 40).


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them are about moral and ethical matters (Billig, 1996). They highlight and explore the open texture of ethical being; we could always act differently, and perhaps unethically. The stories, symbols and images impinge on our consciousness and influence our actions, albeit often in a loose and fragmented fashion. Only rarely might they prompt sustained, analytical reflections that approach those of moral philosophers, but they figure prominently in our ongoing moral education and involvement. As Jarrett Zigon puts it: morality is better thought of as a continuous dialogical process during which persons are in constant interaction with their world and the persons in that world, rather than as a set category of beliefs from which one picks appropriate responses to particular situations. (Zigon, 2008, p. 155)

The generalizing tendency of moral ideas Ethical dispositions are influenced by socialization and reflection under specific, concrete circumstances, but they are also applied to novel situations and orient our actions; indeed that is their practical point. There is more at work here than a merely pragmatic logic – an ‘economy of practice’ like that associated with practical skills, in which a disposition or skill that serves us well in one context turns out to serve us well in others – for the generalization of ethical behaviour is normatively enforced. Moreover, as Jeffrey Alexander puts it: ‘Values possess relative independence vis-à-vis social structures because ideals are immanently universalistic. This is so . . . because they have an inherent tendency to become matters of principle that demand to be generalized’ (Alexander, 1995, p. 137). Alexander cites research in developmental psychology, which with ‘the signal and revealing exception of behaviourism’ supports the acquisition of this process of generalization. This generalizing tendency of morality is not at all in contradiction with its localized origins in particular relations: It is because we have specific commitments to specific individuals and groups that we can then go on to recognize the claim of all human beings . . . It is because we first form ties with parents, siblings and friends that we are subsequently able to extend our sympathies to other human beings with whom we are less closely connected. (Norman, quoted in Goodin, 1985, p. 4)

Learning to care for those close to us can foster rather than limit concern for those more socially distant. The recognition of a form of morality

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involving concrete rather than abstract others – typically friends and family – is not incompatible with this generalizing tendency, for it too involves a process of going beyond one’s own position (see also Benhabib, 1992, Chapters 5 and 6). Preferential treatment of ‘significant others’ is therefore usually seen as proper rather than as unethical, though how far responsibilities are expected to extend to others varies and is a subject of debate, not only in philosophy but sometimes in everyday life (see, for example, Boltanski, 1999; Goodin, 1985; Tronto, 1994; Unger, 1996). The very existence of such debate indicates the presence of the generalizing tendency. It is widely noted that lay ethical concern is nevertheless often limited in its scope, favouring those who are socially and culturally proximate. But it can be extended both by experiences and information that extend people’s moral imaginations, and by normative ethical campaigns, such as those against homophobia or the stigmatization of asylum-seekers. These typically draw attention to what we have in common – at least at the level of vulnerability – with those who previously did not figure much in our moral imaginations, or try to get us to imagine what life is like for those who are significantly different from us. For example, a campaign for greater understanding and sympathy for people with autism might do both, explaining what is different about them, but also, in saying they are ‘people with autism’, not ‘autistic people’, that what we have in common with them is even more important. The existence of support for animal rights shows that our moral imaginations can extend beyond our own species. The reciprocal character of relations with others produces not only a generalizing tendency but a concern with consistency and fairness, other things being equal. Integrity – coherence and consistency in thought and action – tends to be valued and sought after, though, of course, it is often thwarted by forgetfulness, individual or sectional interests and inequalities of power. As ever, morality is essentially imperfect. However, the strength of the ideal of fairness is evident from the fact that even those whose dominance owes nothing to merit or fairness make spurious appeals to it, for this shows a realization of the need at least to appear to be fair in their dealings with the subordinate if they are not to lose legitimacy. The concern with consistency is not unconditional; occasional bad behaviour would be preferable to consistent bad behaviour. Nor is it merely for consistency’s sake; it is also likely to be motivated by the sense that we should respond to similar cases in the same way,


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because they are the same in relevant respects, for example because a given group of people happen to be equally needy or equally deserving. This idea is central to the concept of justice.14 While the concept of justice is often seen as involving a generalizing, abstract way of thinking involving comparisons of cases, we also, as Smith noted, talk of the importance of ‘doing justice to’ something or someone (Smith, 1759, VII.ii.1.11, p. 270). Here, justice is concerned with individuals and particulars: the writer of an obituary tries ‘to do justice’ to the specific qualities of the deceased person, rather than reducing them to a general type. The two senses are nevertheless related. In treating equals equally, we simultaneously do justice to their shared, particular qualities; it is because they all have those particular qualities, especially those capacities for suffering and flourishing, and because people tend to evaluate themselves and be evaluated comparatively, in relation to others, that they deserve to be treated as equals. On the other hand, treating people equally where they differ in relevant respects is an injustice, because it fails to do justice to relevant particularities. Thus, it would be unjust to expect a blind student to use the same educational materials as a sighted student. While these are normative points, they are often observed in everyday practice. Even though consistency is valued in ethical reasoning, this depends on our understanding of the objects; reason as attentiveness to the object is primary.

The judgements of others To the extent that people reflect on their conduct, whether retrospectively or prospectively, the judgements of others, real or imagined, often weigh heavily on them, though, of course, the extent to which they do so is strongly influenced by their socialization. This in itself tends to moderate pursuit of self-interest. Social action is influenced by mutualand self-monitoring of conduct, as expounded by Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith, 1759). The giving of approval and disapproval provides an important form of moral regulation of the social order. Using our capacities for fellow-feeling and reflexivity, we imagine 14

Consistency is also, more generally, central to practical rationality. From the point of view of coping with the world, I need to respond to its properties and differentiations, repeating successful actions where the situation remains the same in relevant respects, and adjusting them where conditions change.

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how others’ well-being will be affected by our actions. Sometimes we imagine how a spectator – particularly a well-informed, experienced and respected one, or perhaps a god – would evaluate our actions, so as to consider what we should do. Further, knowing that others may be monitoring our conduct tends to remind us to use our capacity for fellow-feeling. Thus, people’s judgements of how to act may not only be based on attempts to anticipate the implications for themselves and the person(s) affected by their actions, but to imagine the reactions of observers.15 This conscious or semi-conscious monitoring and evaluating is crucial both for ethical conduct and the reproduction of social order. People can remember or anticipate the approval or disapproval of others and weigh up whether to respond to it, and those others may make their judgements known in order to influence future conduct. The real or imagined judgements of others loom large in people’s thinking not only to the extent that they like to have their approval and fear sanctions, but to the extent that they think others are good judges of how to act. In other words, their epistemic, moral authority or wisdom is important as well as their approval – indeed sometimes someone who might be relied upon to be approving may be deemed to lack such authority or wisdom; those who love us and think we can do no wrong may not be the best judges. The views of others may also be deemed important out of respect for them as independent reasoners; insofar as our actions impact on others – others who, like us, are capable, sentient beings who need to have some command over their lives if they are to flourish – they have a right to comment on them. In hierarchies such considerations may be absent from downward relations of domination and authority, though they may be present in horizontal relations among equals within any stratum. To have power over someone is precisely to need to take less account of their wishes than they have to do of one’s own. Outside accepted relations of domination, ignoring others’ judgements in matters which impact on them is likely to be regarded as a form of arrogance or self-righteousness, and for both epistemic and egalitarian reasons. We may give approval and disapproval to someone to show that we care about how they treat us, and hence that we matter. Having to censor what we say of others, because they have power over us, is likely to damage our self-respect. This is one of the harms done by 15

Smith developed the concept of the impartial spectator to theorize this.


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relations of domination. Equally, we also sometimes indicate approval and disapproval of others’ actions to show them that we care about them and hence that they matter too; a child whose parents are indifferent to how she acts may feel that she does not matter to them. Benevolent concern for someone can bolster their sense of self-worth. On the other hand, being continually granted approval and disapproval can seem demeaning if it seems to infantilize us by underestimating our capacities for self-command and responsible action. We may also suspect that the approval and disapproval is given not out of regard for us, but purely in order to control us (Brennan and Pettit, 2004). These are examples of the delicate, touchy matters that emotional reason has to assess in everyday life. Such complexities derive from our deeply social, relational nature. While the judgements and approval of others – or at least, valued others – are important to actors, it is nevertheless possible for individuals to decide to disregard them. Of course, they may do so in order to pursue their own selfish interests, but they can also do so for moral reasons, because they think that it is the right thing to do and that the reference group is mistaken. The respect and approval of others is not the only condition of individuals’ well-being. Individuals may do what they consider to be ‘praiseworthy’ (as Smith termed it) or good in itself, even if it brings them disapproval. There need be no piety in this; we sometimes do things simply because we recognize that they need doing. For example, workers often ‘go the extra mile’ – perhaps working late in order to finish a task – not necessarily in order to win praise or extra pay, or because they fear losing their jobs if they don’t, but because they believe that the job needs doing and a client or workmate or the organization will be harmed if they don’t do it. Despite the importance of others’ approval to us, it is far from the only consideration – indeed we would disapprove of those whose every action was motivated purely by the need for approval; we feel insulted if others assume that the only reason we do anything good is in order to win praise or for our own benefit. Mere conformity does not guarantee respect; it may prompt suspicions of shallowness or cowardice. This is a vital corrective to the vulgar Durkheimian picture of moral action as guided only by sanctions and praise (Durkheim, 1971).

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Responsibility and blame Social life depends on people being able to hold one another responsible for doing particular things; for this to work, individuals have also to hold themselves responsible for what they do. Our self-respect and psychological well-being depend heavily on how we meet the expectations that others have of us. This is not merely a process of passively internalizing their expectations, but of assessing them, and accepting or contesting them. The attribution of responsibility, and hence blame or credit, matters greatly to us. If we have been injured, it matters whether we were hurt accidentally or deliberately or through culpable negligence. Where certain responsibilities become part of someone’s commitments, failure to meet them may cause them personal shame. This again illustrates the relational character of social being – positioned, as we are, between the individual and the social, as Norrie puts it (Norrie, 2000). Holding one another responsible is always a precarious business, as the literature on trust acknowledges. However, it is often overlooked that trust presupposes trustworthiness, that is, the tendency of individuals and institutions to do what is expected of them, and usually this means taking care of persons or things which impact on people. Trust without trustworthiness is gullibility. This is central to ethics in everyday life; without trustworthiness, social life becomes difficult. In some spheres it is left to goodwill and the individual’s sense of moral responsibility; in others it is reinforced by unequal power so that the dominated are ‘trusted’ to conform because they have little alternative, though coping with the vagaries of social life becomes extremely inefficient if people do nothing beyond what they are told to do and refuse to take any responsibility for anything else. A reductionist social science which ignores the role of responsibility and its first person significance in the social world, or treats it merely as the acting of roles or the internalization of norms, misrepresents social life. When social scientists ignore agency and responsibility and explain what people do wholly in terms of social circumstances, including the characteristics of the individual, they say, in effect, that ‘they would do that, wouldn’t they, given that they are in that social position’. In everyday life, if anyone responds to our arguments by saying ‘you would say that wouldn’t you, in your position’, we know this is an insult, because it implies we are not responsible for our arguments


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and lack integrity or any independence from the relations in which we live. Like anyone, sociologists hold those with whom they live and work responsible for what they do, and they expect others to return the favour by treating them as responsible actors too. Social scientists who ignore responsibility in their accounts are guilty of a theory– practice contradiction. In understanding responsibility and blaming we need to assess individual and social responsibility, while acknowledging their interdependence. Although sociologists would generally argue that there’s a social side to the explanation of rape or murder, they would presumably not wish to argue that rapists and murderers have no responsibility for their actions. On the other side, the responses of ordinary people in everyday life to questions of responsibility typically underestimate the role of social influences on what people are able and motivated to do; thus the poor are blamed for behaviour which owes much to structural influences and power, while the rich credit themselves with responsibility for their advantages, ignoring what they inherit and their position within hierarchical social structures. The everyday, individualistic explanations have a depoliticizing effect and tend to produce what might be termed ‘moralistic’ explanations of social problems, that is, attributing them to moral deficiencies on the part of individuals. However, a more political understanding need not be amoral, for in attributing social problems more to certain forms of social organization it can acknowledge that they are unjust in themselves and tend to encourage unethical behaviours. One of the challenges of social science is to explain social phenomena in a way which acknowledges the importance of social structures and contexts without ignoring their ethical implications and without denying any role for agency and responsibility. Whether in social science or everyday life, assessing responsibility is a difficult business. Just what people can reasonably expect of one another is a difficult and contentious issue. It is partly a positive matter of what is feasible, of what the constraints and resources allow – what they are able to do – and partly a normative matter of what they should do within those constraints – that is, what they should be willing to do. The distinction between these two aspects is extremely fuzzy; the very concept of responsibility defies a positive/normative dichotomy. Imagine a situation where someone who accepts a certain responsibility then fails to do what is expected. In their defence, they appeal to

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constraints and mitigating circumstances, but others reject these excuses or reasons and say that they should have attempted to overcome the constraints. It is inevitably difficult to say whether this is a reasonable response, in terms of acknowledging the capabilities and limitations of the individual and the magnitude of the constraints. Perhaps heroic efforts would have enabled her to meet her responsibilities despite the constraints, but is it reasonable to expect such exceptional behaviour? When things go wrong, these problems loom large in people’s moral judgements of themselves and each other and of specific kinds of behaviour. They also figure in social scientific explanations of concrete events, and in official inquiries into the causes of disasters, such as failures of social workers to prevent the murder of children by their carers. To what extent did something happen because of the structure and tendencies of the situation and to what extent because of the way people in that situation interpreted them and decided to act? Moreover, this is not only a problem of how to weigh the contributions of individuals and contexts but of how to assess the effect of social relations in shaping the very character of individuals, and hence their tendency to act in certain ways. These difficulties mean that the dominant western liberal view that we can simply hold individuals responsible in a clear-cut way for their actions is unsustainable (Norrie, 2000). In life the individual and social aspects of behaviour so closely intertwine and interact over time that it is often difficult to distinguish them (how far is my choice a product of my socialization?; is not the reproduction of any social structure dependent on how people act?), and neither individual nor social causes make sense on their own. This is no excuse for reductionism in either direction – whether to undersocialized or oversocialized accounts. As Midgley comments: It is understandable that the embattled champions of the social aspect, such as Marx and Durkheim, were exasperated by earlier neglect of it, and in correcting that bias, slipped into producing its mirror image . . . In the hands of their successors, this habit grew into a disastrous competitive tradition, a hallowed interdisciplinary vendetta. (Midgley, 1984, p. 3)

To modify a better line from Marx, we make history but not in the circumstances – nor with the discourses, materials and cultivated mind-bodies – of our own choosing. It is not a question of


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blaming either individuals or society but of assessing the formative relations and interactions between them.

Shame and ethical life Shame is a particularly significant emotion with regard to ethical life, for the desire to avoid this painful, tormenting emotion tends to encourage individuals to behave as they believe they should and to go to some lengths to retain their standing both in their own eyes and those of others. It is hard to imagine how there could be much social order without it, for through it people contingently adopt wider expectations, norms and ideals, and discipline and punish themselves according to how they measure up to them. The capacity for shame is one of the mechanisms by which people are ensnared by cultural discourses and norms, although the metaphor of being ensnared is also too passive, for they can assess and resist certain values. Nevertheless, the need for recognition and a sense of self-worth, whose pursuit always carries the risk of failing and being shamed, helps to drive us to seek out ways of acting virtuously, or at least in ways that others will value. Like many other forms of ill-being, shame already includes the desire to end it, to repair the problems that cause it and result from it, either by atoning for it, by challenging the implied negative judgements as unwarranted, or (misguidedly) by seeking revenge by hurting others.16 The ‘ought’ of shame is already part of what it is. Shame is evoked by failure of an individual or group to live according to their values or commitments, especially ones concerning their relation to others. It is commonly a response to the real or imagined contempt, derision or avoidance of real or imagined others, particularly those whose values are respected (Williams, 1993).17 It may be prompted by inaction as well as action, by lack as well as wrongdoing; for example, one may feel ashamed of not being able to afford some socially valued object. Especially where it derives from the kind of generalized lack which results from poverty and low status, shame 16

17

As James Gilligan’s work on the lives of convicted murderers shows, shame is a prime cause of violence (Gilligan, 2000). Shame is often associated with guilt, especially where our actions have harmed someone else, though not necessarily: someone might feel ashamed about not being able to read but they are not likely to feel guilty about it. On the relations and differences between shame and guilt see Williams (1993).

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may be a largely unarticulated feeling of low self-esteem that can blight people’s lives and lead them to underestimate their capacities and what they might reasonably claim of others. Shame is in some ways the opposite of self-respect, but they are also related; to experience shame is to feel inadequate, lacking in worth, and perhaps lacking in dignity and integrity. Self-respect derives from a feeling that one is living a worthwhile life and a confidence in one’s ability to do what one considers worthwhile. Although it is a private and reflexive emotion, based on an evaluation of the self by the self, self-respect also has an inescapable social dimension, for we can hardly maintain the conviction that how we live is worthwhile if there are no others who agree (Rawls, 1971, pp. 440–1). When we feel ashamed of ourselves, it’s normally not only because we don’t live up to the expectations of others and can sense or imagine their contempt, but because we judge ourselves to have failed to live up to our own expectations and ideas about what is good. (I thought I was the kind of person who would never do x, but I did, and I am ashamed of myself. The basis for my sense of self-worth is undermined.) Sometimes we may feel shame about an action or deficiency even though others are unaware of it. There is still a social element in such cases because we can imagine their scorn if they did know, and because shame involves an evaluation of ourselves in relation to others. While it is tempting to keep it secret and avoid the contempt of others, we may feel an opposite desire to confess to an intimate who had no inkling of what we have done, hence putting their valuation of us at risk, in the hope that they will forgive us and reassure us that they will not abandon us, thereby helping us to restore our relational sense of selfrespect and to feel we can resume our place in the group.18 Shame is therefore not merely an unthinking, internal, private reinforcement of social norms of just any kind – and hence an emotion that tends only to produce conformity. The cognitive aspect of the emotion implies that, if an individual rejects a certain social norm and is confident of her rightness in so doing, then she need feel no shame in defying it (though as we shall see, there can be exceptions). An anti-racist who responds to racists by denouncing them and hence provokes their scorn 18

See Smith’s eloquent discussion of the opposing pulls of the desire of the shamed person to escape from society and to be admitted back into it (Smith, 1759, II.ii.2.3–4, pp. 84–5). Foucault’s interesting but crypto-normative discussion of confession in relation to power leaves unanswered the question of whether confession is always bad (Foucault, 1976).


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is likely to feel defiantly proud of having done so – though it may also be an upsetting experience; equally she may feel shame and loss of self-respect if she conceals her views in the presence of racists and allows them to assume she accepts what they say. The concepts of integrity and moral courage do not fit with an overly socialized picture of the moral regulation of everyday life. Shame can produce not only conformity, as sociologists have generally assumed (e.g., Scheff, 1990), but resistance, for people can act not merely on the basis of social norms but on what they think is right. It is therefore clear that, as the psychologist Sylvan Tomkins argued, the negative feeling of shame is generally dependent on a positive valuation of the behaviours, ideals or principles in question (Sedgwick and Frank, 1995, pp. 136ff.; see also Nussbaum, 2001, p. 196). Shame – like other emotions – is about something; thus removing it is not just a matter of trying to get rid of the feeling but of correcting what it is about: the behaviours or deficiency of which we feel ashamed. Only then can we begin to feel alright again. Yet because it is about something other than itself, shame is also a fallible response in the sense that it can be unwarranted.19 The person who through no fault of their own has a body shape that is not culturally valued has done nothing shameful, but might still feel shame. ‘Shamelessness’ implies an unwarranted refusal of deserved, warranted contempt and shame. When faced with conditions which are shaming because they give people little alternative but to live in ways they do not consider acceptable, they may be tempted to reconsider the valuations giving rise to the shame, de-valuing what others value, and valuing what others despise, so that bad becomes good. By contrast, the desire to be accepted as respectable is a shame response dependent on a feeling that what is lacked is truly worthwhile (Sayer, 2005; Skeggs, 1997). However, particularly for those with little power, it is possible for people to experience a feeling of shame even where they strongly believe they have done nothing wrong, if significant others, such as workmates, believe that they have. One can despise the class system, but still feel shamed by it. The power of recognition is not always trumped by conviction; the social may trump the cognitive.

19

However, we can also be ashamed of shame.

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Ethical reflection and the contestation of the good Notwithstanding our capacity for spontaneous moral or immoral action, it should be clear that, to different degrees, ethical reflection may be involved in all these everyday aspects of conduct we have so far discussed. People may examine, evaluate and re-adjust moral or immoral emotional responses, reflect on virtues, vices and exemplary characters, reconsider memories and moral stories, take into account norms and the views of others, and indeed draw on anything and everything they know in deciding how to act. They may use both general rules and practical ethical judgement, responsive to particulars and informed by experience.20 They may imagine taking the place of others, and generalize from familiar cases to new ones. Retrospectively, they may decide how to attribute blame or credit. Prospectively, they may weigh short-term against long-term considerations, and concern for self relative to concern for others. They may go further and ‘step back’ from their immediate situation and thoughts and feelings in order to assess them as a whole. Occasionally they may evaluate the values and social norms which they have so far accepted, perhaps revising their valuation of material acquisitiveness, or divorce, or assisted suicide. Moral stories are often about people doing just this, and coming to realize that they need to steer their lives in a different direction. We don’t have to choose between acknowledging non-discursive, spontaneous practical sense and acknowledging ethical reflection in our depictions of everyday life; both are important, and in between lie countless fleeting thoughts and uncompleted musings. In life, if not in examples in philosophy books, reasons and motives tend to be complex and mixed – for example, to be partly instrumental and ethical. Consider the professed motives of the white middle class parents from London, studied by Diane Reay et al., who chose to send their children to ethnically and class-mixed schools instead of white middle class schools. They did so both because they thought it was right in itself that their children should learn to get on with children from different backgrounds, and because they thought it might help them get ahead in later life. It appeared that they would have not sent them to the school if they had felt it would have worsened their chances (Reay et al., 2007). This does not mean that ethical justifications are merely covers for selfish motives (some might argue that it would be unethical (selfish) 20

See Chapter 3.


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for parents to sacrifice their children for their principles). Concrete moral problems can be complex and dilemmatic, responding to diverse and sometimes interdependent goods and bads. Although we tend to favour public justifications of our actions which are simple and invoke a single reason, perhaps because we fear that providing several reasons indicates lack of integrity and clear moral thinking, or perhaps even concealment of the ‘real’ reason, actual motives are often multiple. People may act in a certain way both because they think it’s the right thing to do and because they know it might land them in trouble if they don’t. We might see the latter motive as inferior to the former, but the combination is common enough. Conscience and good will are often weak, and it may take the carrots and sticks of approval and disapproval to make us act well. People’s motives tend to be complex where they have to address and reconcile different, often incommensurable ends – both their own, and those of others. Central to the account of ethics in everyday life that I am developing here is the neo-Aristotelian view that ideas about these ends are related to assumptions about flourishing or eudaimonia. With regard to their own ends, individuals’ capacities, needs, desires and dispositions are multiple and varied, so that any form of life implies a plurality of values (good or bad), such as self-interest, self-reliance, strength, courage, compassion, care, respect for others, sense of justice, love, understanding, or perhaps desire to dominate others and be envied. Individuals may differ in terms of the importance of each of these elements for their subjective sense of well-being, though they may not reflect on this much.21 It is also evident from any such list that these capacities, different needs and desires compete and pull in different directions, and hence do not form a harmonious whole (Parekh, 2000, p. 48). Each may be appropriate in different circumstances, though just how is itself a matter of practical judgement. It is not only that we may have both virtues and vices, but that different virtues, such as love and impartiality, may conflict in some circumstances. It is because flourishing or well-being consists of several elements, including being able to form and pursue various commitments, that we have several different ends. To the extent that we feel these are out of balance we can respond by changing our behaviour or the valuation of these elements of 21

They may also differ in terms of their objective well-being, that is, people’s needs may differ, even though they may not realize this.

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flourishing.22 The choices may be difficult, for time, energy and resources are always limited, and we can cultivate only some of our potentials. For example, a life of outstanding achievement in some specialist field is likely to involve a sacrifice of other goods and other kinds of contribution to social life. The fact that individuals also have to take account of the interests and ends of others that are in conflict with their own might seem to lend support to the idea that morality is basically a ‘social contract’, designed to minimize conflict among competing prudent egoists. But even in a liberal capitalist society this is only partly right. As Midgley points out, it needs two important qualifications. Firstly, much ‘competition’ is unintended – a result of scarce resources rather than desire to beat others; cooperation is also common. Secondly, people are often not prudent, and they are generally not completely egotistical, but are ‘often moved by a quite different set of motives, arising directly out of consideration for the claims of others. They act from a sense of justice, from friendship, loyalty, compassion, gratitude, generosity, sympathy, family affection and the like . . .’ (Midgley, 1991, p. 5), though these latter motives are not necessarily dominant in practice. A deeper form of ethical reflection involves the contestation of dominant cultural values and institutions. Particularly in complex, divided and plural societies, different conceptions of virtues and the nature of the good life vie with one another. They are evident, for example, in conflicts at the discursive and symbolic level over gender relations and class, in terms of feminine versus masculine values, and working and middle class values (Sayer, 2005). Thus feminism in everyday life faces difficult judgements as regards the value of the ways of life to which women have been traditionally assigned: is the problem that many of the more worthwhile, fulfilling roles are monopolized by men, so that the subordination of women is primarily a result of exclusion from these? Or is it that traditional feminine roles have been undervalued? (Of course, both may be partly true.) What this shows is that these social struggles are not merely struggles for goods and power but about how to live, about what is a just, virtuous or good life and a good society.23 22

23

If we only had one final end in life, and all our other values were subordinate to it as means to that end, then that end would be beyond revision for there would be no other standpoints from which to evaluate it (Blackburn, 1998, p. 240). Bourdieu’s insistent ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ leads him to underestimate these non-competitive forms of motivation.


