Cracks in the Wall: Sociological Critique as Moral Practice

• In Event: 178 - Regular Session. Ethics and Science

Abstract

Recent scholarship in the sociology and philosophy of social science has suggested numerous ways of clarifying how sociological research can contribute to a good society. This literature has turned to cognitive psychology and moral philosophy for potential grounding. However, this scholarship has paid little attention to the concrete ways in which sociologists debate the rightfulness of their methodological assumptions, and the normative meanings they attach to them. In this paper, we offer a new perspective by which to analyze the ways social scientists proffer, manage, and weather moral critiques within their disciplines. Drawing on the work of Boltanski, Chiapello, and Thévenot, we trace such methodological-cum-moral debates across three subfields (globalization, secularization, and intensive parenting) in sociology. While some of the