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Not everyone strives for advantages over others, still less for domination over them. Some can be motivated by principle, including the idea of living in equal relations with others. Thus, socialism and feminism aim not to invert the relations of domination that they are concerned with, but to eliminate them. Middle class egalitarians may actually seek to reduce their economic power. Male sympathizers with feminism may seek to weaken male dominance. The green movement aims not to gain power as an end in itself but to save the planet. One of the consequences of that variant of the scholastic fallacy which consists in imagining that it is somehow less scientific to acknowledge values and ethics in everyday life than it is to acknowledge power – a tendency reinforced by the gendering of power and values, the former hard, masculine and a suitable topic for positivistic science, the latter soft, feminine and supposedly unsuitable – is that the nature of social struggles is systematically misunderstood. This is not to suppose that the net effects of moral concerns are necessarily sufficient on their own to produce much change in society; social relations and the distribution of resources are generally strongly embedded and difficult to change, even where they are recognized as wrong. But such judgements do matter to people, and vie with more amoral or selfish strivings for change. While ethical reflection connotes something calm and disinterested, the contestation of values may take quite different forms, some more like a bar-room brawl than an academic seminar. Judgements of others’ values may be distorted by the desire of individuals and groups to establish their own moral superiority vis-à-vis others; indeed the practice of ‘othering’ – construing others as the repository of all that is despised and feared – is a common feature of unequal societies. At times, what may appear to be a conflict over a very specific issue, such as the veil in western societies, may actually function as a kind of lightning rod for a much wider set of mutual resentments and judgements about the relative worth of different cultures as a whole. Often we find that, when people judge and criticize others, the responses that follow are often not only about specific actions and their legitimacy, but about whether the critic has any moral authority or ‘right’ to criticize in the light of her own character and history and that of her group. We may feel that, even where someone else’s specific criticism of us is correct, it is nevertheless hypocritical of them to make that criticism, given their

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own record.24 In other words, people evaluate not only the other’s moral evaluation of us, but their broader moral standing and record. Ideas about what is ethical change; sometimes practices that were once regarded as ethical are now seen as unethical. But this does not mean that suffering only comes into existence when it is discovered or ‘constructed’ as existing. Though once seen as legitimate, slavery is now condemned, and condemned as always having caused suffering. What such changes imply is not cultural ethical relativism, though it does imply there are culturally different views of the good – but rather a kind of moral progress. Cultures are not self-validating. Both progress and regress are possible; the twentieth century provided plenty of examples both of how societies formerly at war could come to live in harmony and how apparently stable societies could quickly regress into genocidal wars. Although ideas about the good and how to live are contested, they can accommodate the desire to live harmoniously with others who have different views on precisely this matter, and indeed the political philosophy of liberal societies tends to identify morality with the business of enabling people with different conceptions of the good to live together.25 This liberal view of morality is to some extent constitutive of such societies. But of course even this is a conception of the good. Finally, while it is important to acknowledge that ordinary people, and not just philosophers, engage in ethical reflection and reason about actions, the extent to which they do so should not be exaggerated. Mostly, people think and act in piecemeal fashion, and only occasionally, if ever, step back and try to work out whether they are being consistent. Thus, inconsistencies in lay ethical thought and action are common: some may deplore murder, yet be in favour of capital punishment. While there are many contradictions in popular ethical beliefs, it is generally only where individuals encounter them personally in particularly vivid form that they try to sort them out. Philosophy is invaluable for helping us identify and resolve these matters.26 There are also 24

25

26

While to reject the argument because they are hypocritical would involve an ad hominem fallacy, rejecting the implication that their claims are false need not. For the purpose of understanding lay morality and ethics we do not have to take a stance on whether the right is prior to the good, or even whether it makes to try to distinguish them. See, for example, Peter Singer’s brilliant dissection of our contradictory valuations of life and death (Singer, 1995).


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non-moral, including sub-conscious, influences on moral conduct. Experimental empirical research in psychology shows that people’s actions are often affected by their current mood; on the whole they are more likely to help others if for some reason they happen to be in a good mood – which may be a consequence of something as arbitrary as the weather – and less likely to do so, if not (Appiah, 2008). People tend to underestimate this influence on their own behaviour, and would generally prefer to believe that their own conduct was immune to such arbitrary influences. However, they notice it in others: that we are more likely to get people to treat others well if we can get them in a good mood is part of folk wisdom, though something that philosophers and sociologists tend to ignore. The influence of mood also helps explain why people do not always act on their beliefs. As always, there are exceptions, but this research implies that social environments and subconscious influences play a more significant role in shaping behaviour than philosophers would like to think, and that environments which tend to make people (un)happy are (un)likely to encourage good behaviour towards others. Poverty and stigmatization are unlikely to have an ennobling effect on people; contrary to romantic myth, those who have few resources or opportunities compared to others and who continually experience disrespect are hardly likely to be inclined to act generously and respectfully towards others.

Different moral norms for different social relations People’s behaviour towards others varies according to the kind of social relation and setting in which they’re acting; different expectations, sensibilities and norms come into play in different contexts, such as family, neighbourhood, workplace, market relations, professional client relations, political debate, and so on. This is particularly evident in modernity, where the differentiation of life into spheres has developed enormously. Hence the importance of works such as Michael Walzer’s Spheres of Justice (1983) and Boltanski and Thévénot’s On Justification (2006), which identify the logics or standards of different kinds of social relation or setting. One might say that the differentiation arises because different conventions obtain in different settings or spheres and indeed are constitutive of those spheres; thus, the different moral norms of the market and of families are constitutive of their respective spheres. But while this

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seems right we need to ask, what is the relation between the demands of the norms and the character of the relevant social relations and practices in any given setting? While both the norms and the social settings are of course socially constructed, like all social constructions they are fallible and succeed or fail and cause problems to the extent that people can be made to behave in the expected ways. An organization may prescribe that its members treat each other as equals despite the fact that they are actually organized into relations where they are objectively unequal in terms of their powers, so that they cannot do so. It is not merely in virtue of different conventions that people generally treat their family members in different ways to how they treat people in marketplaces. A more materialist explanation is needed: they also behave differently because of the objective differences in the social relations, activities and settings themselves and how they affect individuals. Social conventions have to be ‘put to the test of things’ (Boltanski and Thévénot, 2006, p. 17). It is no surprise that the expectations that customer and retailer have regarding how they should behave towards one another are different from those of people who belong to the same household: they are radically different kinds of social relation. Thick, durable relations of care, love and friendship that significantly shape the kind of people we become inevitably generate different moral expectations from the minimal and transient relations that characterize many other kinds of social sphere. Even then, there is more contingency, for the conventional conduct can at times be overridden: families can be sites of antagonism, domination, simmering resentment and violence. In practice, prescribed behaviours and responsibilities are only roughly established for any given setting, and people frequently contest and re-negotiate them; they are not merely negotiations about norms in a vacuum, but about the material, cognitive and emotional interactions of particular people with specific needs and wants, capacities and vulnerabilities in particular material settings.27 The contestation of such differentiations of norms and practices is as much a feature of modernity as the differentiations themselves, and indeed their legitimacy may be a matter of ongoing public concern: do workplaces need to be ‘humanized’? How should new family forms and norms be evaluated? Is neighbouring dead? 27

See Finch and Mason’s important study of the negotiation of responsibilities in families (Finch and Mason, 1993).


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Most of the settings I have cited tend to be the visible ones in which people are aware of who they are relating to, but quite impersonal and often unnoticed social relations mechanisms can have profound impacts on people’s well-being. The impersonal, aggregative and largely indirect relations of competitive markets in capitalism can leave people dispossessed and destitute, or affluent and comfortable. If I, as a buyer, switch from product A to product B, which I think is superior, I do not do so in order to make the producers of A unemployed, though that may be an unintended consequence of such an action if many other people do the same. The causal responsibility for such effects is usually dispersed in terms of numbers involved, as are also its effects. In modern capitalism, where each of us consumes thousands of different products whose production and distribution involves yet still greater numbers of producers, it is impossible for us to know enough about all those people to be able to decide how to act with regard to their well-being.28 We can do it for small numbers of producers, with the aid of organizations like Fairtrade, who we trust to research information and take actions on our behalf, but it requires a different form of regulation to provide a more far-reaching and consistent protection – one that is institutionalized through laws rather than relying on mere norms and individual moral judgement. At the same time it should also be remembered that, even in the absence of personal connection, the moral sentiment of humanitarian concern for others is significant and can prompt response. We might wish it were stronger, but it is strong enough for organizations such as Oxfam and Amnesty International to rely on. Although there is usually no direct interaction between donor and recipient, this too is still a response to determinate conditions – extreme suffering – and not merely a matter of norm following. There may also be other motives, like donor guilt and the desire to be able to prove to oneself that one is a moral person, but these are still in response to suffering.

Morality, social structure and power In sketching an approach to understanding the moral elements of everyday life, and to appreciating the importance of that dimension of 28

This point was made by Smith (1976), and elaborated by Hayek in terms of the epistemic qualities of markets (Hayek, 1991).

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people’s lives, it has not been my intention to ignore or underestimate the role of social structures, power, discourse, habit or interest, for these are interwoven with the moral elements. The social field is not merely the product of competing motives, virtues and vices. It is structured, usually unequally; the power and interests of individuals and institutions differ according to their position in relation to others. To the extent that particular forms of social organization generate ethical or anti-social behaviour, we need an assessment that is simultaneously political and moral.29 Moral concern which is directed purely at individual behaviour and suffering, rather than the social structures that tend to nurture them, is problematic. This can be seen in the difference between charity and justice: although charitable acts based on compassion are well-meaning they presuppose an inequality between the giver and the recipient without necessarily challenging social injustice; indeed they may add symbolic domination to structural inequality by making the giver appear generous and superior and the recipient passive and inadequate – an object of pity, rather than a victim of injustice. ‘It’s good to feel compassion; it’s better to have no cause to’ (Appiah, 2008, p. 72). But then the concept of justice is itself a moral one, so that a critique of structural injustice is not something different from a moral critique. We need to relate morality to power. Relations of care, typically asymmetric, and so important for our ethical formation, are relations of power, whether benign and malign, as both development psychology and the feminist ethic of care emphasize (MacIntyre, 1999; Sevenhuijsen, 1998; Tronto, 1994; Winnicott, 1964). And care responsibilities are typically strongly gendered. Some forms of power depend upon the moral commitments of the dominated; ‘to be left holding the baby’ is a form of disempowerment which is wholly dependent on one’s commitment to protecting the baby from risk, and someone else’s refusal of that responsibility. Moral blackmail is a more common technique of domination than commonly acknowledged. A church may gain power over its members by making them feel guilt even where they have caused no harm.

29

‘Defective systems of social relationships are apt to produce defective character. But even the best sets of social relationships cannot ensure that no one develops badly’ (MacIntyre, 1999, p. 102).


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Although morality may be a source of opposition to domination, moral ideas themselves tend to be influenced by power relations. Norms about conduct and the definition of our responsibilities and rights tend to favour the dominant, and the dominant usually strive to legitimize their domination as fair and proper, and to establish themselves as authorities on moral matters. The tendency for historically and culturally specific institutions to become taken for granted is itself a form of power, as Foucauldians emphasize. As such it constructs as well as restricts and suppresses. We need to know where structures and norms promote well-being and where they do not, and hence assess whether the legitimations are indeed legitimate. Abstaining from judgement is no help here. The authority of moral ideas may not necessarily depend merely on ‘the argument of force’, as Bourdieu terms it; as we have implied it may derive from the force of the better argument. We ought to be able to discuss morality and power simultaneously without either reducing the former to the latter, or mistaking the latter for the former. The most cynical explanation is not necessarily the best. We need to be wary of the prejudice in which social scientists disregard goodwill and ethical behaviour as romantic illusions, and in ‘seeing through them’ elevate themselves as superior, less gullible, more rational beings. In their everyday practice such social scientists are usually as concerned as anyone about how they treat others and how others treat them; in fact they are often far more sensitive about certain kinds of unethical conduct than others are, and popular hostility towards their political correctness derives from suspicions that mirror their own intellectual wariness of morality.

Ethics and cultural difference The idea that people as ethical subjects are very much products of the society in which they grow up is likely to make us wonder whether what is moral is simply relative to particular societies. Could this book be merely a reflection of the cultural prejudices of my own local, historically specific society? Indeed could western philosophy be just such a commentary? Do not other societies have quite different moral beliefs and norms? Did not the Samurai think it acceptable to test their new swords out on a passing peasant, murdering them in the process (Midgley, 2003)? Back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, less than a mile from where I am writing, women labelled as witches were

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executed at Lancaster Castle. Arguments for either cultural relativism or at least that different societies have different, perhaps incommensurable, moral values are common in anthropology and sociology and, on the face of it, appear to have some force. There are some common responses to such positions (e.g., see Blackburn, 1998; Gellner, 1970; Midgley, 2003; Moody-Adams, 1997). If the concepts of different cultures were incommensurable or untranslatable, then ethnographic studies of other cultures which translate their concepts would be impossible; the fact that anthropologists claim to be able to understand them shows they are not untranslatable (Davidson, 1973–4).30 If different cultural beliefs were wholly incommensurable then anthropology and ordinary intercultural understanding would be impossible. Even for cross-cultural disagreement to be possible, there must be some mutual understanding, on the basis of which we can articulate where we disagree (Moody-Adams, 1997). If relativism were correct then it would imply not only that we have no basis for judging other cultures’ values, but that members of other cultures must also have no basis for judging our own society’s values; their judgements would inevitably be ethnocentric and worthless. Would we really want to reject any such criticism as necessarily ethnocentric and misguided? Or would we want to say we are open to criticism, external as well as internal, and that we may benefit from the views of others who may be able to recognize things which we overlook? It is important not to allow fear of ethnocentrism to become a thought-stopper in social science. Welcoming criticism of our own society and refusing to be critical of others is contradictory; as Gellner famously remarked, it amounts to being a liberal at home and a conservative abroad (Gellner, 1970). How should we regard other cultures that are ethnocentric and dogmatic in their condemnations of our own and other cultures? How do we regard those within another culture who reject some of its values? Moral relativism implies a moral geography consisting of internally homogeneous and separate cultures (Moody-Adams, 1997), but cultures are internally differentiated and entangled with others. They are hybrids resulting from movements, interactions, borrowings, conflicts and adaptations. Once we acknowledge this, we can realize that even the distinctions of internal and 30

The idea that they are incommensurable can function as a means by which anthropologists can protect their intellectual property in other cultures.


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external, within and between, in referring to cultural relations, may be problematic. Like discourse, cultures are complex and heterogeneous, and we should not assume they have some overarching unity. Construing other cultures as unified belief systems in which everything hangs together is always a temptation in anthropology, for it allows elegant syntheses, but as Moody-Adams puts it, moral practices of real societies have ‘a fundamentally non-integrated complexity’ (1997, p. 44). Some internal differences in beliefs, including moral beliefs, may relate closely to social divisions, such as gender or rank, but in addition it is possible for most actors to be reflexive and to question particular beliefs, by focusing on their empirical claims or consistency with other beliefs, and taking the position of others. Contrary to a patronizing, ethnocentric, western view, reflexivity, dissent and scepticism are not the preserve of modernity but are common elsewhere. To establish how far different cultures differ in their moral beliefs would require a comprehensive empirical study of different cultures. We cannot establish the answer a priori. Here I shall just comment on one concrete anthropological study of morality in a non-western society which claims that it is radically different from western morality. Catherine Lutz’s Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll and Their Challenge to Western Theory (Lutz, 1988) is a fine ethnographic study of the Ifaluk – a small, largely selfsufficient community in the Samoan islands.31 In it Lutz claims that: (1) ‘[f]or many Samoans, morality is not transcendent but always embedded in the need to sustain relations with others’ (p. 77); (2) the ‘[daily] conversations of the Ifaluk people are pervaded by the assumption that people are oriented primarily toward each other rather than toward an inner world’ (p. 81, emphasis added). They speak of persons as relatively undivided, either internally or from their social context (p. 115).32 In Ifaluk morality one should always attend to the needs of others and maintain one’s attachments to them, for isolation is seen as a form of suffering, evoking sadness in both the isolated individual and in observers. A premium is placed on sharing everything, both in hard times and good, rather than

31 32

My thanks to Linda Woodhead for recommending this book. Lutz acknowledges that without some notion of the self as distinct from other selves and objects social and moral order would be impossible (p. 84).

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merely looking after oneself; indeed anyone found not sharing was likely to be punished. Lutz explains this pattern of emphasis by reference to the community’s precarious and isolated situation, and its small scale and open nature where little is secret, and neediness is visible; (3) the Ifaluk do not seem to distinguish between thought and emotion; (4) ‘[o]ne person’s anger (song) entails another’s fear; someone’s experiencing grief and frustration (tang) creates compassion/love/ sadness (fago) in others’ (p. 82). The concept of song implies that the anger is justifiable, and it is usually directed at those who fall short of meeting their obligations to others; Ifaluk people frequently use the term fago; many of its different uses, as described by Lutz, seem to involve care and concern for the neediness of others, such as someone in pain, or shamed, or without kin. Although, like most readers, I have only Lutz’s word to go on, her account seems entirely plausible. However, I question her claim that all these characteristics are radically different from western morality: (1) The idea that morality is not transcendent but embedded in the need to sustain relations with others is not so different from everyday notions of morality in the west. If morality is primarily about how people should act with respect to others, with regard to their wellbeing, then sustaining relations with others is fundamental, not in the liberal sense of individuals avoiding harm to contingently related others, but in the more fundamental sense that good relations with others are a condition of individual well-being, because self-hood and a sense of belonging depend on relations with others. Many westerners know this – more often women than men, and more likely those not schooled in liberal political philosophy. The ethic of care may only recently have been validated in western moral and political philosophy but it has long been present in western lay culture, just as it has in others; indeed it is hard to imagine how we could have reproduced ourselves without it. (2) This strongly relational concept of the individual is not so different from western ways of thinking and acting, for much behaviour and thought in the latter is also oriented towards others, as in the case of many parents towards their children, or friends and lovers towards each other. Some westerners think of themselves in terms of their


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relations to others. As Margaret Archer’s research shows, ‘social reflexives’, that is, people who continually share their internal conversations with others who are close to them, are common in British society (Archer, 2007). There are also spheres and occasions within western society, for example within families and in social gatherings, where failure to share and to show generosity is viewed with disapproval. (3) Regarding the Ifaluk fusion of thought and feeling, while these, like reason and emotion, are often seen as opposites in modern western thought, in everyday conversation we often use ‘feel’ and ‘think’ as synonyms. Moreover, as we saw earlier, many western philosophers see emotion as overlapping with reason, and argue that there is emotional reason. (4) The idea, implicit in the concept of song, that anger might be justified, is perfectly common in western ways of thinking, as is the idea that other emotions might be justified. The particular things which cause anger probably differ across cultures; for example, different behaviours might be seen as indicative of disrespect, though disrespect is probably a cause of anger common to all societies. Further, as Smith argued, we tend to take other people’s emotions seriously as indicative of something about their situation. Feeling compassion for someone who is grieving or otherwise suffering is completely familiar to westerners, though there are no doubt some differences in how these emotions are related in Ifaluk and western cultures too. Such emotions involve a structure of reasoning and derive from the work of attention. As the above discussion shows, the differences between Ifaluk and western morality or ethical life look far from incommensurable or large. We need to distinguish between ‘a good that is specific to a local culture and a local cultural specification of a good’ (O’Neill, 2007, p. 136), such as a particular local view of what constitutes good childcare. Further, differences between cultures in terms of their notions of morality are generally intelligible in the light of how their societies are organized; thus it is to be expected that a modern liberal society has a more individualistic notion of morality that prioritizes individuals’ freedoms, and a small-scale traditional society has a more collectivist conception. But societies are internally differentiated and different kinds of morality may apply in different areas of any given society; thus a liberal

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society includes spheres such as families in which liberal norms do not apply much.33 We are continually pushed and pulled in different directions by these different kinds of relation. A purely liberal society, that is one in which all individuals are only contingently and conditionally related to others and can negotiate their relations with one another as equals, is an impossibility. The commonalities between different cultures’ moralities should not surprise us, for they are about beings who are similar as well as different. The folk universalist idea that ‘we are all flesh and blood’ alludes to something important. Understanding other cultures would not be possible if we had nothing in common (Midgley, 1991).34 To be sure, there are dangers of too easy a translation, of simple absorption of the others’ ways of thinking into our own, settled, familiar categories. But there are also dangers of comparing cultures only in terms of what is most different in them, reducing each to their unique characteristics. Ruth Benedict, the anthropologist, (in)famously claimed: We do not any longer make the mistake of deriving the morality of our locality and decade directly from the inevitable constitution of human nature. We do not elevate it to the dignity of a first principle. We recognize that morality differs in every society, and is a convenient term for socially approved habits. Mankind has always preferred to say, ‘It is morally good,’ rather than ‘It is habitual,’ and the fact of this preference is matter enough for a critical science of ethics. But historically the two phrases are synonymous. (Benedict, 1989, p. 356)

I do not ‘derive’ morality from ‘the inevitable constitution of human nature’, though I do argue that it has a loose, fallible relation to human capacities for flourishing and suffering, and that there is a crucial difference between merely conventional and harm-based or eudaimonistic forms of morality. As Bidulph Parekh puts it, ‘Human beings are 33

34

One kind of novel differentiation in Ifaluk society was noted by Lutz: money and markets were beginning to impact on the community. How money was to be shared had not been decided and it was initially not only unequally distributed but hoarded. The rise of external sources of individual income was thus beginning to undermine the traditional moral order. This illustrates the way in which the moral order both shapes and is shaped by the material organization of society. Strangely, Lutz argues for seeing ‘emotion as a cultural rather than a natural category’ (Lutz, 1988, p. 81, emphasis added). But it is both, for culture is an emergent property of certain parts of biological nature, particularly that of human beings.


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culturally embedded, and a culture not only gives a distinct tone and structure to shared human capacities but also develops new ones of its own’ (Parekh, 2000, p. 47; see also Singer, 1991). We don’t have to choose between assuming that human nature is a neutral and comprehensive standard for all moral questions and assuming that cultures successfully define and constitute their own kind of human good. Benedict later reputedly changed her relativist position when confronted with Nazism, and she went on to write critiques of racism, implying, of course, that racism is not merely just another locally approved habit, but a mistaken and damaging view of human being. There are indeed many different views of what is moral, but that does not mean that they are all equally adequate in enabling us to flourish. That cultures have different moralities does not legitimize moral relativism – people can be morally mistaken, just as those who convicted women of being witches were in my home town. A misogynistic culture may assert that women are naturally inferior to men, but that doesn’t make its picture of human nature correct or mean that women do not suffer as a consequence. I am therefore not proposing moral universalism in the sense that there are universal basic norms that all accept: clearly there are many different moralities and views about morality, though as our discussion of Lutz implies, we should not exaggerate their differences.35 Parekh suggests that no culture embodies all that is valuable in human life and develops the full range of human possibilities (Parekh, 2000, p. 167). This implies that different societies cannot be meaningfully compared in terms of a single criterion; acknowledging, as we have insisted, that human beings have much in common does not mean that there is a single, optimum form of social organization and way of life. The fact that we cannot find a single criterion by which to compare and evaluate different societies doesn’t mean that we cannot compare them, for we can use multiple criteria; indeed the fact that we have a variety of different needs implies that this is what we should do. We shall explore one way of doing this in Chapter 7.

35

Jarrett Zigon’s defence of moral relativism defines moral universalism in these terms, mistaking the object for the beliefs about it (Zigon, 2008). Further, like Benedict, he fails to distinguish conventional from harm-based morality.

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Conclusion This has been an eclectic account of actually existing morality or ethical life – a veritable dog’s dinner – unashamedly so because that’s what the nature of the object seems to warrant. It is heterogeneous and therefore difficult to summarize in abstract form. Far from being reducible to lofty principles (or local conventions and discourses) morality is grounded in our social being, in the ordinary sentiments, reflexivity, behaviour and interactions of people, constrained and enabled by their physical and psychological capacities and susceptibilities, and by social structures and cultural discourses. Only by entering into the nature of the implications of our behaviour for well-being can we fully explain the ethically evaluative character of human experience. Mundane morality ranges from the simple to the complex, the straightforward to the dilemmatic and ambivalent. In its simpler forms, such as the respectfulness, trustworthiness, consideration, care and friendliness common in social interactions, it tends to be taken for granted by actors, and often ignored by social science. Yet those who enjoy such interactions would soon notice their absence; indeed, recurrent hostility and disrespect from everyone would quickly threaten their psychological well-being. Tensions among our many needs and interests, and between these and others’ interests, are inevitable, so that just what is a good way to act is often unclear to actors. The future is uncertain, and the effects of our actions are subject to moral luck; well-meaning actions may be thwarted by contingencies. Some situations are dilemmatic; a parent considering divorce may feel that staying together and divorce are equally bad. Further difficulty is presented by the fact that we find ourselves living within social structures which themselves are ethically problematic, involving domination and exploitation and neglect of certain groups, and in which uncoordinated individual actions are insufficient to correct for or change such structures; the goodwill of a middle class egalitarian towards someone disadvantaged by poverty fails to repair the injuries of class and can seem condescending. Further, modern life involves such extraordinarily complex and geographically extensive social networks that it is hard for even the most reflective of individuals to assess the ethical implications of many of their actions. We need to acknowledge the whole range from simple to complex here.


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None of the elements of ethical being that I have identified is likely to be adequate on its own in consistently producing behaviour that we might endorse as good or right. Moral sentiments and the ongoing work of attentiveness are important in everyday ethical sensibility and action, but on their own they are unreliable; their fallibility tends to be reduced by ethical reflection, including consideration of how others would regard our actions, and possible consequences that might follow. Virtues, attachments and commitments give reliability to social interaction and allow trust (Lovibond, 2002), but they require an appropriate moral education to develop, and this is shaped, largely unawares, by social structure. Mere norms coupled with sanctions are unlikely to motivate individuals unless they regard them as legitimate, and even if they do their actions tend also to be governed by practical reason about particulars, and contingencies of mood. Stories and positive and negative models add further guidance. Each element may support the others or go some way to compensate for their limitations, but while they are more likely to produce ethical behaviour collectively than singly, they form only a loose assemblage, and sometimes fail. The whole range of elements and their interrelations has to be acknowledged if we are to understand the ethical dimension of life as it is in all its messiness and imperfection rather than as philosophers think it ought to be. Social science, with its dominant spectators’ view, often represents the ethical dimension of life in ways that ignore much of the life of the mind, while philosophers view it overwhelmingly in terms of actors’ reasons and their justifications. There is more reasoning and reasonableness in everyday conduct with respect to ethical matters than sociologists and other social scientists tend to acknowledge, but less than philosophers tend to assume. In interpreting lay morality we have to steer a course between a hermeneutics of suspicion and a hermeneutics of sympathy, as Ricoeur put it, and attend to the object (Ricoeur, 1982). Overdoing suspicion elevates the observer to a position of superiority relative to the dupes being observed but actually prevents her from seeing what they see. Overdoing sympathy flatters and overlooks what people generally miss or prefer to ignore. For all their limitations and flaws, everyday ethical sensibilities and practice should not be undervalued; they may be insufficient unless supported by appropriate social structures and institutions but they are indispensable in

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securing what quality of life we have. Any attempts to make societies more ethical have to engage with actually existing ethical being. In developing this account, my arguments have been influenced by ethical theories from philosophy. In the Appendix I briefly review these theories in terms of how they can help or hinder our understanding of morality in practice.

6

Dignity

Introduction All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. (United Nations Declaration of Human Rights) [C]aste based discrimination affects one’s human dignity and casts shadow on his personality. It strangulates confidence and creates inferiority complex in our generations. (Surendar Valasai, President of Scheduled Castes Federation of Pakistan)1

Dignity is a curious, elusive thing, frequently invoked both in high places – in constitutions, political manifestos, declarations of human rights and in moral and political philosophy – and in the protests of the oppressed.2 It matters to all of us and is yearned for by those to whom it is denied – the oppressed, the dispossessed and the disrespected. Although difficult to define it is something quite ordinary that we sense particularly when it is threatened – when we are treated in a disrespectful, undignified manner, when we do something embarrassing, or when we have to do something we consider to be ‘beneath us’. Maintaining our dignity and being treated in a way which respects our dignity is crucial for our well-being; indeed it is often spoken of as a base-line: ‘at least I left with my dignity intact’; ‘I want to die with dignity’. Our dignity is always at risk – for some more than others, according to their situation; if we fail to maintain it, we are likely to suffer. Practices which systematically humiliate particular kinds of people and hence undermine their dignity have sometimes paved the way for their extermination, as in the case of the Jews in Nazi Germany 1 2

World Dignity Forum (2006). I would like to thank Sharon Bolton for getting me interested in this subject. The use of examples from employment relations in this chapter reflects its origin in a workshop on ‘Dignity at Work’ organized by Sharon.

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(Glover, 2001). Dignity is not just a philosophical notion, a fuzzy concept, but something that is clearly important to people – sometimes seemingly more than anything else. Particularly since the Second World War, with the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, it has become common to invoke human dignity as the ultimate value. The growing popularity of the term across the world suggests widespread resonance, though its very vagueness has made it attractive. Though the concept has ancient western roots, equivalents can be found in Confucianism and Islam (Lee, 2008) and in Asante culture (Appiah, 2005, p. 265; see also Nussbaum, 2000, p. 73).3 The African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights refers to the right of every individual ‘to the respect of the dignity inherent in human being’, and the Cairo Declaration of Islamic Leaders also used the concept of human dignity (Lee, 2008, p. 3). It has become a key term in the struggles of the Dalits (‘untouchables’) for recognition and justice in India (World Dignity Forum, 2006). An internet search reveals large numbers of organizations, both religious and secular, invoking human dignity as a fundamental guiding value. Whether the immediate issues are children’s rights, land rights, the treatment of workers, poverty, or social stigma and political exclusion, the notion of human dignity is increasingly invoked.4 As one would expect, there are variations in its meaning across, and indeed within, cultures. The western, liberal concept of dignity invoked in political constitutions and declarations of human rights emphasizes the autonomy of the individual, while nonwestern versions tend to have a more relational sense of dignity. In some Asian societies, ‘dignity is a collective status which individuals are entitled to by virtue of their belonging to a community and assuming certain social roles’ (Lee, 2008, p. 15). Yet the relational view is far from absent in western societies, for even in these liberal individualism has only limited influence.

3

4

For example, the term goes back to the Stoics and early Christianity (Nussbaum, 1994, p. 15; Soulen and Woodhead, 2006, pp. 1–26). See, for example, the Children’s Dignity Forum, in Tanzania (www.arasa.info/); the Land, Territory and Dignity Forum, Porto Alegre, Brazil (www.landaction. org/display.php?article=411); an organization called ‘Dignity’, an ‘Association for Protecting the Human Rights of the Macedonians Discriminated by the Republic of Greece’ (www.gate.net/~mango/Dignity. htm), and many others.

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Despite the importance of dignity to people, social science – even critical social science – has had little to say about it, though recent interest in ‘the politics of recognition’ takes us a step closer, insofar as it deals with respect for others (Fraser, 1999; Fraser and Honneth, 2003; Honneth, 1995). It is not merely as a subjective ‘value’ or expressive activity, which people happen to have, that we can merely note as a social fact about them without assessing its significance. If we examine it, and what secures or threatens it, it reveals much about our relation to the world of concern, our extraordinary sensitivity to the quality of our relationships with others, about both our autonomy and our dependence, and our embodiment. While philosophers often invoke dignity as an ultimate value, they rarely explain what it is (Lee, 2008; Malpas and Lickiss, 2007). To be told that dignity is ‘worthiness’, or ‘that which is worthy of respect’, is of little help, though it is easier to recognize instances of dignity being threatened or denied. Not surprisingly what little literature there is that defines it has been written in response to situations in which dignity is at risk. It has therefore become a significant topic for health professionals and care workers, with recognition of the importance of patients’ dignity and the idea of a dignified death, and recently for trade unions in dealing with bullying and harassment of workers.5 In trying to reform practice, it is necessary for these campaigns to try to define what constitutes dignified behaviour towards others. They tend to provide a complex and contextualized view of dignity – one that emphasizes relations between people and their material circumstances, while the philosophical literature mostly associates dignity with autonomy, and particularly, following Kant, with the capacity for reason. While I shall note some useful and arresting Kantian ideas about dignity, they provide only limited purchase on how the term is used in everyday life and how it seems to matter to people. I also depart from most philosophical approaches, particularly the more Kantian ones, in emphasizing the ways in which dignity is maintained or threatened and communicated via the body, often wordlessly. Ironically, while some philosophy associates human dignity with reason, as the ‘highest’ of our powers, as opposed to the ‘lowly’ qualities of the body, in everyday life dignity is 5

Shotton and Seedhouse (1998), Social Care Institute for Excellence (2009), the Unison trade union’s Dignity at Work campaign in the UK, and The Workplace Dignity Institute in South Africa.

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also signalled in comportment, eye contact and bodily control. The dance of dignity among people in the way they comport themselves in relation to one another reveals much about the peculiar dialectic of the personal and social, the subjective and the intersubjective. Philosophers often say that, if you want to know the meaning of a word, don’t ask for a definition but examine the different ways and situations in which it, and cognate terms, are used, particularly in everyday life, and this is what I shall do. It is helpful to discuss dignity in relation to a number of other feelings and conditions, some of which, like integrity, respect, pride, recognition, worth and standing or status, are positively related to it, and others, like shame, stigma, humiliation, lack of recognition or trust, are negatively related to it. Not surprisingly for such a vague and elusive concept, and one that is often invoked in relation to the most difficult of ethical issues, not all uses seem to be consistent. There is a peculiar tension between two dominant uses: firstly, the idea of dignity as something intrinsic to human being (and perhaps to certain other animals), and hence which individuals have whatever their situation and behaviour, and regardless of whether others recognize it; and secondly, the idea of dignity as something crucial yet fragile which depends on how people act and how others treat them; indeed, as if it depended on its being recognized. In the former case, dignity is associated with autonomy; in the latter, with relationality (Malpas and Lickiss, 2007). On the one hand it is treated almost as an empirical fact, something people have, and on the other, as an ideal, something they should have; dignity seems to hover ambiguously between these. Once again we find something hugely important which appears to lie between the positive and the normative. How come something so important can seem so mysterious? I begin with the relationship of dignity to autonomy, dependence, seriousness and trust, and how it is threatened in contexts in which instrumental relations to others are dominant. In examining these aspects we quickly find that even autonomy is not opposed to relationality of certain kinds but presupposes them. I then discuss dignity and the body. Next I address different forms of respect, and the way in which maintenance of dignity depends not only on words but on deeds and material conditions. Finally, drawing particularly on the case of dignity in relation to employment, I discuss the difference that inequalities make to the achievement of dignity, and conclude.

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Intrinsic property or relational and conditional upon behaviour? (1) ‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.’ (2) ‘I was relieved that my mother was allowed to die with dignity.’ (3) ‘Despite all the setbacks I managed to maintain my dignity.’ At times, as in (1), dignity is spoken of as an intrinsic quality, a proper object of respect, having great, perhaps supreme, value; all are born equal in dignity, just by virtue of being human, regardless of their position in society, their particular characteristics and behaviour and their relations with others.6,7 This implies a non-relational view of dignity. But if this were the case then why should we ever feel that it needed protection by establishing that we have certain rights that must be respected? Why would it be such a fundamental object of concern? Of course the very need to assert (1) implies that it can be threatened, and that it depends on the social circumstances in which people live; they may be born equal but their subsequent incorporation into social structures that are often hierarchical and exploitative means that they can become unequal. The relational quality is more clearly suggested in (2) and (3): dignity here is a vulnerable, precarious quality or condition dependent both on how people conduct themselves and how they are treated by others. In (2) dignity appears to be something that depends on its recognition; respectful treatment by others gives or at least helps maintain dignity: respectful, dignified treatment dignifies the person. In this example the behaviour of the subject herself is less important than how others treat her, because her own powers to assert herself and exercise selfcommand had weakened. Allowing someone a dignified death implies respect for them through treating them as they would like to be treated. The ‘dignity’ that she was allowed refers not simply to a thing or personal quality, but a form of conduct and interaction between people, a way of being with others and with herself. (3) implies that, where others refuse to give us respect, then it takes considerable strength to maintain our dignity in the face of such treatment; here dignity appears as a form of comportment and conduct within a relationship. 6 7

Equivalent arguments could be made for the dignity of animals. In some religions it is believed that the dignity of human life derives from our being created in the image of God.

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In both (2) and (3) there is a complex relationship between autonomy and dependence on others, which can involve tension or harmony. No wonder dignity seems so hard to define. It appears to be an immanent but precariously realized quality – a quality that is crucial for our well-being, especially our self-respect. Further, because of the tendency of a healthy relation to self to depend on healthy relations to others, it is easier to retain one’s dignity, composure, competence and self-respect when others treat us with respect, and difficult when they do not; conversely having composure, self-command, etc., tends to win respect. Respect seems to be partly constitutive of what it recognizes; one might hope that treating people respectfully encourages them to behave in ways that warrant respect, and vice versa. The ambiguous nature of dignity might be explained by noting the difference and the relation between a person having certain capacities for doing things (and, as we shall see, certain vulnerabilities), and their actually activating those capacities. A person who is doing nothing – perhaps just sleeping – has dignity by virtue of her capacities, what she can do, even though many of them are not currently being exercised. At the same time, the concept of dignity as something fragile that must be maintained if people are to have respect and self-respect concerns how their capacities are exercised, when they are; it depends on their behaviour and how others treat them.8 This latter concept is more relational. Though different, the two concepts can be related, for our well-being depends not just on having certain causal powers – capacities to do certain things – but on being able to exercise them sufficiently and appropriately. The first concept of dignity as intrinsic acknowledges the former; the second concept of dignity as contingent acknowledges the latter. As we saw in Chapter 4, things are more complex than this, because the very development of some of our most important capacities depends on how we are brought up and how our life goes subsequently. Further, the effectiveness or fitness of those capacities depends on how often, and under what conditions, they are exercised. Someone who is continually humiliated may find their confidence and ability to act are sapped; it might be not just that they are prevented from exercising their capacities, but that as a result the capacities themselves weaken. We are 8

Critical realists will recognize this distinction between the possession of powers and their exercise. In Bhaskar’s terms it corresponds to the distinction between the real and the actual (Bhaskar, 1998).

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always striving across the gap between what we have and what we could be, or need or want to be. Even if we are currently flourishing, this could change. I suggest this is why we have these two concepts of dignity; it is the need for continual reproduction of our fragile wellbeing under conditions of uncertainty that links the two. When a constitution affirms the dignity of all people, or an oppressed group struggles to have its dignity respected, they are claiming both that they have certain human capacities and needs like others (including the common capacity to be different), and that they should be allowed to meet their needs and actually to exercise their capacities, so that they can realize their potential and flourish. This distinction between dignity as deriving from what people are and are capable of, and dignity as dependent on what they actually come to do or are allowed to do, is reflected in two corresponding kinds of recognition. Recognition of, or respect for, the former might be seen as unconditional; I recognize or grant them respect simply as persons. Recognition or respect for a person by virtue of their behaviour is conditional, depending on, among other things, whether it is held to be dignified, and hence whether they deserve respect (Taylor, 1994a). Sometimes these two may not go together; this possibility presumably underlies defences of human rights in terms of human dignity; whatever else we might think of someone’s behaviour, their human dignity should still be respected – though, of course, quite what that means is typically left undefined.

Dignity and the dialectic of autonomy, relationality and vulnerability The most striking correlates of dignity concern autonomy, the agency of the individual, but this depends on the quality of interactions between people. We also find a relationship between dignity and vulnerability. In all these respects we see the trace of the features of human social being that we discussed in Chapter 4 – particularly the interdependence between self and other, and the condition of vulnerability. To be dignified or have dignity is first to be (capable of being) in control of oneself, competently and appropriately exercising one’s powers. Dignity thus appears to be about autonomy, particularly in the sense of ‘self-command’ and ‘self-possession’. The closely associated sense of respect also implies recognition of autonomy, for to respect

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someone implies keeping a ‘respectful distance’ from them and refraining from attempting to colonize or control their lives. It is hard to respect someone who has no autonomy, no distinctiveness or individuality, who appears passively to follow everything that someone else’s will dictates, and has no will of their own. They seem to lack dignity. However, how far they can exercise self-command, how far they can ‘be themselves’, depends very much on how far others let them. To have autonomy must at least imply the right to be different, at least in ways that are not anti-social. If we refuse to respect someone’s difference from ourselves, then they are likely to feel a loss of dignity. For an organization to refuse to recognize an employee’s religion or culture – for example, the need of a Muslim worker to observe Ramadan – would be an affront to their dignity.9 Here it is again vital to distinguish what people can do or become from what they actually do or are allowed to do; in everyday life, the former is often wrongly inferred from the latter, so that those who occupy lowly positions that deny their holders autonomy are seen as inherently inferior, as incapable and lacking in dignity. No wonder that the Dalit peoples of India – subject to centuries of institutionalized domination, discrimination, disrespect, humiliation and violence within the caste system – should invoke the concept of human dignity in their political struggles. To have dignity and to have it recognized is to be treated as an end in oneself – at least in part. People are ends in themselves partly because they have the capacity to govern their own actions through their own reasoning. Hence: [t]o treat someone else as an end is to offer them what I take to be good reasons for acting in one way rather than another, but to leave it to them to evaluate those reasons. It is to be unwilling to influence another except by reasons which that other he or she judges to be good . . . By contrast, to treat someone else as a means is to seek to make him or her an instrument of my purposes by adducing whatever influences or considerations will in fact be effective on this or that occasion. (MacIntyre, 1981, pp. 23–4) 9

I am assuming sexual identity can be subsumed under cultural identity here. However, some cultural identities may not be worthy of respect (Barry, 2001). For example, the identity of white supremacists is based on hatred and stigmatizing of their others, and is therefore unworthy of recognition. In refusing unconditional respect or dignity to others, they lose their claim to conditional respect for themselves.

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Bullying is an affront to the victim’s dignity because it uses threats and violence rather than reasons that she can freely accept or refuse without risk, according to what she judges to be good. To be able to speak out, to be listened to and have our views taken seriously rather than mocked or ignored or treated as merely symptomatic of our condition is to have our dignity respected. Not being at liberty to speak one’s mind, or not being listened to or taken seriously, are all affronts to our dignity because they suppress our agency and refuse us recognition. Note, however, that to treat someone in a dignified manner does not require that we always accept what they say or do; to put forward arguments for disagreeing is to take the other seriously as someone capable of reasoning. It is important for individuals’ self-respect that they can air disagreements and criticisms without loss of respect. This, of course, can be a difficult and delicate matter; but given respectful relations, it is possible for people to lose arguments or admit mistakes without loss of face. To respect people’s dignity is to treat them as responsible for their actions, and to respond positively or negatively towards them according to what they deserve. It is not about refraining from judgement, or compulsory niceness. Making respect for others obligatory rather than conditional – for example, expecting workers to defer to customers even when they are mistaken or offensive – devalues it and is hardly dignified or dignifying. For related reasons, popular concepts of dignity are also associated with seriousness (‘gravitas’) and being taken seriously: again, note the bivalence. Someone who is never serious lacks dignity; if they are serious but are never taken seriously by others, it is hard for them to maintain their dignity and self-respect. Those who are not serious at appropriate times may also threaten the dignity of others with whom they associate; indeed in certain situations, we might say they threaten the dignity of the occasion by failing to respect it. Again there is a connection to self-command, for seriousness implies a measure of self-control and composure (not ‘losing it’), including limiting displays of strong emotions, whether happy or sad or angry. This control is particularly clear in the middle class professional habitus (Bourdieu, 1984), where it is generally helpful in enabling clients to put their trust in professionals, because they seem in command of

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themselves, or ‘together’, and hence more likely to be competent.10 Those kinds of professional work which require a closer and more emotional engagement with clients, such as counselling, involve a difficult balance between avoiding coldness and insensitivity on the one hand, and an unwanted or premature familiarity and emotionality which would indicate disrespect towards the client on the other. Like any form of response to others, the maintenance of dignity can be overdone or underdone and cause problems in either case.11 Given the association of dignity with autonomy and treatment of people as ends in themselves, it may be threatened in instrumental relations, where people primarily treat others as means to their ends. This is clearly the case in employment. By definition, employees are hired as a means to their employers’ ends, not out of a sense of benevolence or respect. Equally, members of divisions of labour are means to each other’s ends. Further, modern divisions of labour tend to be designed so that the individuals filling the roles are substitutable. Insofar as a person is reduced to the role of placeholder, with no acknowledged character of their own, they merely have a price, rather than a dignity, as Kant put it.12 To treat others as merely an object or 10

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Dignity in the form of gravitas is valued in many spheres of life, but arguably it is often overvalued. We may be more impressed by a certain kind of bearing and manner, than by what those who have it actually say or do, while those who lack it may say and do better things. At worst, to appreciate someone for their gravitas may amount to gullibility on our part in being ‘conned’ by their confident and serious manner. Avoidance of such inappropriate responses and finding the mean between them is a central theme in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (1980). Similar arguments can be found in Smith (1759). ‘In the realm of ends everything has either a price or a dignity. Whatever has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; on the other hand, whatever is above all price, and therefore admits of no equivalence, has a dignity’ (Kant, 1991, p. 113, 4:434, emphasis in original). At least superficially, popular usages of the term dignity come close to Kant’s remarks on the subject, in which dignity derives from the rational character of humans, hence able to form their own ends, and hence properly treated as ends in themselves, rather than merely as means to others’ ends. However, for Kant, human dignity inheres in the transcendental characteristic of being a free and rational will, and hence the ability to follow what reason – or ‘duty’, understood as that which follows from reason – dictates, in deciding how to act (Williams, 1973). Note the marginalization of emotions and the body, evident in his dismissal of ‘feelings, impulses or inclinations’ (ibid., p. 113, 4:434) as having anything to do with rational action. When he says that ‘[a]utonomy is therefore the ground of the dignity of human nature and of every rational nature’ (ibid., p. 115, 4:436,

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instrument, as in the case reported by Hodson of factory managers who would take products out of the hands of the workers working on them without saying anything to acknowledge them, is to undermine their dignity (Hodson, 2002). But it is at least possible – and common – also to treat others in these instrumental economic contexts in ways which signal a non-instrumental valuation of them as persons in their own right, and hence as having dignity. ‘Pleasantries’, even in the minimal form of making eye contact with the person we are dealing with, and nodding slightly to them (a miniature bow), are not trivial; they signal that we acknowledge them as a person. Of course, such acknowledgements can themselves be instrumentalized; being respectful to others may be a more effective way of getting them to do things. But if people feel that others are merely going through the motions of signalling respect without meaning it, the respect is devalued – we might say it merely pays a price rather than acknowledges dignity. Recognition is most valued precisely where the other doesn’t have to give it. Hence the significance of occasions on which respect and appreciation can be signalled to others without being followed up with a request for a favour in exchange. To be sure, expressions of respect and appreciation may lubricate gift relations, but again it is important not to assume that the most cynical explanation of any action must always be the best, as in adolescent iconoclasm. We should be sceptical, but scepticism is not the same as cynicism; we can be sceptical about cynicism. People can respect others as persons in their own right, and value them, even where they do not benefit from their actions; for example, one might respect a competitor, even where their success comes at one’s own expense. Having dignity is associated not merely with autonomy but with exercising the kinds of powers we associate with flourishing human beings.13 To be able to do not only basic things, like feed ourselves, but exercise our ‘higher’ faculties is a source of dignity. Skilled work is more dignifying than unskilled work. Someone who acts incompetently when they have no excuse for doing so lacks dignity. Individuals who lose

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emphasis in original) he refers to the autonomy of the rational will, unconstrained by nature or by feelings. In these respects, popular meanings of dignity, which have a great deal to do with human nature and feelings, are radically different – and in our view, quite rightly so. Hodson’s research on meaning and satisfaction at work also suggests that concerns about dignity and respect are common across gender and ‘race’ (Hodson, 2002), though, of course, what counts as dignified or undignified varies somewhat culturally.

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those powers, perhaps through illness or old age, may find it hard to maintain their dignity. Further, maintaining our dignity depends not only on how we conduct ourselves, but on whether we have things which others regard as essential (‘the social bases of self-respect’, as Rawls called them [Rawls, 1971]). This is why people who have little income often engage in quite expensive conspicuous consumption – to show that they are worthy of respect. The search for dignity often takes the concealed form of a distributional struggle for resources, these being valued not only for the use-values they provide but the recognition which they signify (Sayer, 2005). Conditional recognition of dignity depends not only on the technical competence with which people exercise their self-command but their treatment of others in the process – whether they act responsibly or in an insensitive or anti-social way. Here there is a relational and moral dimension to dignified conduct and its recognition. Dignified conduct involves taking responsibility for oneself and not burdening others unnecessarily, and taking on responsibilities for others or for particular tasks that benefit them.14 Hence, workers may gain a sense of dignity from the fact that they are doing something for their income rather than being dependent on state benefits. Gilens’s study of Why Americans Hate Welfare (Gilens, 1999) shows that those US taxpayers who resent paying taxes to support welfare benefits do so not so much because they have to give up some of their earnings to others, but because they see welfare recipients as lacking dignity or self-respect since they have no autonomy, and – many taxpayers imagine – have only themselves to blame for this. Workers’ sense of dignity may be greater if their employers allow them some discretion in how they work, and if this allows them to serve others (Lamont, 2000; Sennett and Cobb, 1973). Wanting to be self-reliant and socially useful are common motives, and achieving both unites self-interest and the public good. This is not understood by those economists who imagine that it is in the self-interest of people to free-ride on others’ efforts wherever possible. People tend to gain a sense of dignity from being trusted and hence recognized as competent, moral, trustworthy people – through knowing 14

As always, it may be objected that this claim might not win universal assent. Not everyone accepts the theory of evolution either, and many have what we now know to be false views on the subject. A universal claim does not have to have universal acceptance. We have to argue the case, and I invite readers who disagree with these claims about dignity to do just that.

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that others feel confident that they will use their autonomy and discretion in a way which does not take advantage of other people’s vulnerability. When we are trusted we are treated as responsible. While this allows us to act without their direct control we nevertheless depend on them for this freedom. Again, autonomy and relationality are closely associated. For the working class men studied by Michèle Lamont, their sense of dignity derived from their maintenance of high moral standards, their self-discipline and self-reliance, and from being trusted and trustworthy. The pride derives not merely from feeling recognized, but from feeling justifiably recognized as trustworthy and competent. As Lamont notes, defining their worth in realms other than economic success meant that they could keep a distance from the American Dream, against which they would not measure up well. Rather their sense of dignity derived from ‘having a space for expressing . . . [their] . . . own identity and competence’ (Lamont, 2000, p. 248). Refusal of trust, on the other hand, erodes dignity. In her report on low wage jobs in the US, Barbara Ehrenreich notes the humiliating character of practices such as searching employees’ purses to make sure they have not stolen anything, and of requiring employees to take random drug tests. As she points out, many forms of surveillance of workers, or restrictions such as being banned from talking with other workers, are indignities (Ehrenreich, 2001, p. 211). They signal lack of trust in workers’ competence and probity, and lack of respect for them as persons. To be told how to do things that one would in any case do perfectly well of one’s own volition, and to be constantly under surveillance, may be humiliating. This is also a reason why service workers may resent having to use scripted conversations in dealing with clients. The refusal of trust and discretion is itself an indignity. The relational dimension is again evident in the possibility that lack of trust may crowd out trustworthy behaviour, reducing people’s willingness to make an effort to be virtuous. To assume, as management often does, that people will only work well for rewards, rather than doing so for its own sake, is demeaning, and fails to respect their dignity. It overestimates their dependence on others as a source of motivation and underestimates their capacity for virtuous autonomous action. Doing some things for their own sake also seems more dignified and virtuous than doing them purely out of self-interest precisely because it implies treating those for whom the job is done as ends in themselves (Brennan and Pettit, 2004; Frey, 1997; Le Grand, 2003). Of course, the

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point of employment for employees is to get an income, but it is not necessarily the only point. Their dignity also matters. To reconcile these tensions requires the maintenance of a certain distance between the actions and their recognition and reward, so that, for example, rewards are not given for successful completion of each task, as in training a dog, but over a period of time, in recognition of general good performance and citizenship. Then the employee may feel valued as a person, rather than manipulated. These points indicate how dignity exemplifies our deeply social being – which as we saw in Chapter 4 presupposes vulnerability and dependence on how others treat us. Good, mutually dignifying and enabling relations can be difficult to achieve. If others treat us in an undignified manner, then we may find we have to struggle to maintain our dignity in the face of this treatment. Signalling our indignation may backfire and generate more hostility and exclusion. Engaging in supererogatory valued acts to reassert our worth may result in selfrepression. Concealing our hurt may show the offender that they have not got the better of us, or it might make them despise us more for lacking the courage to challenge them. If, on the other hand, others invariably respect us, then dignity may become something we can take for granted and do not have to ‘work at’. In both cases, dignity has a social, bivalent character, dependent on both the individual and her others. The often delicate relations between respect for autonomy and respect for vulnerability in the maintenance of dignity are particularly evident in relations between disabled and abled individuals (Goffman, 1968). To draw attention to someone’s disability where it’s irrelevant to the situation, or to treat someone who is disabled as reducible to their disability, is to undermine their dignity. On the other hand, where the disabilities are relevant, it is of course insensitive to ignore them.15 Consider the case of elderly patients in hospital who have become incontinent and hard of hearing. These patients are often more

15

While it is common for able-bodied people to treat people with disabilities insensitively, often they do not intend to do so, and their encounters with them are sometimes characterized by a very moral unease and anxiety, as they fear giving offence but do not know how to avoid doing so. Goffman’s book could be seen as a celebration of the way in which moral individuals try to relate to those who are different from themselves in a respectful, friendly way (Goffman, 1968).

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concerned about their dignity than anything else.16 They are already likely to feel a loss of dignity simply as a result of their disabilities, and it is difficult for nurses to maintain their own dignity in carrying out such tasks as wiping bottoms; the patient may also be embarrassed on behalf of the nurse for this reason. It is difficult for a nurse to talk to patients who have lost most of their hearing, without infantilizing and embarrassing them. Seriousness and attentiveness on the part of the carer are likely to be helpful, but if overdone may make the patient feel worse; a light touch, matter-of-factness and humour are often helpful too in restoring a sense of normality rather than crisis or deficiency. Everyday morality, imperfect as it is, varies considerably in the extent to which it achieves dignified interpersonal relations, but we all know their importance. Thus, to treat someone in a dignified way is not to ignore their vulnerability and dependence on others, but rather to treat them in a way which discreetly acknowledges that vulnerability without taking advantage of it, and to trust them not to use their autonomy in a way which would take advantage of our own vulnerability. To be able to maintain some autonomy, make claims on others and be effective despite our inevitable vulnerability and dependence on others is a source of dignity. There is therefore both a tension between autonomy and dependence, and a complementarity. The very fact that we need respect and recognition of our dignity for our psychological well-being shows our dependence on others and how they treat us. It is a contingent, vulnerable property, or it is not dignity at all. To be sure, just what counts as dignified conduct varies culturally, and by gender, class and age. Again, these may just be different ways of signalling respect for others, and hence the cultural variation belies a common concern. Sometimes the different standards reflect differences in capabilities and susceptibilities; the child is not expected to behave as an adult would. Respect for others’ dignity, even of the conditional kind, can be sensitive to relevant differences. In some cases, responses to others may involve double standards; what the female or low caste person is expected to do or to accept, the male or high caste person is 16

This is now being recognized in health services; it is common to see references to patients’ dignity in British hospital mission statements and publications. It is significant that some of the best literature on dignity is written by professionals in the health and social care sector (e.g., Shotton and Seedhouse, 1998).

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not; what is held to be dignified in one is held to be undignified in the other. Simpering compliance may be seen as a feminine virtue, and yet an indignity for men – an affront to their masculinity. Such double standards typically reflect forms of domination, misrecognition and neglect. While this analysis might clarify everyday usages of the concept of dignity, there are controversial ‘grey areas’ in relation to more difficult cases. If dignity is associated with self-command and capability, especially the ability to reason, does that mean that someone with advanced senile dementia, or in a coma, has lost their dignity, so that there is no need to treat them in a dignified way? Insofar as their carers do treat them with dignity, even though they seem incapable of noticing this, that respectful treatment might be seen as a kind of moral surplus, a reflection of their carers’ own self-image, rather than a response to the needs of the other. Although it might seem redundant and irrational, it is understandable, for it honours what the patient once was, and supports the carer’s own community’s self-respect and affirms their regard for others. This again shows the relational side of dignity. It might also be feared that undignified treatment of those who are unable to recognize it might easily lead to undignified treatment of those who can and hence are vulnerable to it. At a deeper level there is a common tension between wanting to respect people simply on the grounds that they are human, and respecting, as I have suggested, their specific capacities and vulnerabilities. Different cultures deal with this in different ways, though in modern western culture it is unresolved and hence a source of contradictory behaviour. If human life per se has absolute dignity, then an ancephalic baby, lacking the part of the brain that enables feelings or thought, should be kept alive. If dignity exists in virtue of an individual’s capacity for self-command and vulnerabilities, then such a baby would lack dignity, and there would seem no justification for prolonging its insensate life.17 As Peter Singer shows, this tension is a common source of conflicting feelings about life and death in contemporary western society, underlying debates about issues such as abortion (Singer, 1995). The ‘grey areas’ present enormously difficult problems of 17

In the latter case, there would still be a need to respect the dignity of its parents in their bereavement and how they handled the loss; such respect would show awareness of them both as independent reasoners and dependent, vulnerable beings.

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practical judgement in deciding on cases which elude simplistic and standardized views of life. Birth and death are processes rather than events, human beings are heterogeneous, and there are many human capacities which we can lack without this preventing us from flourishing and participating in society, provided others value and respect us and do not ignore or take advantage of the resulting vulnerabilities. Reasonable responses require attentiveness to the specificities of each case.

Dignity, the body and animality As with so many other matters relating to moral sentiments, dignity is partly signalled through the body – whether consciously or unconsciously – in how we hold ourselves, in our bodily hexis, and our facial expressions (Bourdieu, 1991; see also Nussbaum, 2001, 2002). To comport oneself in a dignified manner is to hold one’s head up high, to sit or stand up straight, to maintain self-control and composure – the capacity for competent, responsible thought and action. By contrast, stooping low, or cowering, signals weakness, humiliation and submission to domination or threat. These two comportments are echoed in the metaphor of being above certain things which are ‘beneath our dignity’. As Lakoff and Johnson argue, bodily metaphors such as these are common in our language, particularly in relation to morality, and indicate what they term the bodily basis of mind (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999). Since the mind is seen as ‘higher’ than the body, it figures prominently in many accounts of dignity, but our bodies are important too.18 To be unable to control bodily functions which others can, or to have to expose one’s body where others do not, may also be experienced as threats to a person’s dignity. This is why hospital wards are places in which dignity is at risk and a great deal of ‘dignity work’ has to be done to maintain it – the curtains that can be drawn round the bed, the combing of the elderly infirm patient’s hair, and so on (Shotton and Seedhouse, 1998). Body language – for example, being looked up and down disapprovingly in a split second – can create a ‘“dialogue” of physiognomies’ (Charlesworth et al., 2006, p. 85). 18

In his Utilitarianism, ch. II, para. 6, John Stuart Mill associates dignity with the choice of higher over lower pleasures (Mill, 1861).

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In everyday social encounters, significance emerges through uncodified, nonverbal gestures and symbols, as a covert indication of, and claim to, worth, position and entitlement. Through the patterns of their embodiment, people radiate significances and exercise their differential worth. (Ibid., p. 86)

The repetition of these fleeting, non-verbal acts of mutual evaluation cumulatively impacts on our sense of self-worth. The nod of recognition can suggest not only respect, but deference and wish to avoid conflict. A young man with hunched shoulders, shortened neck and forwardleaning head who avoids eye contact may be unconsciously responding to low status, not appearing ‘above himself’ by holding his head high, yet also appearing slightly threatening through his refusal of engagement. When disrespected, we may find we have to struggle to maintain our comportment and self-control and ‘face’. Concealing our hurt, or signalling our indignation, may involve ‘drawing ourselves up’, raising our chin in scorn, and conspicuous avoidance, signalling contempt and dismissal and refusal to acknowledge the gaze and dignity of the disrespectful; alternatively we may respond with sustained eye contact – the blazing eyes of indignation. The glare returns the look of contempt or false superiority, or captures the attention of those who do not even notice their disrespectful behaviour, and hints at violence. But resorting to actual physical or verbal violence may sacrifice dignity in the form of autonomy, self-control and moral probity for revenge. Philosophers – with their disciplinary inclination to prioritize the rational – may be reluctant to acknowledge these bodily, animal elements, especially those involving threats, but we are beings capable of violence as well as reason. We can appreciate the embodied aspect of dignity perhaps most clearly where respect for a certain group is refused by others and its pursuit by that group becomes part of a culture of resistance. Flamenco is a dance originating in stigmatized groups in southern Spain, particularly gypsies. It is an extraordinarily powerful assertion of dignity, albeit a dignity that has to be maintained defiantly in the face of oppression and refusal of respect. It also suggests anger. The whole bodily hexis of the dancers signifies dignity, pride, strength and assertiveness and preparedness for action – upright, shoulders back, chest open, arms slightly arched, knees slightly flexed, head level. By bending the lower leg up from the knee behind her and then bringing it down forcefully, the

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dancer manages to stamp without bouncing, or wobbling – so that she maintains a level head and gaze throughout and an impression of self-command and composure; she is able to return – or ignore – the gaze of others without flinching. By this means an aura of controlled power can be signalled. There is an improbable conjunction of dignity or self-command in bearing and movement with catharsis, particularly in the singing – the sheer intensity of each commanding respect. To be sure, men’s and women’s styles differ, but in both, the combination of the violence of the stamping with this composure and the elegance of the arm and hand movements makes a striking impression: this is ‘someone to be reckoned with’, someone formidable. And it is not only that the appearance of the dance is one of dignity and power: doing it gives the dancer a feeling of dignity and empowerment (just as doing a different dance such as jive gives a dancer a completely different feeling). Of course, dignity need not always be expressed in this formidable way so that it contains a hint of threat – its expression can be quiet and understated – but it is understandable that an outcast, disrespected group should at times express itself in the former way. As regards non-human animals, it may seem merely an anthropocentric conceit to say that they have dignity. But even if it is, thinking about the circumstances in which we attribute dignity to them tells us a lot about our own concepts of dignity in human society. I suggest that we sometimes think of animals as having dignity not only because they can do remarkable things, and in their behaviour and bearing show themselves to be independent of us and have self-command, but because we are aware that they are also vulnerable at the same time. Despite its apparent frailty, the heron survives in the cold and hunts for its food with great efficiency. Things that lack both agency and vulnerability, such as sand, seem to lack dignity. The eye appears to be the most potent sensor and indicator of dignity. It is difficult to imagine anything which did not have an eye, or some other means of sensing us, as having dignity. Our eyes and bodies can communicate a great deal, although sometimes ambiguously (Goffman, 1959). Avoidance of eye contact can signal not only respect for others, but also fear, or disrespect, or shame: those who are humiliated and shamed may avoid the gaze of others because it signals disapproval, or because they are required by their oppressors to lower their gaze to signify their inferiority. Consider encountering a horse (an animal sometimes characterized as a ‘noble beast’). We are particularly aware

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of its eyes, even if we want to avoid eye contact so as not to appear threatening. We are aware that it is aware of us, even though it may not appear to be looking directly at us. In avoiding our gaze it not only appears less aggressive to us but refuses the invasion and avoids a possibly risky engagement. In acting in ways which seem to signal both awareness of the observer (relationality) and independence and self-reliance, despite its vulnerability, it seems dignified.

Dignity, hierarchy and inequality The concept of dignity I have been discussing is a modern, universal, egalitarian one according to which all human beings have dignity. The UN Declaration of Human Rights states that all human beings are equal in dignity and rights. It displaced the older, aristocratic conception, still signified in the term ‘dignatory’, in which dignity was the preserve of an elite (Munzer, 1997; Sennett and Cobb, 1973).19 However, while the premodern concept has been largely overthrown, inequalities – albeit in modern yet still undeserved forms, particularly of class, ‘race’ and gender – persist and present difficulties for the maintenance of dignity and the conferral of respect (Sayer, 2005). The very existence of inequalities and relations of domination means that objectively individuals’ autonomy and dependence are unequal, so that some will find it easier to maintain their dignity than others. It is these inequalities that are the focus of many of the political campaigns noted earlier that invoke dignity. In this section I want to discuss these problems. But first there is a more abstract issue to address. Socially produced inequalities result in two ways. The first, ‘identitysensitive’, exemplified by sexism, racism, homophobia and ableism, are forms of unwarranted unequal treatment which respond to certain (mis)construals of people’s identities (Sayer, 2005). A crucial element of all these ills is treatment of members of the relevant groups in ways which are undignified: they may be mistrusted, their ability and probity may be doubted, they may not be taken seriously; worst of all, their vulnerability may be exploited, including the special vulnerability which derives precisely from their stigmatization, as in sexual and racial

19

Appiah refers to the shift in the meaning of dignity in Asante culture from elitist to universal as a ‘democratization of dignity’ (2005, p. 338, 68n).

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harassment. In addition, these social groups are often denied normal access to the ‘social bases of respect’. The second source of inequality is ‘identity-indifferent’. It is structural to modern economies in both the nature of the employment relation itself and the internal hierarchies or inequalities of economic organizations. Although these inequalities may correlate with, respond to and reinforce inequalities arising from identity-sensitive mechanisms of sexism, racism, etc., they can exist even in the absence of the latter. They are products of ‘identity-indifferent’ economic mechanisms (Sayer, 2005). The employment relation is itself unequal in that the employee usually has fewer options than the employer, and the latter is dominant. In turn, there are inequalities among employees in terms of pay, security and working conditions, and indeed in all the respects which we noted as important for dignity. Even if there were no gender or racial segregation (i.e., identity-sensitive segregation) across the occupational and pay hierarchy, there would still be inequalities. There are further inequalities between consumers and clients, usually in favour of the latter; service workers such as waiters are particularly exposed to undignified treatment (Paules, 1991). While this treatment may be partly in response to their identities, it may just be responsive to their position, irrespective of their gender or ‘race’. The very existence of inequalities and relations of domination means that some will find it easier to maintain their dignity than others. Treatment that fails to allow us autonomy and respect our vulnerabilities is all the more undignifying if others with whom we compare ourselves do not have to endure such treatment. It is through the work of comparison that people monitor inequalities and get a sense of what is acceptable.20 This does not mean that dignity is purely a matter of social construction, a product of measuring ourselves against certain arbitrary social standards, rather than any objective harm or well-being. A consensus may still be a mistaken one. The members of a privileged group may consider it an indignity to have to prepare their own food, but they are deluded, for food preparation is a necessity and a benefit, and doing it for oneself or sharing it with others does not reduce autonomy (on the contrary) or exploit vulnerabilities. Where there is a 20

Unfortunately, reference groups are often small, and those who are assigned to undignified work are often out of sight and mind, though not necessarily geographically distant.

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genuine indignity, it may not seem so bad if it is shared with one’s peers rather than endured on one’s own, but it is still an indignity. Our chances of achieving respect and maintaining our dignity are influenced by many things we do not control, in particular the positions we are born into with respect to class, gender, ethnicity and ‘race’, and which deeply shape our very character, and by how others allow us to conduct ourselves, which in turn may be influenced by class, etc. Characteristics of social background that are irrelevant in terms of competence and probity, such as accents and tastes, may affect whether people are accorded respect. There is a world of difference between claiming or being accorded respect for one’s conduct and claiming or being accorded it merely for one’s social position, particularly where we do not deserve that position, or ‘deserve’ it as a result of having taken advantage of an inherited advantageous social position. Amongst equals, the granting or refusal of respect is responsive to how people actually behave. But where there is inequality, respect may be demanded by the dominant, and refused to the subordinate, irrespective of whether such expectations are merited in terms of behaviour. Deference to superiors that is expected and merely based on undeserved differences in standing is likely to be humiliating for the subordinate, though they may become thoroughly accustomed to it. Exaggerated deference of subordinates towards the dominant is undignified/ying for both; the dominant may be both embarrassed and also perhaps suspicious that the deference is insincere, indeed sarcastic and disrespectful (Bourdieu, 1991; Sayer, 2005). Structural, enduring inequalities tend to set up a ‘force field’ in which the moral sentiments of actors are likely to be distorted, according to their position in the social field relative to others, so that the dominant are judged more generously than the subordinate for similar actions, and, in effect, double standards obtain (Bourdieu, 1984; Sayer, 2005). Thus, for example, managers stealing stationery are likely to be judged differently from workers stealing products of the same value. This ‘corruption of our moral sentiments’, as Adam Smith put it, may be in response to many kinds of inequalities besides that of income or status.21 In addition, the way in which actions (including statements) are 21

‘This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect, persons of poor and mean condition . . . is . . . the

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received by those to whom they are directed is also likely to be distorted, so that, for example, a sincere expression of concern by someone in a dominant position for the welfare of a subordinate may be seen as patronizing, especially where the dominant are seen as complicit in and benefiting from the subordinate’s situation. If we take matters of dignity and respect seriously, then because of the way in which recognition of worth and distribution of resources and opportunities are so closely related, we have to confront the problem of undeserved inequalities. Expressions of respect between dominant and subordinate which merely accommodate to these are devalued and deferential for the former and condescending, compensatory and consolatory for the latter (Sayer, 2005). We are particularly likely to be sceptical about claims to respect for dignity where they seem to be more about protecting status inequalities than defending a common humanity or in relation to merit. When we criticize someone for ‘standing on their dignity’ or claiming that some task is ‘beneath their dignity’, while others do the same thing without complaint, it is because we believe them to assume that they are somehow more worthy than others, indeed ‘above’ them. In other words, we suspect them of arrogance, snobbery or sexism. Dignity can easily be confused with rank and dominance. While we can signal respect through how we talk to others and what we say about them, words are rarely sufficient. For instance, if employers make pronouncements about treating everyone with equal respect, but in their actions, and in the conditions which they provide for their employees, treat them unequally, then their words are likely to be seen as being contradicted by their deeds. Expressions of equality of recognition which are not backed up by equality of treatment and distribution of resources and opportunities are likely to appear hypocritical. Although labour organizations might seem overwhelmingly preoccupied with material matters of pay and conditions, they, like the labour movement generally, are also motivated by concerns about respect and recognition. Workers may want better pay as much for the respect and status it signals as for the increased spending power. A possible reason why labour organizations don’t

great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments’ (Smith, 1759, I.iii.2.3, p. 61).

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make more of this publicly may be that they are aware of the danger of demands for respect being met with merely tokenistic responses. We might feel that it ought to be possible for all to be treated with dignity despite inequalities, but the ‘despite’ is significant. And just because people at the bottom often do not complain does not mean that there’s no problem. If workers are denied respect for long enough they may come not to expect it, so they may not complain about its absence (Ehrenreich, 2001). Some may resist, and this may help them maintain their dignity, though it is important not to romanticize the picture by overlooking cases where resistance is absent (Hodson, 2001). Where dignity derives from sustained resistance to disrespect, it is clearly a compensatory assertion of dignity, in the absence of respectful treatment, and may win respect from some. Those in subordinate positions may be in a Catch-22 situation, where maintaining their dignity allows the more fortunate to assume that there is nothing wrong with their situation, while failing to maintain their dignity invites them to assume they deserve their fate. Having to work at maintaining one’s dignity in the face of disrespect may also lead to a kind of self-repression through excessive discipline of self and family (Kefalas, 2003; Lamont, 2000; Sayer, 2005). Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Remains of the Day is a brilliant study of the self-repression caused by the attempt to maintain dignity within a relationship of servility (Ishiguro, 1989). Particular activities may be seen as dignified or undignified in themselves, or at least, in the latter case, as difficult to do in a dignified way. Of course, just what is seen as dignified and undignified varies across cultures, but whatever the exemplars of each, they tend to exhibit or lack the characteristics identified earlier of autonomy, competence, trust and seriousness, and the use of the ‘higher’ faculties. In addition, undignified work may be not merely unskilled but unpleasant and demeaning, an object of revulsion.22 The distribution and definition of dignified and undignified work varies strongly by class, gender and ‘race’, and tends to be taken as confirming the status of those who do it.23 Especially where an unpleasant kind of work is assigned to a

22

23

See Sharon Bolton’s (2003) examination of the case of gynaecology nursing as ‘dirty’ or ‘tainted’ work. The implicit rules governing the distinctions are often inconsistent. Thus many men consider cleaning the toilet as beneath their dignity, but are willing to do much harder and more unpleasant manual work.

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particular social group, as it was for the Dalits, it becomes a form of institutionalized humiliation. Some forms of work are undignified because they are servile. Servility is a function of a particular kind of social relation between the provider of a service and recipient. It is not an inevitable feature of service work. The dignity of service work derives from the respect and self-respect that derives from proficiency – effective self-command – in carrying out tasks that those who need them could not do themselves. Imagine I were to hire a cleaner, despite being an able-bodied person capable of doing the same work myself, with a similar level of efficiency. On the same day as the cleaner comes, I hire a plumber to deal with a burst pipe. I may treat both civilly, with unconditional respect for them as persons, but the plumber finds it easier to maintain a sense of dignity because they are doing something we both know I cannot do. Although the cleaner might find some self-respect in doing the job well, it is weakened by the fact that we both know that I could also do the job as well or nearly as well, and the only reason I’m not doing it myself is that our incomes are sufficiently unequal for me to be able to afford to pay someone else to do it.24 Thus, low-skilled work that is done for others who could perfectly well do it themselves is not in general a source of dignity, beyond that which derives purely from having a source of income rather than being dependent on state benefits.25 The household cleaner’s job signals servility – and is properly called servant labour – while the plumber is providing a specialist, skilled service (see Cox, 2006; Ehrenreich, 2001; Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2002; Tronto, 2002). The very existence of servant labour depends on inequalities in economic power; there is little point in paying someone to do something which would cost you as much to do yourself (Gorz, 1983). If we consider the effects of inequalities on the achievement of dignity, we encounter a radical implication. As Samuel Scheffler has put it, ‘equality is not, in the first instance, a distributive ideal . . . It is, instead, a moral ideal governing the relations in which people stand to one another’ (Scheffler, 2003). Yet as we have seen, in everyday practice, dignity and respect – central to the politics of recognition – are 24

25

Contingently, gender would be likely to add a further difference here, but it is the difference that skill makes that I am focusing on here. There is therefore a difference between the cleaning done for elderly people who are unable to do it themselves, and the cleaning done for the able-bodied affluent.

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inevitably widely seen as confirmed or denied through the distribution of resources and opportunities; it is not just a matter of respectful ways of addressing people. Where inequalities are structural features of societies then people cannot stand in dignified relations to one another. The problems are likely to be worse where, as in capitalist societies, many relations between people are not only unequal but overwhelmingly instrumental. Further, if dignified and undignified kinds of work are segregated into different jobs, then it becomes impossible for all to achieve dignity through work simultaneously. It becomes a zero sum game; some workers can only achieve dignified jobs if others do not.26 Individuals may try to conduct themselves with dignity and treat others in a dignified way, but in the context of structural inequalities, such actions only have limited compensatory, palliative effect. Dignity for all therefore implies far-reaching equality, not just in what people get in resources, but in terms of what they are allowed and expected to do. It requires contributive, as well as distributive, justice, and this in turn would require a society with a division of labour in which high quality and low quality work were shared rather than segregated into different jobs (Gomberg, 2007; Sayer, 2009).

Conclusion In conducting research on dignity at work, Sharon Bolton asked some workers what the term meant to them. These are some of the answers they gave (Bolton, 2007, pp. 246–9): Being treated with respect – the little things; like people calling you by your proper name, also trusting you to do the job properly, not taking advantage and stopping paid over-time but expecting you to work anyway and dipping into people’s pensions and understanding that employees are human beings and that they have families and worries other than their jobs and need time sometimes to sort their lives out. (Male, 54, Engineer) Dignity at work to me means that not only are your work responsibilities and actions respected, both in terms of required work and extra work you do, but also that the individual and human aspects of your actions are respected. (Male, 23, Management Trainee)

26

‘The terrible thing about class in our society is that it sets up a contest for dignity’ (Sennett and Cobb, 1973, p. 147).

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My job was dismantled without any reference to me, responsibility was taken from me, I had no control over what was happening to me. I was completely powerless. I was stripped of all dignity. (Female, 56, Accounts Clerk) Dignity at work? I don’t get paid enough to have dignity at work! (Female, 30, Teaching Assistant)

These answers strikingly identify many of the conditions that determine whether people have dignity that we have discussed in this chapter. They all point to the social character of human being, demonstrating how deeply the quality of social relations affects well-being. While they indicate the importance of autonomy, they do so from within a relational framework. To function well and to flourish requires good relations with others – in which people respect each other’s capacities and do not take advantage of their vulnerabilities. If these everyday uses of the term dignity are relatively clear, more abstract uses of the term are less so; the contrast between dignity as intrinsic to individuals and as contingent, fragile and relational is particularly strange. I have suggested that the two might be reconciled by considering the former as best understood as referring to a set of potentials – both capacities and frailties – that need to be recognized and cared for in relations with others if people are to flourish. The intrinsic view therefore needs to be complemented by the contingent, relational view. Dignity and respect are crucial for people’s well-being, and people who are denied respect tend to care deeply about this. Yet it is also not much to ask for. People need their dignity, but they also need much more, for example enjoyment, love and friendships. On its own dignity may be a mere sop: if one is losing one’s job then it is better to lose it with one’s subjective sense of dignity intact, but this is nevertheless only a consolation. That some should have to struggle hard to maintain their dignity is an indictment of their situation. The moral problems of unequal dignity are primarily the product not of disrespect or undignified behaviour within free-floating, ephemeral, interpersonal social relations, but of social structures that make people’s lives objectively unequal within their society.

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Introduction If our relationship to the world in everyday life is one of concern, what is it in social science? Many social scientists would say it is different: it is to describe, understand and explain, and not to evaluate or judge. I have already dealt with the view that values and evaluation are a contaminant in social science and argued that, on the contrary, that they are a necessary, indeed invaluable, part. Although social science is directed to understanding and explanation rather than deciding how to act (practical reason), we have to be evaluative if we are to describe, understand and explain social life adequately (recall the argument about thick ethical concepts). Further, actors’ own accounts of their situation face social scientific accounts both as objects and rivals; while social scientists need to describe actors’ accounts as fairly as possible, they also frequently have to decide how far they are adequate. Is the racist’s explanation of the performance of Afro-Caribbean origin children in British schools correct? Do the actors understand everything about their situation, or are there respects in which they misunderstand and misrepresent them? In seeking the most adequate explanation of ethnic differences in educational performance, a social scientist cannot sit on the fence, and insofar as her accounts differ from those that inform and guide actors’ practice, they are inescapably critical of them. Social science often needs to be evaluative, and indeed critical, of everyday thought, practice and social arrangements, in order to reveal what everyday thought fails to register. Indeed, there is no point in social science if it cannot improve upon or extend everyday understanding of the social world. Such claims have already been prefigured in the discussion of values in Chapter 2. Subsequent chapters should, I hope, have lent support to the idea that to be evaluative is not necessarily to abandon the goal of understanding the world, or to replace the search for objective knowledge with mere subjective opinion: on the contrary. 216


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But on what grounds, or from what standpoint, can we be critical of social phenomena? In this chapter, I want to defend the project of critical social science, that is, a social science that is critical of its objects, but to do so in a way that differs from some common rationales. It’s common to think of the idea of critical social science as relatively new, as a development associated with the ‘critical theory’ of the Frankfurt School in the mid and late twentieth century and their heirs, albeit with Marx as its rather exceptional pioneer. But if we go back to the Enlightenment and before, early social science was strikingly critical of the social arrangements it studied. Only with the great fragmentation of the study of society into disciplines and the divorce of philosophy from social science that occurred in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries did it become uncritical or disavow its critical elements. Here is Adam Smith writing in 1776: The man whose whole life is spent performing a few simple operations . . . has no occasion to exert his understanding . . . He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. (Smith, 1776, V.2, Bk.V, Ch.I, Pt.III., Art.2, pp. 302–3)

Smith goes on to elaborate the damaging effects of such employment on the ability of workers to participate in the life of the community. While his comments are unmistakably critical, Smith is not merely ‘expressing his values’, his subjective distaste for the situation; he is making an empirical claim about what objectively happens – a restriction of the flourishing of such workers. It is simultaneously a factual claim and a critical evaluation. It is part of a characteristically sociological argument in that he attributes differences in intelligence mainly to the way in which people are socialized and allowed to live, rather than to genetic sources: ‘the very different genius which appears to distinguish men of different professions, when grown up to maturity, is not upon many occasions so much the cause, as the effect of division of labour’ (ibid., V.1, Bk.I, Ch.II, p. 19). He went on to suggest what ought to be done about this: while he did not recommend banning this kind of division of labour – not surprisingly, given his appreciation of the benefits that it also brought, famously described in his analysis of the pin factory – he did advocate the extension of parish schools, largely publicly funded, so that workers would gain an education that would mitigate the worst effects of the industrial division of labour. The whole of his seminal

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Wealth of Nations is a critique of the emerging ‘commercial society’ of the mid eighteenth century. Of course, critical social science does not have to be wholly negative in its evaluative descriptions; like most interesting social theorists Smith was ambivalent about this subject, identifying both progressive and problematic features of what was later to become capitalism. Like other authors of his era, he freely mixed social scientific analyses with critical evaluations of social arrangements and various prescriptions. Over the following 200 years, attempts to purge such evaluations from social science gathered strength. It was not until the mid twentieth century that critical social science (hereafter CSS) began to revive. The Frankfurt School’s impact in Anglophone countries was delayed by the growth of positivism in the 1950s and 1960s, and the short-lived popularity of the notion of ‘the end of ideology’ (Bell, 1960). Eventually, the rise of disaffection and resistance in the late 1960s brought a revival of interest in Marxism, together with new social movements, in particular feminism and anti-racism. From then on, the idea of critique and the notion of CSS became popular in many quarters. In the 1970s in particular, there was considerable enthusiasm for a CSS which would be ‘emancipatory’ in intent, and contribute to the liberation of people from domination and oppression of various kinds. However, the enthusiasm was quickly tempered by various doubts, and more restrained positions followed. In retrospect, there does indeed seem to have been something both naïve and dangerous about the early optimism. As one of its key advocates, Brian Fay, acknowledged, early CSS was insufficiently reflexive and self-critical, and hence too ready to rush in and diagnose and evaluate social life (compare Fay, 1975, 1987 and 1996). In feminist CSS in particular, early optimism quickly ran into a barrage of criticism of the lack of reflexivity and self-criticism of the advocates, and above all their lack of sensitivity to difference. Implicit assumptions of what constituted progress and well-being were shown to be dangerously simplistic and involved generalizations of perspectives that were actually quite specific, and inappropriate for others (hooks, 1982; Segal, 1999). As if chastened by this experience, there is now a growing timidity about CSS, associated with a suspicion of normativity as potentially authoritarian and ethnocentric. There is still clearly a concern with suffering and oppression evident in the choice of research topics, but in some circles it’s now common to see it as the job of CSS merely to ‘unsettle’ existing academic ideas rather than


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provide critiques of social practices. As a result critique has sometimes become reduced to little more than scepticism coupled with a concern to be reflexive. Aptly, Barry Barnes (2000, p. 127) refers to ‘the ever-soslightly critical theory of today’. At the same time as critique has become more timid, the word has become more widely used and de-valued; indeed with its new use as a verb, it functions merely as a posh synonym for ‘criticize’. The use of the prefix ‘critical’ for particular types and methodologies of social research has become so widespread as to be virtually redundant, providing little more than adjectival aggrandizement. Who would not want to claim that their work was critical, when to refuse it would be to imply that they were ‘uncritical’ – in effect, naïve and gullible? Just what is left of CSS? Of what is CSS critical? And how does it justify its critiques? In this assessment I argue that the retreat from strong versions of critique is not entirely a consequence of the discovery of the dangers of early, naïve versions of CSS that were popular in the 1970s. Nor does it seem to be a result of any kind of revival of positivist beliefs in valuefreedom as a realizable or desirable goal, though positivists might be pleased that this muting of critique has occurred, even if they have little sympathy with the new reasons given for restraining critique. Nor do I think it has much to do with postmodern suspicion of normativity, for that is as much a symptom of the problem, as a cause. To be sure, the shift to the Right in wider politics has had a dampening effect on radical academia, but I argue that the causes of the current uncertainty about the nature and rationale of CSS go back much further. They derive from modernist, liberal ways of thinking that I have been attacking in this book, which treat values as beyond the scope of reason, and which make social scientists reluctant to discuss conceptions of the good, or of well-being or human flourishing. For these reasons, recent CSS never adequately established its rationale, and now that the wider political climate has become less congenial, its longstanding weaknesses have been exposed. Even when social scientific critiques were bolder, they rarely set out their normative standpoints, their conceptions of the good, from which they launched their critiques; indeed it was – and still is – widely believed that critiques do not need to be based on any such conceptions. I argue that critique cannot avoid such standpoints, though it may hide or fail to notice them; we need to make them explicit. This requires a consideration of ethics and eudaimonia. However, here we are

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obstructed by the institutionalization of the divorce of science and ethics in the division of labour in higher education (Callinicos, 2006). There is great resistance to attempts to reunite them, and even many of those who reject the idea of value-free science as impossible get worried about openly normative argument in the context of social science. My target is primarily CSS as a kind of substantive social research – whether it be on racism, class, gender, imperialism, or whatever – rather than ‘critical theory’ of the type associated with the Frankfurt School and its successors, much of which is more of a second-order reflection on critique and social theory from a largely Kantian standpoint that seeks to avoid premises regarding human well-being, and which has had little influence on recent substantive critical social science.1 I shall only comment briefly on such theory. I shall first introduce a minimalist conception of the standpoint of CSS as the reduction of illusion, suggest what it is not and comment on the centrality of the de-naturalization of social forms. Secondly, I shall discuss the critical standpoints of freedom and discourse ethics and argue that they are inadequate. Thirdly, I argue for a strong conception of CSS as being based not only on the reduction of illusion but the identification of avoidable suffering and forms of well-being. I shall propose that the capabilities approach advocated by Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen is a helpful resource for this. Fourthly, in light of this, I assess some of the justifications of the retreat from strong versions of critique, and conclude.

A simple conception of critical social science Given the fashion for attaching the prefix ‘critical’ to any kind of study, it might seem that at the minimum it could merely indicate a critical attitude to other, earlier, approaches to the study of society. But then it has always been the job of any academic to be critical of existing ideas, and not only radicals but conservatives have always done this, so the adjective is redundant. However, if it goes further to the critical evaluation of concepts and accounts that are influential in society itself, and 1

Critical theory’s aversion to claims about the good partly possibly originate from associations of such claims with Nazism, and has been continued in more liberal and Kantian vein through Habermas in his attempt to develop a discourse ethics which is neutral with respect to conceptions of the good.


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not merely in academic discourse, showing that some are false or at least that they ignore something significant, then this suggests something more distinctive, namely critique as oriented towards the reduction of illusion in society itself. Since practices may be informed by false ideas, critique extends beyond ideas to practices themselves. Thus, sexist practices are informed by ideas about gender which feminism has shown to be false, and hence feminism constitutes a critique of the practices themselves as much as of the ideas that inform them (Fay, 1975). Marxism generally incorporates a critique of practices or social structures as contradictory and productive of unintended and destructive consequences (Callinicos, 2006). This kind of critique implies a minimalist normative standpoint, insofar as it assumes that it is better to believe what is true or more true than what is false or less true, or better for beliefs and practices to be consistent than inconsistent or contradictory, and for them not to produce unwanted consequences, at least not harmful ones. It is oriented to the goal of truth or, if you prefer, towards the reduction of illusion, increased practical adequacy, or ‘epistemic gain’. In the strong form of ‘unmasking’ it implies that certain matters have been deliberately concealed. As it implies a criticism of society itself, many not surprisingly regard this as a step too far for social science, but advocates argue that uncovering illusions is necessary for the achievement of social science’s descriptive and explanatory goals. The idea of explanatory critique takes this simple model a step further. Here ‘critique’ is distinguished from mere criticism by the fact that it tries not only to identify false beliefs and the practices they inform but to explain why those false beliefs are held. Sadly, this useful distinction has now been largely forgotten. Thus we might explain why many believe that profit derives from buying cheap and selling dear. Marxism demonstrates that this cannot be the origin of profit, for not all buyers and sellers can gain profit simultaneously from such a practice, although particularly in the actions of merchants, that is indeed where profits are actually manifested. Hence, such beliefs are not merely mistakes but an understandable response to the way capitalism is actually organized. As Bourdieu puts it, a critique should be able to ‘explain the apparent truth of the theory that it shows to be false’ (Bourdieu, 2005, p. 215). Secondly, as Bhaskar and Collier have elaborated, critique in this strong sense also seeks to identify cases where false beliefs have a self-confirming character by helping to maintain

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circumstances (‘real appearances’) that support those beliefs and also are likely to be favourable to dominant groups (Bhaskar, 1998; Collier, 1994). This deception need not be intended, but it may nevertheless help to support continued domination. I will elaborate some further kinds of rationale for critical social science shortly, but first we should note three qualifications: (i) Critique is often confused with scepticism, but they are not the same thing. Scepticism involves suspension of belief in something, and radical epistemological scepticism involves an attempted – or affected – suspension of belief in everything. However, to refute – rather than merely to question – any particular claim we need premises which have provisionally to be accepted as a basis for such a challenge. Note also that while scepticism may indeed be bracing, and shake us out of complacency, it does not necessarily lead us in a progressive direction; it could, for example, be directed towards anti-racism and feminism. ‘Unsettling’ ideas is often seen as an intellectual virtue today, but again it is not necessarily progressive; Holocaust denial is unsettling.2 Equally, while ambivalence is often justified and worth probing, it is not clear why normative disorientation should be seen as a virtue, as it often is in postmodernism. If the scepticism takes an epistemological form it can be used to suspend belief in any claim, perhaps by noting its discursive constitution – as if that in itself rendered it suspect. This is self-undermining and has no particular purchase against any specific claims, for if it applies, it does so to all knowledge; hence it ‘cancels all the way through’, as Terry Eagleton puts it, and still leaves us having to distinguish more true or adequate from less true or adequate knowledge in practice (Eagleton, 1996). It is therefore untenable in the literal sense that it is not a belief we can hold to in our practice. We cannot live without making judgements of what is (more) true and false (or less true). Thoroughgoing scepticism is therefore easy to espouse but impossible to practise, quite simply because the world is not just any way and not just any action will be successful in changing it; so to cope with and change situations we have to find ways of conceptualizing their tendencies and possibilities. 2

For the same reason, there is nothing inherently progressive about transgression.


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(ii) Another conception of critical social science which was popular during its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s but has now declined was the view that CSS is and should be self-consciously partisan, being ‘on the side of’ a particular group rather than detached from particular normative projects (e.g., Becker, 1967). The problem with this is not necessarily that it is strongly value-laden but that it could be a licence for dogmatic holding of particular values (Anderson, 2004) – in effect, encouraging us to defend ‘our (favoured) group, right or wrong’. Again, it is politically directionless, for such a definition would not exclude ‘critical’ research on the side of fascists or racists, etc. It mistakes partisanship for critique. A more recent variant of this supports ‘subjugated knowledges’ against dominant knowledges, but this has similar deficiencies to those already noted; it provides no particular rationale for favouring progressive knowledge, failing, for example, to exclude ‘fundamentalist cults in Texas, pedophilic networks, and contemporary Nazi groups that deny the holocaust’ (Alcoff, 1996, p. 151). Its only criterion simply concerns power, regardless of matters of truth or practical adequacy, or emancipation. It is one thing to argue that all people are of equal worth, quite another that their ideas are too. If today’s subjugated knowledge were to become dominant, then according to this approach it must become the new target of critique. Moreover, knowledge that is subjugated is likely to bear the marks, including the deficiencies, of the dominant knowledge. (iii) Closely related to this last point, it should be noted that a critique need not be left wing or ‘progressive’; for example, the neoliberal theorist Hayek relentlessly attacked the concept of social justice, and was a source of inspiration for Margaret Thatcher’s declaration that ‘there is no such thing as society’ (Hayek, 1988). I shall now comment on some common elaborations of the simple model of CSS.

Critique as de-naturalization: ‘another world is possible’ On this view, CSS’s most basic claim is that social phenomena could be otherwise and can be changed, and hence it counters the common tendency to naturalize them as matters of fate. This naturalization is

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characteristic of positivism and what Horkheimer termed ‘traditional theory’. The de-naturalization rationale is fundamental to CSS from Marx to contemporary feminism and queer theory.3 However, while it is indeed vital to appreciate that societies are open systems in which things could be and have been different, thereby affirming freedom, there is nothing necessarily radical in the sense of progressive about such a claim. It does not distinguish progressives from fascists and misogynists, who could use it to argue that we don’t have to accept a democratic or non-sexist society. Conservatives could accept it too: clearly, those who believe that we live in ‘the best of possible worlds’ accept that things could be different, but they think that things would be worse if they were. Similarly, Marx’s assertion that the point is to change the world merely begs the question of what is wrong with the status quo and in what direction it should be changed. We could accept the application of the term ‘critical’ to all such views, but generally users of the term would see themselves as utterly opposed to fascism, racism, misogyny and the like. If they want to refuse the label ‘critical’ to the latter then they need to make their definition of what counts as critical more specific, presumably in a way which appeals to some criteria that are independent of these positions. I shall argue later that they cannot escape questions of ethics and what constitutes human flourishing, or ‘the human good’. A common variant of the de-naturalization thesis emphasizes the fact that human beings are meaning-makers – self-interpreting beings that develop practices that have their own norms, values and rationales; religions are an obvious example. It also implies that, to be meaningful and relevant, critical standpoints have to be immanent in the society in question, arising within its system of meanings, rather than external to it. A number of theorists have arrived at this conclusion from different directions. For Marx, this was one of the things which distinguished critique from mere external criticism (Benhabib, 1986). Albrecht Wellmer wrote of the need to find ‘draft meanings’ – enclaves of progressive ideas and practices – within existing society that critical theory could pick up on (Wellmer, 1971). More recently Walzer has made the point thus: [The critic] is not a detached observer, even when he looks at the society he inhabits with a fresh and skeptical eye. He is not an enemy, even when he is

3

Benhabib terms this a ‘defetishisizing’ critique (Benhabib, 1986).


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fiercely opposed to this or that prevailing practice or institutional arrangement. His criticism does not require either detachment or enmity, because he finds a warrant for critical engagement in the idealism, even if it is a hypocritical idealism, of the actually existing moral world.4 (Walzer, 1989, p. 61)

In recent decades the de-naturalization theme has emphasized the role of discourses in structuring society and indeed in influencing the formation of subjects themselves (‘subjectification’, in Foucault’s terminology). It thereby counteracts a fundamental illusion of commonsense thought: that the subject is external to the discourses on which it reflects. This implies that the researcher needs to attend to how she herself is influenced by prevailing discourses, and to problematize her own standpoint. This has become a major rationale for the increased emphasis on reflexivity in recent literature. Notwithstanding the directionless character of the de-naturalizing critique, these points about meaning and discourse remain important.

The standpoint of freedom: emancipation as freedom from constraint The idea that CSS is based on the standpoint of freedom has been recurrently fashionable. For example, it is widely assumed to be implicit in Foucault’s work and is implied in Judith Butler’s statement that ‘Critique is understood as an interrogation of the terms by which life is constrained’ (Butler, 2004a).5 However, as Andrew Collier argues, even if we accept the prioritization of freedom, freedom does not lie in escaping necessity, for that would make us unable to produce any change in the world, and would hence be like trying to drive a car in neutral gear; rather it depends on acknowledging the extent of necessity (and contingency) so that one can cope better with the world (Collier, 1994). While freedom is fundamental it is not sufficient. In one-sidedly emphasizing freedom and seeing constraint as necessarily problematic, such critiques have a libertarian, individualist and masculinist 4

5

Similarly, ‘Critical theory presumes that the normative ideals used to criticize a society are rooted in experience of a reflection on that very society, and that norms can come from nowhere else’ (Young, 1990, p. 5; see also Honneth, 2007). To be fair to Butler, she says only that we should interrogate the terms by which life is constrained, not that we should necessarily reject them.

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character, and fail to acknowledge that we are dependent social beings, only able to live through others, and reliant on the care of others for significant parts of our lives. Further, some constraints, such as those of responsibilities for and attachments to others, can enrich our lives, and indeed a life ‘free’ of such things would be a poor one. Responsibilities need not be seen as external impositions but as important for our wellbeing; indeed, this is why people generally actively seek them out (Barnes, 2000). The easy fixing on freedom as the sole goal overlooks our character as needy, dependent social beings and fails to distinguish beneficial forms of dependence, constraint and discipline from repressive ones. Not all forms of suffering derive from domination; some derive from lack of care, that is, from a refusal of responsibilities for and towards others. To be sure, freedom can be argued to be basic, so that basic rights or negative freedoms come first, but CSS can hardly avoid the implications of neglect and responsibility. An important response to this line of argument is that it is not that we should try to escape all determinations, constraints or responsibilities, but that we should have the freedom to choose which ones we have. We have already argued that this is only partially possible.6 Presumably a society that supported a more inclusive flourishing would need actors to agree not merely to avoid harming one another and acknowledge each other’s rights, but to accept and honour responsibilities of care and for the public good. Nevertheless, the very term ‘emancipation’ implies that the problems that we face are primarily ones of liberation from constraint and domination. Roy Bhaskar’s conception of CSS in terms of a process of emancipation as a progressive removal of unwanted determinations at least acknowledges that some determinations may be beneficial (Bhaskar, 1998). However, we need to know which these are: an account of constraints which failed to distinguish those which enable people to flourish from those which repress flourishing would be deficient not only normatively but descriptively. ‘A society in which the freedom of each is the condition of the freedom of all’ is a nice egalitarian–libertarian slogan, but gives no indication of what enables free actors to flourish; for this, freedom is only a necessary condition. I do not mean to suggest that such a conception of flourishing could ever be perfected, for as I have argued, forms of human flourishing are partly a product of creative constructions which enable us to become new 6

See above, p. 128.


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kinds of being, but it would be strange, and at odds with our practice and what it presupposes, to imagine that we did not have some fairly reliable understanding of at least some of its elements. Bhaskar’s view of emancipation as the successive removal of unwanted determinations is further flawed in that it naïvely assumes that wanted and unwanted determinations are always independent of one another, such that we never face dilemmas in deciding what to do about them. Thus, for example, markets allow us to be both free to choose and free to lose, so that removing markets as a source of insecurity is likely to reduce choice too. Any analysis of real, concrete political issues is likely to reveal many such dilemmas. Finally, the idea that the good can be reached simply by removing ‘bads’, step by step, without having any conception of the good and how it could be realized in feasible alternative forms of social organization, is naïve in the extreme. Manifestly superior and feasible successor systems or practices are needed before it becomes rational to remove what we have at present, even if we know that existing arrangements are problematic (Sayer, 1995, 2000b). Hence, we must conclude that, while the idea of critique as underpinned by an orientation towards emancipation, understood as liberation from (unwanted) determination, takes us a little further than the simple conception of critique as reduction of illusion, it still fails to grasp the nettle of the need for a conception of the human good.

Discourse ethics: critique from the standpoint of the presuppositions of communicative interaction Critical theory in the last thirty years has been dominated by Habermas’s work on discourse ethics, in which, as we saw in Chapter 3, he attempts to ground critical standpoints not in some conception of human well-being but in the very preconditions of discourse itself. While I would accept his arguments about these truth conditions as sound, and while the valorization of deliberative democracy is certainly attractive, the exercise remains, as many commentators have noted, a formal, contentless one; the good is whatever might be defined as good in unconstrained deliberative discourse amongst equals. Like its Kantian antecedents, it is basically just a procedural approach to ethics. It abstracts from and leaves open the actual content of any ethical discourse, and removes it from the context of flourishing and

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suffering, from emotional reason, material practice and phronesis.7 But for the fact that we are social animals and can suffer or flourish, it is not clear why we would be motivated to deliberate with others. Any example of such discourse would have to appeal to evidence, standards and norms, and these in turn would presumably have to adduce some implications for well-being, including that of valued cultural practices. Even where the internal standards of practices are appealed to as criteria – ‘the good of the party/church/sport/discipline’ or whatever – they have themselves to be justified; ultimately they presumably have to make claims about human (or ecological) flourishing. Yet Habermas is extraordinarily coy about what discourse might be about, as if acknowledging the inescapable role of horizontal, intersubjective, intradiscursive relations in the formation of meaning entailed that vertical relations of reference or ‘aboutness’ do not also have a role (Collier, 2003). Ironically, his own work could be accused of being cryptonormative. Thus while discourse ethics serves as an interesting secondorder reflection on critique, it remains a way of evading the most important issue: what is good and why? Small wonder, then, that discourse ethics has had so little influence on concrete studies in critical social science. Desirable though deliberative democracy is – not least intrinsically because it enables us to act rationally, justly and with respect for others – it is neither necessary nor sufficient for promoting flourishing. The distance of discourse ethics from ordinary life, so evident in its own discourse and style, and from well-being and practical reason as we defined it earlier, is its Achilles heel.8

The critique of suffering or ill-being In practice, the targets of the critiques developed by substantive CSS are not merely false ideas and their supports and consequences, or lack of freedom, but injustices and avoidable suffering. The judgements that we have to make in order to live are also about such matters – about what is 7

8

Habermas claims to correct the Kantian model of the unsituated subject by acknowledging that our capacity for agency develops through socialization into forms of life structured by communicative interaction, but this is a form of linguistic reductionism, involving a scholastic fallacy; it ignores the role of the body, care and material action in socialization (Cooke, 1999; Habermas, 1993). For critiques of Habermas see Dews (1999), especially the essays by Maeve Cooke and Dieter Henrich, and Freundlieb et al. (2004).


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good or bad and what to do – and life becomes difficult and dangerous if we cannot respond to such judgements or repeatedly get them wrong. While this conception of critique goes much further than the others, at one level it is already common in social science: after all, what would ‘domination’, ‘oppression’, ‘abuse’, ‘racism’ and ‘sexism’ – all familiar terms in social scientific discourse – mean, if they had nothing to do with suffering? Yet this connection between critique and suffering (and by implication, flourishing) is inadequately addressed in CSS’s selfunderstandings that, we have addressed so far, for they do not indicate such grounds for critique. Social scientists who use such terms tend to leave the reasons why their referents might be bad implicit. They might just assume that their readers already accept the valuations of these things, or assume them to be too obvious to need defending. But they might also be aware that, if they go beyond these terms and dwell upon the evaluations and justifications that lie behind them, they are likely to be accused of importing their values into the analysis, as if these could only be a contaminant, distorting otherwise objective analysis. Alternatively they may be asked ‘where their critique hails from’, which again implies that the evaluation is problematic because it is ‘subjective’ and arbitrary, or deriving from an imagined Archimedean point (which it needn’t), or imposing some kind of repressive universalism. Tactically, then, radicals may find it best not to reveal too much of their critical standpoints, for the more they do so, the more likely they are to be dismissed as ‘subjective’ or as authoritarians foisting their views on others. As a result, much of CSS just gives the reader a vague negative feeling about the phenomena being analysed, but does not attempt to say in what particular respects and for what reasons they are problematic. It might therefore be termed crypto-normative. However, much feminist literature, at least that which has not endorsed more restricted notions of critique, not only exemplifies the critique of suffering, but makes explicit its arguments about what constitutes flourishing. From early work on housewives and the exploitation of women’s unpaid labour, through to critiques of femininity, masculinity and compulsory heterosexuality, there is now a wealth of critiques of suffering and restricted flourishing. A good example is again the literature on care, which argues for a re-evaluation of care work, rescuing it from both its undervaluation and its idealization, analysing not only the problems of lack of care but the restrictions on flourishing that it presents for those with heavy care responsibilities. Significantly,

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and unusually in social science, the more normative philosophical writing on the ethic of care has been in close dialogue with empirical studies of care work, each informing and illuminating the other (Held, 2006; Kittay, 1999; Sevenhuijsen, 1998). As we saw earlier, it is common in contemporary social and political thought to affect agnosticism about just what constitutes flourishing or well-being, perhaps because it might seem illiberal to propose an answer. But we would not persist with this academic affectation when faced with someone who was starving, enslaved, or hounded and abused. There are some aspects of flourishing that are so clear that their denial is absurd. There are others that we are somewhat less sure of, and some that seem to vary across persons and cultures, and others that we cannot begin to decide on. There is nothing unusual about this: the same could be said of most of our knowledge. It is important to avoid the perfectionist fallacy of imagining that, if we don’t know everything about something, then we know nothing worthwhile about it. One quite reasonable response to our limited understanding of wellbeing is to restrict ourselves to claims about the clearest elements of human flourishing, the ones whose denial causes the most egregious suffering. Thus, we might develop a critique based upon the standpoint of human rights, where these are understood as minimal necessary limitations on or requirements of behaviour for the prevention of suffering (Woodiwiss, 2005). However, although rights are social constructions that are intended to be beyond question, they cry out for justification, and here we can only appeal to basic capacities for flourishing and suffering that seem to be common for all human beings. Among these, the right to be treated as an end in oneself is preeminent.9 They originate from the struggle to protect individuals from arbitrary power, particularly that of states. While their credentials seem impeccable on this count, the discourse of rights is also a characteristically liberal modern one, in prioritizing the individual and what she is entitled to, and neglecting the relationality of social life. Although sophisticated accounts of rights acknowledge the responsibilities that go with them, the emphasis is unmistakably on the individual rights claimant. It therefore fits comfortably with liberal culture’s valuation of 9

I say this not on abstract Kantian grounds, as an implication of free will and the capacity for reason, which seems unnecessarily obscure, but simply as fundamental to a person’s well-being.


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individual self-interest; being able to claim rights is more appealing than acknowledging that one has responsibilities to others if those rights are to be honoured. This is indeed a problem, though one that should be corrected not by rejecting the concept of rights but by adding to it and contextualizing it with a richer conception of what is required for flourishing, and by challenging liberal individualism. The western, individualistic character of the concept of rights doesn’t warrant telling Amnesty International to give up its campaigns for human rights. The human rights discourse can be defended in principle insofar as it adequately identifies the minimal, basic pre-requisites of human flourishing; whatever its conceptual limitations, pragmatically it is invaluable in combating oppression. There are other possible sources of critical standpoints that relate to well-being. Axel Honneth’s attempt to ground critical social theory in a theory of recognition which engages with the experience of disrespect might also be taken as a variant of the theme of the critique of suffering (Honneth, 1995, 2007). However, while the experience of disrespect is indeed an important form of suffering, it is doubtful that all the elements of well-being can be reduced to the denial of recognition. Critical standpoints based on equality have also been proposed in moral and political philosophy, but insofar as these require an answer to the question ‘equality of what?’, they cannot escape some notion of what is important for human flourishing.10 In modern, liberal, plural societies it’s common to regard individuals as the best judges of their own good, and indeed to argue that a good society is one in which individuals are free to pursue their own conception of the good, provided they do not harm others. Might this not provide a critical standpoint, in that it would allow the identification of situations in which these conditions did not hold? Attractive though this idea may seem, it subsumes several different arguments and has many problems. Of course we must acknowledge that individuals do differ in their needs, wants and tastes to some degree. In part this may be due to physical differences, such as between the young and old, or people with physical disabilities and the able-bodied. Additionally, there may be differences in how people value various things according to the different attachments and commitments that they have developed; some may put 10

For further discussion of these and other ‘strong’ critical standpoints, see Callinicos (2006), especially Chapter 7.

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family or political activism before having satisfying work, others the reverse. They may differ culturally, and their conceptions of the good are likely to reflect this. However, as we noted, cultural or communal conceptions of the good may be mistaken, as in the case of a misogynistic culture. Liberalism rightly puts the individual before the community, but to respect the fact that everyone has some ‘conception of the good’, or at least some feel for what seems good, is quite different from saying that what is good depends purely on individuals’ points of view. A few decades ago many people thought that smoking was good for them, but they were mistaken; its effects did not depend on their subjective view of the matter. The liberal maxim respects the autonomy of the individual. Sophisticated defenders of it such as John Stuart Mill argued that this must include the freedom of individuals to make their own mistakes, again provided they do not harm others (Mill, 1859). In this respect, they are granted what we might call agential authority. But it is important to note that this is different from epistemic authority. The idea of allowing people to make their own mistakes presupposes their fallibility: they do not have automatic epistemic authority in terms of knowing what is good, or even good for themselves. However, agential authority trumps epistemic authority. Not to respect individuals’ agential authority is to insult their dignity. Their conception of what is good (for them) might, on the whole, be better than what others think is good for them, but even if it is not, then provided they are adults able to take responsibility for themselves, they should have the agential authority to go against what others advise; not to do so impairs their quality of life by undermining their autonomy. We might still want to dissuade them from certain actions by reasoning with them, even though it is likely to hurt only themselves, but if they change their behaviour, we would want them to do so through their own free will; we should not actually prevent them. Thus, when CSS addresses cases where individuals or groups do things which harm only themselves, it can point this out, without overriding their agential authority. But there are problems even with the more sophisticated formulations. Firstly, the view of the good is too individualistic, as if society could consist of individuals following their own conceptions, carefully avoiding treading on others’ toes, and only relating to others where they freely choose to do so. Any conception of the good that imagines that our social being can be taken care of by such limited means is hopelessly


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misguided. It implies an overly negative view of dependence on others, it assumes that all individuals are competent adults and neglects our need of care, and ignores the importance to our well-being of forming friendly, loving, respectful relations and attachments (Baier, 1994; Tronto, 1994). Secondly, the notion of harm is underexamined (Graham, 2002). What is harm beyond physical injury and damage to property? Does competition cause harm to the losers? If A’s purchase of a second home means that B cannot get a first home, has B been harmed by A? Is being stigmatized for having being born into a low income family a form of harm? In its common, vulgar form, liberalism tends to assume that absence of physical coercion means that all individuals are equally free to act. Putting the two points together, my good is far more bound up with the good of others and my relations to them, be they thick or thin, durable or fleeting, than the liberal ideal acknowledges. The ideal is actually impossible to realize in every sphere of life, but quite possible for it to be actualized to the point where it supports and legitimates a cold and uncaring society of self-obsessed individuals. Recently, Martha Nussbaum, the American philosopher, and Amartya Sen, the Indian philosopher and economist, have developed a bolder approach to defining human well-being – the capabilities approach (Nussbaum, 2000; Sen, 1999). It has attracted much attention, not only in academia but in development policy circles, where it has made a significant impact (Alkire, 2002; Charusheela, 2008; Clark, 2006; Crocker, 1995; Feminist Economics, 2003; Gasper, 2004). I want to discuss it here because of its affinity with the approach developed in this book, and because of its potential as a resource for CSS to draw upon in developing its critical standpoints (Olson and Sayer, 2009). It originated in Sen’s work on development in which he argued that economic development is not an end in itself but merely one among several means to the end of developing human well-being. Accordingly, income and wealth are inadequate indicators of well-being. He also rejected subjectivist approaches to well-being based on the notion of utility or on people’s own assessments of their happiness. People in subordinate positions often lower their expectations to fit with what is available to them. Further, happiness or utility are not the only important criteria: justice and positive freedoms are important too. The capabilities approach is objectivist in the sense that well-being is conceived of as reflected in how people are able to live rather than in terms of their preferences, which may be adaptive. It acknowledges that

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needs and wants differ. Although there are similarities to the earlier ‘basic needs’ approach in development studies, it goes beyond it in emphasizing that it is not only what people have that is important for their well-being but what they can do or be.11 This fits with our use of the term ‘flourishing’, with its connotations of activity, rather than ‘happiness’, which merely connotes a state of mind. Sen calls these ‘beings and doings’ that are important for well-being ‘functionings’; for example, being able to enjoy adequate nutrition or being able to appear in public without shame and to participate in the life of the community. It is clear from the second example that the preconditions of well-being can be social as well as economic. However, Sen does not say that everyone must achieve this and other functionings whether they want to or not, for the ability to choose is itself crucial for well-being. But the functioning must be genuinely available to a person if they are to be in a position to choose to have or not to have it; if a person who has access to adequate nutrition chooses to fast, then that is not a problem. A ‘capability’ refers to the ability of people to achieve a given functioning, should they choose it.12 Poverty becomes defined as capability deprivation, or the inability to achieve a collection of functionings. Capabilities also have both intrinsic and functional values in the sense that freedom is valued in its own right, and it can provide access for choice; the approach therefore meets liberal criteria. While Sen gives examples of capabilities he refuses to propose any particular list of capabilities as necessary for well-being. Others, however, have gone further and suggested such lists, most notably Martha Nussbaum (2000, 2006). Nussbaum’s list is influenced by a universalist, Aristotelian conception of the human good, which, she argues, defines the capabilities in a ‘thick, vague’ way – that is, thick in the sense that it acknowledges that there are many elements to human flourishing, and vague in that each of these is defined sufficiently vaguely to allow different cultural interpretations. Here are six of the ten capabilities from her list: 11

12

Basic needs approaches address well-being more directly, though primarily in relation to poverty and deprivation rather than as a whole (Doyal and Gough, 1991). As Clark (2006) points out, Sen at first used the term ‘capability’ to refer to the ability to achieve a single functioning, and ‘capability set’ to refer to the set of attainable functionings that individuals can achieve. Later he often uses ‘capability’ to refer to the whole set.


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Life. Being able to live to the end of a human life of normal length. Bodily Health. Being able to have good health, including reproductive health; to be adequately nourished; to have adequate shelter. Bodily Integrity. Being able to move freely from place to place; to be secure against violent assault, including sexual assault and domestic violence; having opportunities for sexual satisfaction and for choice in matters of reproduction. Practical Reason. Being able to form a conception of the good and to engage in critical reflection about the planning of one’s life. (This entails protection for the liberty of conscience and religious observance.) Affiliation . . . Having the bases of self-respect and non-humiliation; being able to be treated as a dignified being whose worth is equal to that of others. This entails non-discrimination on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation, ethnicity, caste, religion, national origin.

Control Over One’s Environment. A. Political. Being able to participate effectively in political choices that govern one’s life; having the right of political participation, protections of free speech and association. B. Material. Being able to hold property (both land and movable goods), and having property rights on an equal basis with others . . . (Nussbaum, 2006, pp. 76, 77)

Are all such capabilities universally crucial for human well-being? Or do they merely reflect the particular values of modern western societies? Is it wrong to assess non-western societies against them? Nussbaum notes that the list is provisional and should always be open to inclusive cross-cultural assessment and revision.13 Although it is an objectivist rather than a relativist view of flourishing, it is of course still a view and necessarily fallible, but arguably thick and vague enough to be pluralist. It acknowledges that there are many ways of flourishing, but that not just any way of life enables it; for example, one in which women are denied bodily integrity and are subject to rape and other forms of violent assault does not. These qualifications are crucial. 13

Clark claims that there is little evidence of this willingness to consult and revise in Nussbaum’s development of the approach, but even if he is correct, that’s not a criticism of the approach in principle, just a criticism of how Nussbaum has elaborated it (Clark, 2006).

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Several different kinds of criticism have been made in the debates about the capabilities approach, though these are often confused.14 Firstly, there are objections in principle to the very idea of universalist conceptions of well-being. These are similar to those we discussed and rejected in Chapter 4. Secondly, for those who accept the basic ideas in principle, there may be objections to the way in which it is elaborated. For example, even in Nussbaum’s more specific version, there is much uncertainty regarding the implications for inequality, as she acknowledges (2006, p. 292). Although she argues that there might be minimal acceptable levels at which each capability is achieved, it is unclear what the implications might be for inequalities among those above these thresholds. I would suggest that, although the capabilities approach offers a relatively thick account of the elements of flourishing, it is not thick enough, for equality itself is arguably a feature of a society in which the capabilities are met for all: not everyone can realize their potential if the most desirable kinds of activity are monopolized by a minority in a division of labour which segregates good from low quality work (Gomberg, 2007; Sayer, 2009). Particularly in Sen’s version, it appears to prioritize choice over inequality, as Sylvia Walby and others have argued (Walby, 2009, pp. 9–10). Another kind of criticism of the way in which the theory is elaborated objects to the inclusion of particular capabilities that are felt to be inessential for well-being. I, for example, do not accept that private property is necessary for human flourishing; although it is in modern societies there must be many hunter-gatherer societies where its absence is not a problem. However, if objections of this last kind stand, all that it entails is that the particular capabilities in question should be deleted from the list; it does not undermine the whole approach. Thirdly, there are criticisms of the way in which development agencies have operationalized the approach. There are major questions over who should be involved in making the assessment, and how far it is or is not democratic. Even where there is formally democracy, in unequal societies it allows many voices to go unheard. Ideally, one might hope that, for any group of people being considered for assessment, they should be able to decide whether to accept, reject or modify the approach, and indeed to be involved in its application and in the 14

I am indebted to Betsy Olson, John O’Neill and Sylvia Walby for discussions on the capabilities approach. The usual disclaimer applies.


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evaluation of its results. A further problem is that, predictably, development agencies tend to reduce it to a ‘tick list’ of points against which particular communities are evaluated, with the implication that development efforts should then focus on providing the capabilities that are missing. In typical modernist, rationalist fashion, this turns matters of practical judgement into the application of context-insensitive norms or policies that are doomed to produce undesirable consequences. Such a strategy is particularly naïve and dangerous where the assessment is not embedded in a thorough ethnographic, historical, geographical and political economic knowledge of the community, one that understands both its internal structure and external relations, including its divisions and relations of domination, and its own self-understandings, commitments and narratives. Failure to situate the capabilities approach in this way inevitably risks causing more harm than good, for the social processes associated with particular capabilities are invariably entangled with others, so that intervening in one area may cause greater problems elsewhere. Again, however, this is a problem of the operationalization of the capabilities approach, rather than of the theoretical approach itself. In fact, insofar as the approach has an Aristotelian provenance, it should be noted that applying norms to situations without local, contextual knowledge is very much against the spirit of the Aristotelian view of practical reason and likely to result in bad policies; as we argued in Chapter 3, practical knowledge of particulars and experience resulting from extensive practice or immersion is needed as well. The de-contextualized, tick list approach therefore stands condemned. In addition, this reductive view of capabilities has sometimes been worsened where the relevant beings or doings are treated merely as things which are only formally available, disregarding whether it is possible for all to achieve them simultaneously. If this is all that is required, then it amounts to no more than an equal opportunities approach, which may merely mean equal opportunity to compete for positions within structures of inequality (Walby, 2009). Arguably, though, this again is a perversion of the capabilities approach, not an exemplar of it. As with any attempt to operationalize normative theoretical ideas, what actually results is partly a reflection of the balance of power among the political economic interests at stake, and inevitably these kinds of dilution make it less threatening to the powerful.

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However, to blame only the policy makers and exonerate the theory overlooks a fourth kind of problem, or rather limitation, of the capabilities approach, at least when it is considered in isolation. This concerns the simple fact that it is no more than a set of normative criteria that helps us assess the extent to which the various basic constituents of well-being are met within a certain population. It says nothing about the causes of their being met or not met.15 To identify these causes we need social science, albeit of a kind that is able to acknowledge and interpret well-being and ill-being as objective states of being, and not merely as norms or preferences. This, as we have argued, is what much social science either lacks or leaves implicit, but then it is precisely from the likes of the capability approach and other research and reflections about human well-being that social scientists can find such understandings, though of course it will need to assess them. The capabilities approach (indeed moral and political philosophy in general) and social science have opposite and complementary deficiencies. Each can best help itself by engaging with the other. For all its limitations, the capabilities approach throws down a number of fundamental challenges, philosophical, ethical and political. At a philosophical level it obliges us to decide where we stand with regard to objectivism, relativism and pluralism. We might debate whether the approach is just another variant of colonialism, and if so, what would follow from that. If we reject relativism then just what do we think is essential for people to flourish? Are the prerequisites different for modern industrialized societies and non-modern societies such as hunter-gatherer groups? Would deciding that they do differ imply a respect for cultural and material difference or a patronizing attitude that accepts lower standards and expectations for those in the latter societies? Is well-being whatever the official discourse of a society – always likely to reflect the interests of the dominant – claims it is? Should we defer to the Taliban’s conception of what constitutes well-being for women? Should we defer to the US government’s self-interested hostility 15

Menon’s critique accuses Nussbaum’s discussions of capabilities in an Indian context of naïvety in implying that the state is a neutral, rational, benign actor, willing and able to intervene in response to deficiencies identified using a capabilities approach (Menon, 2002). A naïve view of the state is one of the consequences of divorcing normative evaluation and prescription from social scientific knowledge of actual nation states. However, it does not undermine the capabilities approach per se.


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to this kind of prescriptive universalism regarding the human good? It is one thing to reject relativism, but how far should we take pluralism? However, I suggest that, rather than remain at the abstract level of talking about universalism, pluralism, cultural relativism, and so on, we look at each proposed capability, and decide whether we should accept or reject it as a claim about what actual people in different kinds of society need to be able to be and do if they are to flourish. Take ‘bodily integrity’ and ‘practical reason’ as defined above by Nussbaum, for example, and what they mean in practice. It is very clear that the first is denied to millions of women, and the second to vast numbers of dominated groups. Considering actual cases puts us on the spot in a way that abstract discussions of philosophical positions do not. It forces us to inspect our ethical values. And it forces us to consider what action we ought to take, if any, where we conclude that oppression or neglect exists. Retreating into scepticism at the philosophical level merely allows us to evade such matters. In the onward rush of everyday life we cannot maintain this lofty detachment; we have to make decisions and act. Reflecting on actual cases of capability deficiencies may lead us to political conclusions; we may conclude that the basic structure and dominant discourses of the societies in question make flourishing unachievable for many of their members. (In saying that, it is modern western societies as well as non-western societies that I have in mind.) I suggest that much of the resistance to the capabilities approach that is pitched at more abstract levels is actually an academic way of evading ethico-political issues. As one might expect, the capabilities approach has been contested, but I am suggesting here that, whatever one thinks, some conception of flourishing is unavoidable. At the minimum, this is because, as vulnerable beings capable of flourishing and suffering and needing to evaluate our situations, we cannot suspend judgement for long. Finally, as we saw earlier, many proposed critical standpoints of CSS lack ethical or political direction, but critiques based on standpoints of human rights, or recognition or capabilities, do have a direction to them – towards some conception of flourishing, rather than necessarily in a left-wing or ‘progressive’ direction. Some may find this conclusion disturbing. On the other hand, were a left-wing orientation to be made a premise and criterion of CSS, this would make it an exercise in circular and partisan reasoning, and invite its dismissal. My personal hunch is that a CSS which sought to develop understanding of the elements of

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flourishing and suffering, and based its evaluative descriptions and explanations of existing practices on that, would, on the whole, point in the direction of left and progressive politics. But such a conclusion would be a contingent conclusion – a discovery, dependent on the more important criterion of well-being.

The retreat from critical social science Standpoints of human flourishing such as those discussed above underpin ‘strong’ versions of CSS. Although the critique of suffering is implicit in the actual practice of concrete studies in CSS, many are reluctant to acknowledge this in their pronouncements on critique, and instead we have seen the emergence of weaker notions of critique that limit it to the highlighting of hidden presuppositions and the deepening of reflexivity. Many of these inhibitions have a poststructuralist provenance. At one level, as Fay argues, this reaction is justifiable for it identifies an overconfidence in early CSS (Fay, 1975, 1987, 1996). Thus, for example, middle class, white feminists were criticized for speaking too readily for other women, and being insufficiently attentive to difference (hooks, 2000). In the context of a growing awareness of cultural difference, the fear grew that CSS implied social scientists setting themselves up as legislators, at risk of developing ethnocentric critiques of others’ social practices. Yet while this is indeed a risk, it is not a good argument for refraining from critique of any but our own culture or group, as we saw in Chapter 5: if we believe it is acceptable for non-westerners to criticize western culture, we can hardly deny the right of westerners to criticize non-western cultures. All critique implies the possibility of at least distinguishing better from worse understandings. Ethnocentrism and other kinds of ill-informed criticism are risks, but not inevitabilities. Judgement need not be dogmatic, and it is a prerequisite of critique. By sticking our necks out and making judgements we expose ourselves to critique by others. To reject judgement and critique (perhaps as ‘judgemental’) is to protect dogmatism from challenge rather than to refuse it. CSS therefore need not be seen as implicitly authoritarian, but as contributing to an ongoing debate which any can join. A common form of retreat has been towards de-naturalization and reflexivity:


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a critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest. (Foucault, 1998, p. 155)

The theme of reflexivity, spurred on by increased fear of the risk of ethnocentrism with the rise of multiculturalism, has become dominant in rationales of CSS today. It implies a turn inwards, away from the object as focus of critical attention, to the ways of thinking available to the researcher herself. Note again that this reflection does not have any apparent ethical or political direction to it.16 While reflexivity might certainly be considered an intellectual virtue, it amounts to a highly limited notion of critique. Foucault also counterposed the de-naturalization theme to what he saw as an authoritarian tendency in CSS: The role of an intellectual is not to tell others what they have to do. By what right would he do so? The work of the intellectual is not to shape others’ political will: it is, through the analyses that he carried out in his own field, to question over and over again what is postulated as self-evident, to disturb people’s mental habits, the way they do and think things. (Foucault, 1997, p. 131)

Here Foucault fails to notice that critiques typically evaluate rather than instruct. In reducing the normative to imperatives he reproduces that same polarization of thought into is and ought that has made it so difficult for social science to understand our evaluative relation to the world (see Chapter 2). An evaluation of some situation as involving avoidable suffering does not amount to an authoritarian instruction to the reader to take a particular action; it merely presents us with something important to consider in deciding how to act. Even if we accept the evaluation, there may be overriding considerations which suggest a different course of action from that which might seem obvious. Normativity is not reducible to simple ‘oughts’; it consists first and foremost of evaluations, and evaluation is not legislation. In refusing even to evaluate, Foucault not only rendered his own radical political activism – which was clearly directed towards the 16

Foucault’s own commentary on ‘ethics’ is primarily concerned with the governance of the self and freedom rather than with ethics in the usual sense of the harmonization of conduct to achieve well-being (Foucault, 2000).

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reduction of suffering – unintelligible, but weakened his analyses of power. Although he usefully demonstrated how power constructs as well as constrains, he refused to distinguish between benign and malign forms of such power. In so doing his work was deficient not only normatively (crypto-normative), but descriptively; if we don’t know whether a particular form of power causes suffering or flourishing then we know very little about that power; democracy seems no better than dictatorship (Habermas, 1990b; see also Bevir, 2002; Fraser, 1989; Taylor, 1986). It presents a vaguely dystopian view of the world but without offering any specific critique of social arrangements or any bases for a critique, though as we have seen, at times Foucault appears to adopt a critical standpoint of freedom. As we saw in the discussion of thick ethical concepts, sometimes explanation requires evaluation: social science has to be critical in the strong sense of disclosing suffering and restricted flourishing if it is to describe and explain its objects. The goals of social scientific description and explanation and critical evaluation are consistent rather than at odds. Further problems can arise from approaches to de-naturalization which regard discourses as all-powerful in creating what they name, and see all claims made within particular discourses as relative to them. Foucault’s concept of ‘regimes of truth’ (Foucault, 1977), which implies that discourses are self-confirming, and the associated rejection of the concept of ideology (since it presupposes some concept of truth), relativizes truth and undermines its own standpoint, or that of any critique.17 It is only to the extent that discourses make claims about matters which are not purely their own construction, and hence about which they may be mistaken, that they are capable of being fallible. The concept of regimes of truth is complemented by a view of normativity purely as ‘normalizing’, but this again is crypto-normative, for we need to know what its implications are for well-being; otherwise our response might well be ‘so what’? Nor can a blanket hostility to normalization be squared with a standpoint of freedom; a normless society would be one in which individuals were free to restrict the freedom of others. 17

Foucault also adds to the deflationary tone by referring to ‘games of truth’. I am aware that there has been much disagreement over just what Foucault’s views were regarding critique and more charitable interpretations are possible (see, for example, Alcoff, 1996; Hoy, 1986).


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Another contributory factor in the retreat of CSS – particularly in sociology and anthropology – has been the fear of ‘essentialism’, or dangerously naturalizing and homogenizing contingent social forms, by implying some universal kind of susceptibility to suffering. We discussed this earlier in Chapter 4. In the strong, Nietzschean interpretation of the production of subjects, there is no human essence or natural constraints – only the possibility of self-making, driven by the will-topower. Are not judgements of the good and bad culturally variable? Have not behaviours which are now proscribed once been normal, and vice versa in earlier societies, as Foucault demonstrated for sexuality? But while there are indeed significant variations in such judgements, if we are reluctant to acknowledge that people have any particular susceptibilities and powers save those constructed by the society in which they happen to live, then it makes it hard to see how they can be damaged by particular social circumstances. While the recognition of the relative autonomy of culture is important, it can be problematic if it assumed that this means there can be no universal or natural elements of pathologies, as if pathologies could only be identified if the culture in question identified them as such. Feminism does not merely provide a different set of cultural conventions, but reasons why certain kinds of behaviour are bad; either implicitly or explicitly, the arguments draw attention to the suffering, unhappiness and restricted flourishing that existing gender orders cause. It is always possible that critique might involve a premature, illinformed and unreflexive form of judgement, but while this is a danger, and one that has almost certainly sometimes been realized, it is not inevitable. Science may involve ill-informed descriptions too, but that is no reason for avoiding scientific description. Timidity is disempowering. I would argue for a closer engagement between social science and the sustained, patient deliberation on forms of judgement and their legitimacy to be found in lay ethical thought and moral and political philosophy – so as to improve our evaluations.18 They are not merely collections of ‘values’ but complex forms of reasoning that deserve to be examined. Perhaps as a consequence of these fears, critique has turned inward, into scepticism and an emphasis on reflexivity in the production of academic texts. Other authors share Foucault’s view that critique is 18

For an earlier attempt at this in relation to class, see Sayer (2005).

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actually not about the identification of suffering or well-being, but about the identification of hidden features of discourses that researchers and lay-people use, and which shape our way of thinking and acting, particularly those which restrict us (e.g., Butler, 2002; Thrift, 2005).19 Judith Butler’s own book Precarious Life is a collection of fine political essays which identify the normative complexity of issues, the interdependent forms of suffering and illusion, and the discourses that relate to these, though, strangely, she seems to see only the digressions therein on matters such as ‘the subject’ as constituting critique (Butler, 2004b). So while one could hardly disagree that we should seek to uncover the hidden and unconsidered ideas on which practices are based, I would argue that critique is indeed exactly about identifying what things ‘are not right as they are’, and why.

Conclusion Although recent conceptions of CSS and critique emphasize reflexivity and scepticism, in practice, to a largely unacknowledged extent, the continued use of thick ethical terms like ‘homophobia’ or ‘racism’ implies that it is still also about the identification of forms of suffering or restricted flourishing and their causes. However, there are strong inhibitions about elaborating these evaluative descriptions, and analysing what exactly is problematic about the phenomena in question and what they imply for well-being. We have also seen the peculiar phenomenon of researchers whose work includes evaluative judgements of social practices, arguing that it is not this that makes their work critical but rather their reflexivity. Thus, as things stand, there is a curious coexistence of espoused conceptions of critique which severely limit it, with practices of social scientific writing which include at least some elements of something stronger – a critique of injustice and avoidable suffering. An aversion to evaluation results not only in lack of awareness of what is problematic in life but in inferior understandings of the social world; indeed the two are inseparable, for lack of evaluation may impoverish descriptions and explanations. 19

In 2006, at the start of a graduate course on critique, I asked students to identify what, for them, distinguished critique or ‘critical’ approaches in social research. The responses included scarcely any reference to suffering or domination, and instead reflexivity was emphasized. Twenty to thirty years ago, the emphasis would have been reversed.


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To say why anything warrants critique we need some conception of well-being and ill-being; even the goal of reduction of illusion implies an orientation to well-being. Lay and political discourses commonly imply or refer to such conceptions (what it is to be a good parent, for example), but for various reasons, contemporary social science is often reluctant to invoke or explore them. In pressing the question of why anything is good or bad we enter a territory where the ways of thinking we learn as social scientists seem to fail us. The reasons for our difficulties in defending critique are not only consequences of worries about essentialism and ethnocentrism but go much deeper to the fact–value, science–ethics, positive–normative dualisms of modernist thought, and the subjectivization of values associated with the rise of a liberal society. Critical social science needs to acknowledge its often hidden or repressed premise – that its evaluations of practices imply a conception of human flourishing.

8


We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. (Wittgenstein, 1922, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6.52) First it was nature that was ‘neutralized’ with respect to value, then man himself. Now we shiver in the nakedness of nihilism in which nearomnipotence is paired with near emptiness, greatest capacity with knowing least for what ends to use it. (Jonas, 1984, p. 23)

By way of conclusion I would like to draw out some implications of the preceding chapters for how we do social science. (1) Social science – at least apart from philosophy and political theory – needs to overcome its peculiar combination of aversion and indifference towards normativity. Normativity, resulting from neediness, ill-being and desire, and the capacity for reason, understood in the broad sense I have defended, is intrinsic to human being. As we saw in Chapter 4, the very concept of human being is partly normative: its object is always more or less deficient and capable of development or decline. (2) It is important to complete the deconstruction of the fact–value family of dualisms, not in order to deny any kind of differences among things like fact and value, reason and emotion, or nature and culture, but to acknowledge their internal differences, interactions and overlaps. In their starkly dichotomous form they undermine attempts to understand the nature of living and becoming, of sentience, involvement and concern, and of life as an open-ended process between what is and what may happen; they obscure the very things that are most important to us. The only choices they offer us are crude objectivism versus subjectivism and relativism, and either a rationalism that derogates emotion and feeling or a 246


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romanticism that undervalues reason. We need to redraw the conceptual map that they constitute, by changing the network of relations through which each term draws its sense. Such a radical reconstruction tends to cause conceptual dizziness because it’s hard to avoid using the very terms that we find problematic in trying to change them, especially when the dualisms both shape and reflect features of modern society, such as rationalization. To some extent this is rather like trying to rebuild a boat while on the water, plank by plank, as Otto Neurath put it, but fortunately our conceptual resources are not entirely dominated by these dualisms; other ways of thinking, including different concepts of reason, are still current today in everyday thought and enable us to do some of the rebuilding on land. Terms like ‘flourishing’ and ‘well-being’ are still sometimes used in everyday life in ways which aren’t subverted by the modernist dichotomies; a sick animal may be described as ‘failing to flourish’; a city may claim to have ‘a flourishing arts scene’. When we say an animal is failing to flourish we often mean that it cannot do the things which animals of that kind are capable of doing or might reasonably be expected to do (MacIntyre, 1999). Aristotle, who was greatly interested in biology, applied this way of thinking to humans. But the flourishing of a person is more complex than that of a tree or a cat because our development is more open and can take many novel and self-directed forms, but then the association of flourishing with activity, variety, creativity and abundance is precisely the reason for its appeal in describing an arts scene. As Parekh comments, ‘Since cultures mediate and reconstitute human nature in their own different ways, no vision of the good life can be based on an abstract conception of human nature alone’ (Parekh, 2000, p. 47). I agree; we have to get beyond thinking of human nature and culture in dichotomous terms, and recognize them as open and capable of diversifying as they evolve. (3) It is vital to counter various kinds of ‘irrealism’ – whether in the shape of subjectivism, emotivism or conventionalism – all of which tend to dissociate people from their relationship to the world and reduce them to relationships which are purely horizontal, subjective, discursive or conventional and are not about anything. As Andrew Collier notes, from the correct point that we have to think in discourse it is assumed that we can only think about

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discourse, as if the fact that we can only see with our eyes meant that eyes are the only thing we can see (Collier, 1999b). Irrealism renders our successes and difficulties in coping with the world unintelligible. (4) We need a postdisciplinary perspective within social science that rejects the tiresome disciplinary imperialism that is institutionalized in the academic division of labour and is reproduced by co-opting academics’ ambitions and careers (Sayer, 2000a). I have managed only to go part way to developing a postdisciplinary approach to lay normativity: more needs to be done especially in opening dialogue between psychology and other social sciences. This will need to go far beyond merely interdisciplinary research (which leaves existing disciplines fairly intact) and require fundamental changes in ways of thinking all round. (5) In focusing on ethics and morality so as to counter their neglect in social scientific accounts, I have of course risked inverting the problem by not saying enough about power and the political dimension of social life. It is not my intention to replace one form of reductionism with its opposite. I am well aware of the common suspicion in social science that emphasizing moral or ethical matters is likely to allow us to ignore politics, and so be idealistic or conservative. It is indeed important to avoid what Weber scathingly referred to as: that soft-headed attitude, so agreeable from the human point of view, but nevertheless so unutterably narrowing in its effects, which thinks it possible to replace political with ‘ethical’ ideas, and to innocently identify these with optimistic expectations of felicity. (Weber, cited in Bellamy, 1992, p. 216)

Forgetting the political is a danger but not an inevitability. The opposite problem, of attempting to replace ethics with politics, is no less bad, for a politics without ethics can embrace genocide as easily as democracy. Of course political matters cannot be displaced by ethics; we cannot resolve problems whose roots lie in social structures that support exploitation, domination and neglect merely by being nicer to one another. But then we cannot begin to understand what is wrong with exploitation and the like without addressing ethical being. In everyday life we often find ourselves having to make ethical decisions in conditions which are so unethical and unfair as to compromise our efforts. Where there are structural


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sources of avoidable suffering, it generally takes collective political action to remove them; but without compassion and a sense of justice, why should we care? The view, expressed by some Marxists, that there is no need for an ethical critique of society, only makes us wonder why they support the working class, and why they see anything objectionable in exploitation. Why should contradictions be a problem? A mere logical contradiction doesn’t make us suffer, though a contradiction of social forces might; it is only if it causes suffering or restricts flourishing that it matters. There is nothing necessarily ‘idealist’ about ethics; it’s about how people live together, and how they might achieve well-being. Marx’s own comments on human flourishing in the 1844 Manuscripts (Marx, 1975) were strongly influenced by Aristotle and imply a robustly materialist view of ethical life, grounded in a conception of people as sentient, creative social beings. Capitalist social relations of production and dynamics produce structural injustices in which many are consigned to lives of exploitation and domination, and are unable to realise their potential. In this context, I should perhaps note that the whole project of this book arose from an earlier concern with radical political economy and the need to find ways of evaluating alternative economic systems through an approach I call ‘moral economy’ (Sayer, 2000c, 2007). All economic institutions have constitutive norms regarding the rights, responsibilities and appropriate forms of behaviour that pertain to the people and activities they govern. Property rights are the most obvious example. When new institutions are proposed, their constitutive norms are often contested, as we see today with regard to the patenting of genetic materials. But once the institutions have become established, the norms tend to become taken for granted as natural, as in the case of the ownership of private land or limited liability companies. Often such norms are imposed by the powerful rather than approved by democratic deliberation among equals, but even the powerful tend to feel the need to provide legitimations of the institutions, so that they are accepted as fair and good. Part of the project of the study of moral economy – which combines ‘engineering’ and ‘ethical’ approaches to economy in the manner of classical political economy (Sen, 1999) – is to assess these legitimations; but that is the subject of another book.

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(6) My argument implies a model of social science that embodies medical or therapeutic, dialogical and critical elements.1 Medicine does not merely concern itself with how bodies work but conceives of them as capable of being in various states of health and ill-health. A doctor knows that a haemorrhage or viral infection are not only processes but forms of ill-being, and of course the whole point of medicine is the healing of illness and the achievement of health. We would be unlikely to treat a doctor’s diagnosis of illness as just her value-judgement or local convention; rather we would see it as an identification (albeit fallible) of a problematic state of being that restricts flourishing. Nevertheless many believe that equivalent diagnoses of social ill-being are no more than individual opinions and parochial cultural values – products of merely subjective conceptions of the good. Yet what is feminism, for example, but a critique of certain forms of objective ill-being associated with the subordination of women? Does it not, like medicine, seek to cure that ill-being? Feminism (and Marxism) are exceptional in going against the dominant understandings of social science, but even these are sometimes compromised, whether by a scientistic refusal of values as subjective, or a romantic, irrationalist refusal of objectivity: both obscure our relation to the world of concern. Even economics, locked into the dichotomies and fully embracing subjectivism and scientism, can hardly avoid distinguishing economic well-being from ill-being – prosperity from crises and misallocation of resources – and of course economists rarely hesitate to offer diagnoses. Nevertheless, one of the reasons why many economists are such terrible doctors is that they imagine that values are merely subjective ‘preferences’. While the view of social science I am proposing has something in common with medicine there are also important differences. Social science must always begin with an attempt to understand the ‘target group’s’ own interpretation of their condition. This matters more in social science than in medicine, for well-being in the broader social sense depends heavily on our involvement in socially constructed practices whose internal meaning is important. The doctor needs to know my symptoms, but whether I understand my liver makes little 1

This section owes much to Martha Nussbaum’s discussion of the therapeutic character of philosophy (Nussbaum, 1994).


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difference to whether she diagnoses it as healthy or malfunctioning, for my liver functions largely regardless of how I understand it. However, my conduct in social life depends very much on how I understand it. We therefore need a more dialogical model that gets at what that understanding is. For example, the meanings and valuations of femininity and masculinity are constitutive of social practices and they must be understood by social scientists, albeit in a way which addresses how they are entangled with attachments and commitments which people value. At the same time, just as the patient’s understanding of her condition is not always correct, nor is people’s understanding of social life and their place within it. Just as the doctor may point out asymptomatic forms of ill-being – such as an unnoticed carcinoma – so the social scientist may point out unnoticed, as well as recognized, forms and sources of ill-being. Insofar as a group responds freely to critique, and finds that its illusions are reduced, the process may be immediately therapeutic. However, it usually takes a lot more than expanded understanding to change entrenched social structures and norms. Consequently, the diagnosis may not make people happier, only more aware of how bad things are. The diagnosis needs to be discussed with those being studied, and revised if necessary, for the social scientist is fallible too. But, as we argued in Chapter 7, it is important to distinguish agential from epistemic authority; those whose lives are the object of study have agential authority in deciding how to respond to evaluations of their situation, but who has epistemic authority depends upon the adequacy of their interpretations. At the end of the dialogical process, the social scientist does not have to agree with the interpretation offered by those she studies. Although democratic dialogue has intrinsic merits, where it concerns ethics it is not merely a route to uncoerced agreement among participants of how to go on together, or a matter of ‘identity’, but a deliberation on the nature of eudaimonia or flourishing and the institutions which support or obstruct it. Because there are many forms of flourishing, because cultural understandings are part of those forms, and because it is so common for goods and bads to be entangled, social science faces a more difficult task than that of the physician. To some extent these points have already been acknowledged in critical social science, but what

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is often overlooked even there is the intrinsically normative character of human being itself, based on shifting states of neediness and desire, and striving for well-being. Unless it acknowledges our consequent relation to the world of concern, it is at best able to identify illusions, but not suffering and flourishing. The dominant understanding of social science conspires to repress this medical or therapeutic and critical relation to its object. An alienated social science produces exactly the result that Wittgenstein noted: a science that has no practical relevance. But it doesn’t have to be this way. As in medicine, the whole point of social science and ethics is or should be the improvement of well-being. (7) If a critique gives no indication of how a set of problems might be removed then its force is undoubtedly weakened. However, it is possible to discuss, in a rigorous fashion, alternative ways of organizing society in terms of their feasibility and desirability. For examples of such explorations and evaluations of radical alternatives I refer the reader to The Real Utopias Project based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (Wright, 2005, 2010). None of this amounts to social scientists playing God; it is merely a matter of doing some serious normative reasoning. As such it has a key role in contributing to ‘public sociology’ and its equivalents in other social sciences (Burawoy, 2005).2 I end by inviting others to offer their own accounts of normativity and ethical being in everyday life. Why do they/you care about anything?

2

Revealingly, some have reacted to calls for a public sociology by invoking the fact– value dualisms again and concluding that it marks an abandonment of science (e.g., Mathieu Deflem’s campaign to ‘save sociology’; Deflem, 2006).


The account I have given of lay normativity and ethical life is the product of an engagement with theories of ethics in philosophy, with social scientific, and particularly sociological, approaches to values and morality, and to a lesser extent with moral psychology. Readers may perhaps want to know more about where I stand with respect to philosophical theories. Though my debts to philosophy are large, there are some well-known theories that I reject. Here I will briefly outline the main reasons behind this selection. Many of the philosophical approaches are too idealized and reductive for the purpose of understanding the ethical dimension of social life as it is rather than as one might hope it would be, though they may have some use precisely where lay morality is deficient.1 Some ethical theories attempt to derive their conclusions from a single principle, such as ‘utility’ or the categorical imperative. For William James, the pragmatist philosopher, it is as absurd to expect that ethics can be reduced to a single motive or principle as to expect physics to be reducible to a single law (James, 1891). I have some sympathy with Bernard Williams’s view that the search for grand ethical theories is misguided, and we would do better to attend to concrete situations and the many different kinds of social relation in which we act (Williams, 1985; see also Geuss, 2008; Putnam, 2002; Walsh, 2003). In addition, the grand theories tend to have a ‘thin’ account of human social being, typically assuming us to be adult, able-bodied, implicitly male, bourgeois or liberal subjects, and treating our ability to reason as our only significant capacity.

1

For example, Rawlsian theory offers an imaginative and original normative approach to certain ethical issues, but it does not pretend that people normally think in this way. I note also the strange taste in avant-garde social theory for extraordinarily obscure, abstract, pious, portentous and dramatized views of ethical being such as that of Levinas (Robbins, 2001). Ethical life is ordinary, but at the same time far more complex.

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Such theories are an example of the dangers of the reduction of reason to rationality, ignoring the work of attention, and turning away from the object – the things reasoned about. Neither the social scientific nor many of the philosophical approaches engage adequately with ethical experience in everyday life. In practice people have to deal with concrete, often complex, situations, in which practical reason, rather than simple rule-following, is needed. An empirical or ‘bottom-up’ approach based on a thick understanding of human social being is likely to be more illuminating than one deduced from a small number of abstract principles. However, as Appiah points out, although the main ethical theories tend to be reduced to simple, single principles, whether duty, utility or contract, in practice their most sophisticated advocates’ more comprehensive expositions accommodate, ‘in one idiom or another, notions of character, consequences, duties, maxims, reasonableness, fairness, consent’ (Appiah, 2008, p. 202). Thus Mill the utilitarian was also a virtue ethicist, Rawls the contractarian recommended an ‘Aristotelian principle’, Hume and Smith discussed virtues, reason, justice and duties as well as moral sentiments, and so on. The same tends to go for recent theorists’ more extensive discussions. The most helpful ideas come from neo-Aristotelian, critical realist and ethic of care theorists, and from Adam Smith.2 These are approaches to ethics which are based on a thick conception of human social being and acknowledge the multi-dimensionality of morality in practice, the importance of moral sentiments, phronesis, embodiment, relational being, and the role of socialization instead of seeking a single rational principle. My debt to Smith’s concrete, bottom-up account of fellow-feeling, moral sentiments and individual self- and mutual evaluation has already been acknowledged, and we need only underline a few points here. While his close friend, David Hume, espoused a dichotomous framework of reason and passion (emotion),3 Smith’s careful analysis of particular moral sentiments showed them to be a form of reasoning about social life, indeed a central part of ethical reflection and guidance. His is a deeply social account of morality, the actor being considered in 2

3

Among the neo-Aristotelians I am most indebted to Martha Nussbaum, Joseph Dunne, Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor, though I take a more naturalist line than Taylor. Though even then, in his accounts of particular sentiments, Hume could scarcely ignore their reasonable character.


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relation to others and as observed by them, and as having fellow-feeling and moral and immoral sentiments. There is no disjunction between the emotional aspect of responses to others and the epistemic or ‘rational’ aspect. Smith’s work is also an analysis of one of the key sources of social order, and he therefore deserves to be included among the founders of sociology. At the same time, he was far too wise to overestimate the power of moral sentiments and regulation as a source of order, and he famously identified their limitations in the emerging ‘commercial society’ of the eighteenth century, in which other forms of regulation could be more beneficial. Yet he certainly did not believe the pursuit of self-interest should trump other moral considerations, or that market relations were the only significant kind of relation in a modern society.4 However strange – and sometimes off-putting – Smith’s language and tone may seem to a twenty-first-century reader, The Theory of Moral Sentiments is indispensable for understanding actually existing morality. The Aristotelian focus on virtue ethics, and the way in which people develop embodied dispositions through acting within particular kinds of social relation and context, is immediately sociologically appealing (Flanagan and Jupp, 2001).5 Aristotle therefore recognized the importance of moral education – whether through teaching or experience – in forming virtues, though he also acknowledged that this education could be good or bad. Bourdieu’s sociological account of practice and the development of the habitus has many Aristotelian echoes, though Aristotle placed greater emphasis on reflexivity, responsibility and choice, for there can usually be different patterns of habituation to any given context. There is nothing automatic about the development of virtues: people could act in a courageous or cowardly way in response to the same situation, ‘for we are ourselves somehow partcauses of our states of character’ (Aristotle, 1980, The Nicomachean

4

5

‘The wise and virtuous man is at all times willing that his own private interest should be sacrificed to the public interest of his own particular order or society’ (Smith, 1759, VI.ii.3.3, p. 235). This statement appears in the sixth and final addition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, published in 1790 – a year after the fifth and final edition of The Wealth of Nations. The belief that Smith abandoned his moral view of social order for one based on self-interest has been decisively refuted. There was only one Adam Smith. There are of course many objectionable, but separable, things in Aristotle’s work, such as his elitism and misogyny, which we reject.

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Ethics, III.6) – an unwelcome conclusion for social scientists bent on establishing strong empirical regularities in behaviour. Individuals still have some responsibility for how they respond to a given situation. Thus, virtue is more than habit; although the courageous or generous person is one who, through practice, has developed those dispositions, she can still choose to act courageously or generously where appropriate and know why it is appropriate (MacIntyre, 1998, p. 62). Arguably, this overstates how much difference individual reflexivity and agency make in practice – though from a normative point of view, it’s understandable that the capacity for reviewing and changing our responses should be emphasized. Our interpretation of ethical practical reason also owes much to Aristotle’s analysis of the role of experience in assessing concrete situations. While there are general norms or rules-of-thumb there is also a need for experience and attentiveness to the concrete particulars of the situations we face: ‘. . . the account of particular cases is yet more lacking in exactness; for they do not fall under any art or precept, but the agents must in each case consider what is appropriate to the occasion, as happens in the art of medicine . . .’ (Aristotle, 1980, The Nicomachean Ethics, II.2). Lay normativity is also often concerned with assessing ends, and trying to work out what kind of life is a good one, or what flourishing consists of. Our account has much in common with Andrew Collier’s boldly realist or cognitive interpretation in which ethical reasoning, ethical dispositions and moral sentiments are or can be intelligently responsive to their objects (Collier, 1999a, 2003). Hence people often seek further information in order to devise better means to their existing ends, or to re-assess those ends (Collier, 1999a, p. 32). ‘Action is moral insofar as it relates to others as they are in themselves, rather than as they are for us’ (Collier, 1999a, p. 26). He endorses Macmurray’s argument that ‘[M]orality, after all, is merely a demand for rational behaviour . . .’ (cited in Collier, 1999a, p. 25). One implication of this objectorientation of ethics is that virtues and vices may vary in different kinds of society; for example, pleonaxia – insatiable acquisitiveness – is a greater vice in the context of scarcity than abundance. What is ethical depends on the nature of the object and situation – the person and the particular kind of social relation and situation, including, we might add, the self-understanding, attachments and commitments of others. Although authors like Collier, Margaret Archer and Ted Benton


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have advanced critical realism’s ability to address the ethical dimension of life, in my view it still needs a fuller philosophical anthropology. The ethic of care literature – one of the most important developments in moral philosophy in the last century – is unusual in the extent to which it spans the divide between positive and normative analyses (Bübeck, 2002; Held, 2006; Kittay, 1999; Nussbaum, 2006; Tronto, 1994). It is firmly grounded in an empirical examination of human social being throughout the life course that acknowledges the dialectics of care relations and the gamut of emotions from compassion and love to resentment and anger that they can prompt.6 Empirical attentiveness is, of course, entirely appropriate for a body of thought which deals with how we tend to the needs of others. This sensitivity owes much to feminism’s exhaustive exploration of the texture of personal relations and their relationship to flourishing, free of the prejudices that emotionality is necessarily threatening to reason, the body inferior to mind, the personal less important than the public, and so on. More than any other kind of literature on ethics, it challenges the undersocialized and disembodied models of human being that have dominated political and moral philosophy. The position I have outlined in Chapters 4 and 5 is similar to that in normative ethics sometimes described as ‘ethical naturalism’, though ‘naturalism’ is a poor term, for it risks being misunderstood, not least because of the problems that surround the very meaning of ‘nature’. Firstly, it invites the misconception that we are opposing nature to culture, or worse, biology to culture, rather than seeing cultures as emergent properties of ‘nature’ in an inclusive sense. Secondly, it risks implying that the ‘nature’ of an adult is somehow prior to their social, cultural and moral constitution, when, as we saw in Chapter 4, it is formed through socialization, which always has cultural and moral dimensions. Thirdly, it might be taken to imply that we are simply good by nature; but clearly, as Aristotle acknowledged, we can quite naturally be bad, by causing harm (Aristotle, 1980, The Nicomachean Ethics, II.1). It is not nature per se but flourishing and suffering that are the reference points I have adopted, though these of course depend on our cultivated natures. This latter qualification means that this is not a 6

As Joan Tronto notes, it has many affinities with the moral philosophy of Smith and other members of the Scottish Enlightenment (Tronto, 1994).

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reductive naturalism, for it acknowledges: (a) that many of the biological and other physical processes to which we are subject are culturally interpreted and modified by human intervention, whether intentionally or unintentionally; (b) that we are also social beings whose welfare depends on the attachments and commitments that we contingently form, and on the nature of our societies and our particular positions within them – for example, whether we are able to participate in social life as equals of others or relegated to the excluded or abject. Insofar as our flourishing depends on that of our commitments, we might say that there is a ‘culturally autonomous’ aspect to human flourishing, though some commitments may be anti-social and restrict flourishing. Lastly, human flourishing is open-ended, though not unconstrained; the new can only be forged out of the old. Perfectionists may object that we cannot give a comprehensive definition of well-being, precisely because of this historical character. But as we argued in Chapters 4 and 7, that does not render it meaningless, for we already know something about flourishing, about some of its elements, and can distinguish them from some of the elements of suffering. We could not survive without having some idea of this, and there is much wisdom in the world’s cultures and their history to draw upon in developing such a conception. We should not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Perfectionism is as absurd in ethics as it is in epistemology; just as the latter implies the possibility of a completed knowledge upon which we cannot improve, so the idea of perfected ways of relating to others is idle. We know something about flourishing, and we know that it matters; we know that it is likely to decline unless we strive to attain or maintain it. That is enough for the purposes of the general understanding of lay normativity that I am trying to develop in this book. ‘The good’ and ‘flourishing’ are thin, abstract terms which cover a range of more specific things; as we have seen, some of them are included in capabilities theory. It seems easy for a sceptic to wave away these as arbitrary or subjective. How do we know what is good? But this is an affected kind of ignorance or agnosticism, one that is impossible to live. Theory–practice contradictions expose such selfdeceit. We only have to challenge the sceptic to justify the judgements of good and bad which they have to make in everyday life. Do they make them for no reason, because they have been injected with wider social norms so that they merely think what others think – or do they make them because they think they are right and can present arguments


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and evidence in their support by reference to human well-being? This latter position can still acknowledge that people’s judgements are fallible. Moreover, as Martha Nussbaum points out, sceptics who cite the impossibility of infallible groundings as an objection show themselves to be prisoners of the very standpoint they imagine themselves to be challenging (Nussbaum, 1993, p. 235). This concept of well-being as objective implies some connection to our capacities and susceptibilities as human beings, or those of other species. Mary Midgley argues that proposing to make these things good by an act of will is nonsense. Each creature has its own faculties and not others. ‘You cannot have a plant or animal without certain quite definite things being good and bad for it’ (Midgley, 2003, p. 54; see also MacIntyre, 1999).7 This is along the right lines, though too strong, for not all our faculties are good: we can be evil. So is this ‘moral realism’? Not if moral realism is simply, as philosophers sometimes say, the idea that there are ‘moral facts’, such as ‘murder is wrong’. This makes no sense to me, for it seems, as Marcel Lieberman puts it, to require ‘extraordinary additions to our ontology’ – a special domain of facts, quite unlike others, such as ‘water boils at 100°C’ (Lieberman, 2007, p. 192). However, the idea that moral judgements do refer fallibly to matters of fact, that is things that are objective in the sense of independent of the particular subjective ideas of an observer, might be termed moral realist for a different reason. Our moral beliefs are directly or indirectly about matters of fact – the capacities and susceptibilities of our cultivated natures. Those facts about flourishing or suffering are what we seek to establish through moral evaluation. As Lieberman reminds us, here it is vital to note that we too are part of the world, not positioned outside it as external observers, though our ideas are about things that are independent of them. The issue is complicated by the fact that individuals and groups can become committed to practices which are not actually necessary for human beings in general to flourish, but which have become part of their particular way of life, such that being denied them causes them to

7

Similarly: ‘[E]thics must be grounded in a knowledge of human beings that enables us to say that some modes of life are suited to our nature, whereas others are not’ (Wood, 1990, p. 17).

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suffer. However, even here we can see that the commitments, and any associated moral claims, are about something. Some readers may feel that my approach is a metaphysical one, in the sense that it might appear to attempt to see the mind–world relation ‘sideways on’ (Lovibond, 2002, p. 49).8 ‘Post-metaphysical’ approaches reject the idea that one can grasp objects such as human nature from nowhere, rather than from within the ways of thinking that are available to us. I also reject the idea of a view from nowhere. Our thinking is always from within the conceptual frames or discourses available to us, and even non-discursive knowledge or know-how requires schemata. As necessarily evaluative beings we could hardly have a disinterested view of the world. But the fact that our relation to the world is mediated does not mean that language or schemata are a barrier between us and the world, so that we can never get feedback from the world that can help us assess whether our knowledge is more or less adequate (Lovibond, 2002, p. 136). The practical knowledge of an experienced practitioner is not one of correspondence between propositions and objects but a practical matter of coping. Nor is it clear that my account is metaphysical in an older sense of the term – as referring to that which lies beyond the empirical – for the qualities that I proposed as important for our ethical capacities in Chapter 4 were empirically observable ones.9 My account of ethics in everyday life bears little resemblance to Kantian or utilitarian theories. At one level this is not necessarily a problem for the simple reason that those are normative ethical theories, and hence propose what should be the case rather than what is. However, my approach is fundamentally opposed to certain basic features of the Kantian theory. Its view of moral sentiments or emotions as irrational forces counterposed to reason – ‘heteronomy’ versus ‘autonomy’ – derives, as we saw in Chapter 4, from an untenable

8

9

This term has many, quite different, meanings, and theorists from different parts of the intellectual map tend to use it – sometimes pejoratively – without explaining what they mean by it. See http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/metaphysics/. In any case, lack of observability is not a foolproof criterion for accepting or rejecting propositions about the world. Science has always posited the existence of real but unobservable entities, and often it has later discovered ways of observing them. How extraordinarily anthropocentric to imagine that the world was simply co-extensive with the limits of human sensory powers. How could we ever discover anything new if that were the case (Bhaskar, 1975)?


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dualism of deterministic natural causes and free, unconstrained reason.10 The modern divorce of reason and value from what they are about and the devaluation of emotions and embodiment are the problem, not the solution: they render the everyday sources and kinds of ethical action and practical reason unintelligible, and unfairly demean them. Take, for example, one of the most common objections to Kant’s categorical imperative, according to which we should act only in ways which we could will all to act. The norm is itself empty of moral content; it merely provides a useful way of checking out moral ideas, but conformity with the categorical imperative is neither necessary nor sufficient for deciding what is ethical.11 It is bad to lie not because we couldn’t universalize a recommendation to lie, but because it usually causes harm. But lying does not always cause harm – indeed it may sometimes prevent it; if I know your whereabouts and gunmen demand to know where you are so they can kill you, it would hardly be ethical for me to tell them the truth. This criticism suggests that the consequences of actions should be considered in deciding what to do. Utilitarianism proposes a purely consequentialist approach to ethics; consequences are all that is important, not character or motives or rights, and actions are not seen as good or bad in themselves. In practice, while people do often take account of consequences in deciding to act, they also often do things out of a sense of duty or because they seem right in themselves. The crucial moral emotion of shame does not even depend on consequences in terms of having harmed anyone; one may feel ashamed of having thought ill of someone who didn’t deserve to be regarded with suspicion, even though that person had no idea that one doubted them. In practice, the extent to which people do act as if the end justified the means also depends on the 10

11

Though my rejection of Kant is from a realist and neo-Aristotelian position, there are some parallels here with Adorno’s critique of Kant in his Negative Dialectics (Adorno, 1973). ‘In Kant the word duty [and ought] is detached altogether from its root connection with the fulfilment of a particular role or the carrying out of the functions of a particular office. It becomes singular rather than plural, and it is defined in terms of obedience to categorical moral imperatives – that is, in terms of injunctions containing the new ought. The very detachment of the categorical imperative from contingent events and needs and from social circumstances makes it in at least two ways an acceptable form of moral precept for emerging liberal individualistic society’ (MacIntyre, 1998, pp. 189–90). This kind of reason is removed from the object rather than attentive to it.

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kind of social context and dominant ideas of the society; some encourage people to think in such ways, others do not, and of course utilitarian ideas themselves have been influential in modern society. We see from these two common objections to Kantianism and utilitarianism that limiting morality and ethics to that which is validated by a single principle or theory, and hence discarding much of actually existing morality, causes problems; and it is often to some of the discarded parts – be they emotions, virtues, or conceptions of the good – that critics of those theories appeal. Many, though not all, versions of utilitarianism have a subjective view of well-being as happiness or utility, unlike the objectivist or naturalist conception that we have argued for, so that if people think that they are happy or flourishing, then they must be; they cannot be mistaken. To the extent that it treats individuals’ conception of the good as personal, it fits comfortably with liberal capitalism. Subjectivist arguments may nevertheless sometimes arrive at the same conclusions as our more naturalistic approach because people may subjectively make adequate assessments of their objective good. ‘Utility’ or ‘happiness’ are thin concepts which implicitly cast individuals as passive; they are happy when they have what they want. Like Aristotelians, I would argue that happiness is largely a by-product of flourishing (eudaimonia) rather than something which can be achieved independently of it. Further, ‘flourishing’ or eudaimonia differs from happiness in that it suggests activity, abundance, vigour, full use of capacities, and completeness of life, not a passive state of mind (Nussbaum, 1994). Moreover, the Aristotelian approach acknowledges that there are several different ends or elements of flourishing that are irreducible to a single end, and cannot be substituted for one another. The capabilities approach discussed in Chapter 7 develops this idea. It also differs from the Epicurean view that all good and bad derive from the sensations of pleasure and pain; well-being and ill-being are not reducible to sensations but are states of being which may or may not give rise to such sensations. Liberalism focuses on enabling individuals to pursue their own conception of the good, provided they do not harm others. In its more simplistic versions it implies that flourishing is merely a matter of personal taste or preference, though harm is treated as objective. An individualist, market view of the good has the effect of trivializing values, needs and wants – rendering them merely as personal


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preferences or tastes. Homo economicus has no needs, only preferences of differing strengths, which they seek to satisfy, as if no harm other than dissatisfaction would come to someone whose ‘preference’ for food and shelter were not met. Economists sometimes like to ‘joke’ that a need is just a want that you hope someone else will pay for. It’s a joke that functions as a thought stopper and therefore conceals a great stupidity: the idea that the need of the starving for food is no different from the preference of a wine buff for a particular vintage; they are just preferences of different strengths. Further, if we think of ‘conceptions of the good’ in terms of ‘preferences’, ‘tastes’ or ‘lifestyles’ – as if they were merely aesthetic and personal – then it is easy to forget the ethical dimension of life, the fact that most of what we do has implications for the well-being of others. Although capitalism links us to more people than any other kind of economy, it also provides us with unprecedented opportunities to live without considering them, indeed to fall prey to the illusion that how we live has few implications for them. The idea of a society in which all can supposedly create and follow their own conceptions of the good can easily become a glib slogan. It has a superficial appeal until we think what it implies – a moral geography of ablebodied, autonomous adult individuals, only contingently related to others, each with their own property, able to do what they like with it, provided no harmful effects cross over the boundary separating them from the next individual, so that the social order appears ‘as the mere sum of individual wills and interests’ (MacIntyre, 1998, p. 258). The implicit model of human social being here is hopeless; even in a society where the model is performative, it can hardly begin to recognize human interdependence and the variety of relationships in which we live. This is only a brief sketch of the relation of the arguments in this book to some major philosophical approaches, but I hope it is enough to explain why some were drawn upon while others were passed over.

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Index

adaptive preferences 134 Adorno, Theodor 89, 114 affect 2, 36, 69 agential and epistemic authority 232, 251 Alcoff, Linda Martín 223 Alexander, Jeffrey 159 altruism 119–24 Anderson, Elizabeth 40, 44, 52, 53 animality 108, 205–8 non-human animals 207, 208–14 anthropology 180–5 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 101, 178, 179, 254 Archer, Margaret 24, 110, 125, 130, 140, 183 Aristotle 59, 82, 114, 247, 254, 255, 256, 257 Neo-Aristotelianism 254, 255–6, 262 Arpaly, Nomy 77–8 attachments 5, 83, 123, 124–7, 226 audits 59–60 autonomy 127–9, 190, 195–204 Barbalet, Jack 40 Barnes, Barry 219 Bauman, Zygmunt 89, 101, 132, 152 Benedict, Ruth 184, 185 Benhabib, Seyla 144 Benner, Patricia 70, 73 Benton, Ted 109 Bhaskar, Roy 93, 226–7 biological reductionism 100–1 blame 164–7 Boltanski, Luc and Thévènot, Laurent 175–6 Bolton, Sharon 189, 214 Bourdieu, Pierre 14, 63, 82, 94, 221, 255

Brontë, Charlotte 143 Butler, Judith 225, 244 capabilities approach, the 135, 233–9 applications 236–7 choice in 236 divorce from social science 238 and equality 236, 237 functionings 234 care 109–12, 119, 123, 128–9, 148, 149, 178, 183, 226, 229 see also ethics of care causality 103 character 125, 149–53 charity 178 Charlesworth, Simon 205 Collier, Andrew 46, 53, 104, 150, 154, 221, 225, 247, 256 commitments 5, 6, 72, 124–7, 167 and preferences 126 competition 172 concern 1–10, 42, 92, 112–14, 140 conscience 152 conventions 175 see also morality, conventional critical social science 6, 216–45, 251 as de-naturalization 223 explanatory critique 221 as partisan 223 and political direction 222, 223, 224– 5, 239 and reduction of illusion 221 retreat from 218–19, 240–4 and scepticism 222 standpoints of 219, 225–7 discourse 227–8 disrespect 231 freedom 225–7 liberal 231 rights – see human rights suffering/eudaimonia 228–40

279

280 critical theory 89, 99, 217, 227 cultural difference 179–85 culturally autonomous phenomena 135, 141 culture 5, 8, 27, 33, 35–6, 98, 100–1, 153, 243 curiosity 114 cynicism 178, 179 Damasio, Antonio 39 Darwin, Charles 148 Dean, Kathryn 111 deference and condescension 211 Deigh, John 147 dependence on others 129, 202, 233 desire 42 determinism 70, 95–6, 103–5, 109, 116, 141 difference 99–100, 108, 141, 218 dignity 189–215 and capacities 199 and comparisons with others 209 and equality 213 premodern concept of 208 and resistance 206 uncertainties about 204 work 202, 205, 206 workers’ views of 214–15 see also self-respect dilemmas 158–9, 186, 227 disability 202 discourse 2, 27, 35–6, 62, 98, 115, 120, 136, 225 dispositions 71, 75, 79–80, 129, 149 see also habitus domination 161, 162 see also power Dunne, Joseph 79, 87, 90–4 Dupré, John 123, 124–7 Durkheim, Emile 34, 153, 155, 163 Eagleton, Terry 124–7, 141, 222 economic theory 40, 250 egoism 119–24, 172 Ehrenreich, Barbara 201 embodiment 8, 108–9, 131, 151–2, 191, 205–8 emergent properties 56–7, 101, 110, 119, 147

Index emotion 8, 10, 32–5, 140 see also reason, emotional see also shame emotivism 24, 32–5 see also values as subjective Enlightenment, the 102, 217 epistemic fallacy 51, 93, 136 epistemology 74, 75 essentialism 103, 104, 141, 243 ethics 7–8, 82–5, 248 of care 82–4, 182, 230, 254, 257 consistency in 160–1 defined 7–8 ethical capacities 107–42 limited nature of 159 ethics–morality distinctions 16–17 lay and philosophical 144–6 and reflection 169 social science and 8, 15–18 ethnocentrism 24, 101–3, 235, 240 eudaimonia 39, 171, 219, 262 evaluation 4, 6, 23, 25–8, 44, 57, 171, 241 reasoning about 54–6 strong 64 evaluative beings 1, 10, 13, 23 evaluative descriptions 7, 10, 216 see also thick ethical concepts evil 129–34 fact–value family of dualisms 4–5, 24, 28–54, 246 fairness 160–1 fallibility 33, 36, 39, 46–7, 51, 86, 134, 235, 243, 259 Fay, Brian 217, 218 fellow-feeling 118–19 feminism 9, 31, 48, 109, 127, 172, 218, 221, 229, 243, 250, 257 see also ethics of care first-person relation to the world – see participants’ view of the world Fischer, E. F. and Benson, P. 125 flamenco 206 flourishing 1, 5–6, 8, 9, 39, 112, 114, 125, 136, 171, 228, 234, 247, 257 selective 137 see also well-being Flyvbjerg, Bent 71

Index Foucault, Michel 89, 136, 225, 241–4 Frankfurt School, the – see critical theory freedom 104, 234–6 see also critical social science, standpoints of gender 31 see also feminism Geras, Norman 105 Geuss, Raymond 117 Glover, Jonathan 17, 130 Habermas, Jurgen 89, 90–4, 105, 227 habit 26 habitus 75, 130 happiness 262 harm 233 Hayek, Frederik von 88 Hegel, master–slave dialectic 137 Held, Virginia 123 hermeneutics – see interpretive understanding heteronomy 127–9 Honneth, Axel 29, 135, 231 Horkheimer, Max 89 humanitarian concern 177 human nature, concepts of 98–142, 184 blank slate conception 105 human becoming 109–12 normative character of objections to 99–107 human rights 230–1 Hume, David 49, 57, 102, 121, 254 idealism 157–8 identity thinking 69 imperatives 44, 57, 148, 241 individualistic explanations and standpoints 165, 183, 225, 230, 232, 262 inequality 137–9, 178–9, 207, 208–14 instrumental relations 198, 201 interpretive understanding 90, 139 irrealism 247 Ishiguro, Kazuo 212 is–ought distinction 4, 16, 49–54, 241 Jackall, Robert 130 James, William 253

281 Jonas, Hans 53, 246 justice 161, 178, 249 distributive and contributive 214 justification and explanation 13 Kant, Immanuel 38, 69, 87, 98, 102, 103, 191, 198, 227, 261 Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark 205 Lamont, Michèle 201 Lee, M. Y. K. 190 liberalism 29, 129, 142, 174, 232 see also philosophical theories of ethics liberal society 27, 29, 178, 183, 230 Lieberman, Marcel 259 logic 50–2, 54, 67 Louch, A. R. 43 love 10, 148, 149 Lutz, Catherine 181–5 MacIntyre, Alasdair 33, 41, 52, 100, 116, 128, 196, 249, 261 markets 29–30 Marx, Karl 15, 18, 104, 112, 118, 221, 224 masculine model of the individual 127, 149, 225 meaning 115, 141, 224 Midgley, Mary 104, 107, 115, 155, 166, 170–5, 259 Mill, John Stuart 232, 254 modernity 24, 36, 40, 41, 56, 61, 92, 145 mood 175 Moody-Adams, Michele 179–85 moral economy 249 morality conventional 153–8, 184 and different social relations 175–7 exemplary moral individuals 158–9 generalizing tendency 159 harm-based 33, 153–8, 184 heterogeneity of 186–8 and judgements of others 161–3 moralizing 16, 154 moral sentiments 146–8 moral standing 173 moral stories 158–9 non-moral influences on 174 see also ethics

282 motives 170–1 Murdoch, Iris 43, 148 narrative beings 116 nature concepts of 5–6, 70 needs 41–2, 140 neediness – see vulnerability needs-based conception of social being 139 Neurath, Otto 247 Nichols, Shaun 156 normativity 5, 16, 23, 29, 96 crypto-normativity 44, 228, 229, 242 force 2, 3, 29, 51, 113, 153, 155 heteronormativity 16 lay 2–4, 6 and normalizing 16, 242 suspicion of 218–20, 229 norms 2, 12, 153–8 Norrie, Alan 120, 164 Nussbaum, Martha 38, 39, 147, 233, 234–6, 250 objectivity 6, 7, 11, 34 definitions 45–9 O’Neill, John 126, 183 ‘othering’ 173 Parekh, Bidulph 184, 185, 247 participants’ view of the world 2, 6, 10, 11–13, 164 philosophical anthropology 98, 107, 257 philosophical theories of ethics 253–63 ethical naturalism 257–8 Kantian 260–1 liberalism 262–3 metaphysics and post-metaphysics 260 moral realism 259–60 perfectionism in 258 reducible to a single principle 253 utilitarian 261–2 versus empirical approaches 254 philosophy 4, 8, 11, 13–14, 15–18, 62, 79–80, 132, 187 phronesis – see practical reason

Index pluralism 134–7, 239 defined 135 political economy 30 politics 248–9 positive–normative distinction 4, 41–5 and academic division of labour 14, 28–9, 217 positivism 139 postdisciplinarity 14, 248 poststructuralism 16, 103, 240 power 84, 87, 242 practice 70 psychology 248 psychopaths 156 Putnam, Hilary 31, 32 racism 48, 102 rationality 59–97 communicative 92 formal 69 instrumental 40, 61, 73, 89 see also reason rationalization 60, 70, 86, 88–9, 152 critics of 88–96 Rawls, John 254 realist philosophy 103–4, 139, 140, 143–88, 254 Real Utopias Project 252 reason 4, 6, 23, 152, 254 and abstraction 67–9 attentiveness 62, 65, 72, 79, 84, 87, 97, 148, 149, 161, 205–8 attenuation of 67, 96 emotional 36–41, 65, 72 practical 2, 61–97 conservatism of 86–9 embodied and intuitive 74–9 and ethics 82–4 and evaluation of ends 73, 80–2, 171–2 and particulars 71, 79–80, 237 ‘reasonable’ and ‘rational’ 63–6, 81 Reay, Diane 170 recognition 121–2, 137, 167–9, 191, 192, 193, 210, 213, 231 and actions 211 conditional and unconditional 195, 199–202

Index reflexivity 13, 24, 26, 116–17, 130–1, 181, 240–1 relationality 7, 119–24, 164, 182, 190, 193, 195 and care 83 relativism 134–7, 238, 240 responsibility 11–13, 55, 72, 128, 152, 164–7, 177, 200, 226 individualistic accounts of 165–7 Rorty, Richard 75, 92, 104, 106, 157 Rosaldo, Renato 2–3 rule-following 71–2 Sayad, Abdelmayak 9 Scheffler, Samuel 213 Scheman 128 scholastic fallacy 14–15, 62, 85, 89–94, 173 self, the 119–24 self-interest 122–4, 127 self-respect 168, 194, 197 social bases of 200, 209 see also dignity Sen, Amartya 233–4 Sennett, Richard and Cobb, Jonathan 9, 214 sentience 1, 5, 52–3 seriousness 197 servility 212, 213 shame 167–9 cognitive and social aspects of 169 Sherman, Nancy 37 significance 2, 141, 157 Singer, Peter 70, 204 Smart, Carol 10 Smith, Adam 118–19, 121, 124, 129, 154, 161, 210, 217–18, 254–5 social construction 46, 98, 106, 136 social context/form 129–34, 175 social contract 172 socialization 148–9 social ontologies social science 13–14, 216, 246–52 alienated 2, 6, 12, 29, 144, 155 and ethics, morality 15–18, 187 models of 250–2 dialogical 251 medical 250 therapeutic 251 relation to the reader 11 see also critical social science

283 social structures 7, 177–9, 248 social struggles 172 Soper, Kate 109 spectator’s view of world 6, 8, 11–13, 143 structure–agency theory 140, 165–7 subjectivity 45–9 suffering 1, 3, 5, 8, 9, 42, 53 Tallis, Raymond 120 Taylor, Charles 43, 51, 55, 69, 97, 120 the good 166, 170–5, 232–3, 258 theory–practice contradictions 8, 13, 15, 18, 33 thick ethical concepts 42–4 Thompson, Edward P. 42 Tomkins, Sylvan 169 Tronto, Joan 83 trust 164, 200 truth 46, 48–9, 93, 221, 242 universals 99–107, 185, 208, 234 valuation – see evaluation values 1, 6, 7, 23–58, 170 ‘aboutness’ 27, 69 beyond the scope of reason 3–4, 40 and ‘bias’ 10 conventional (see also norms) 6, 24, 32–5 defined 25–8 and dogmatism 44–5, 223 in social science 10–11, 23, 28 subjective 1, 4, 6, 7, 11, 24, 27, 30, 46, 48–9 value-freedom 7, 11, 24, 44, 47 ‘valuey-facts’ 52–3 Vetlesen, Arne Johan 132–3 vices 129–34 virtues 129–34, 149–53 vulnerability 1, 5, 6, 10, 23, 112–14, 195–205, 207, 208–14, 226 Walby, Sylvia 236 Walzer, Michael 131, 175, 224 Weber, Max 11, 40, 44, 48, 56–7, 60, 89–90, 248 well-being 1, 7, 8–9, 25, 33, 41, 81, 134–9, 186, 194, 230, 245, 250, 258

284 well-being (cont.) objectivist and subjectivist views of 134–9, 157, 217, 218, 233–4, 259 Wellmer, Albrecht 224 Wilkinson, Iain 42 Williams, Bernard 49, 253

Index Winnicott, Donald 119 wisdom 64 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 246 work 118 Zigon, Jarrett 159

Why Things Matter to People: Social Science, Values and Ethical Life

Social Decision Making: Social Dilemmas, Social Values, and Ethical Judgments

Making Social Science Matter

People, Places, and Things

People, Places, and Things

Values and Valuing: Speculations on the Ethical Life of Persons

Why Sports Morally Matter

Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter (Consumption & Space)

Moral Principles and Social Values

People, Places, Things

Social Things: An Introduction to the Sociological Life

Reply to Dewey's 'Ethical Subject-Matter and Language'

Blind Spots: Why Smart People Do Dumb Things

Science of Everyday Things: Real Life Chemistry

Science of everyday things: real-life biology

When Bad Things Happen to Good People

A humanist science: values and ideals in social inquiry

When Bad Things Happen to Other People

Interpretation in Social Life, Social Science, and Marketing

Matter and Antimatter (Arrow Science)

Science of everyday things: real-life earth science

How Social Movements Matter

Why Beliefs Matter: Reflections on the Nature of Science

Social Work Research: Ethical and Political Contexts

Pharmacogenomics: Social, Ethical, and Clinical Dimensions

Why People Cooperate: The Role of Social Motivations

Ethical principles for social policy

How and why in science

Values and Opportunities in Social Entrepreneurship

The Matter Is Life

Social choice and individual values (2nd edition)

Why Things Matter to People: Social Science, Values and Ethical Life

Social Decision Making: Social Dilemmas, Social Values, and Ethical Judgments

Making Social Science Matter

People, Places, and Things

People, Places, and Things

Values and Valuing: Speculations on the Ethical Life of Persons

Why Sports Morally Matter

Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter (Consumption & Space)

Moral Principles and Social Values

People, Places, Things

Social Things: An Introduction to the Sociological Life

Reply to Dewey's 'Ethical Subject-Matter and Language'

Blind Spots: Why Smart People Do Dumb Things

Science of Everyday Things: Real Life Chemistry

Science of everyday things: real-life biology

When Bad Things Happen to Good People

A humanist science: values and ideals in social inquiry

When Bad Things Happen to Other People

Interpretation in Social Life, Social Science, and Marketing

Matter and Antimatter (Arrow Science)

Science of everyday things: real-life earth science

How Social Movements Matter

Why Beliefs Matter: Reflections on the Nature of Science

Social Work Research: Ethical and Political Contexts

Pharmacogenomics: Social, Ethical, and Clinical Dimensions

Why People Cooperate: The Role of Social Motivations

Ethical principles for social policy

How and why in science

Values and Opportunities in Social Entrepreneurship

The Matter Is Life

Social choice and individual values (2nd edition)

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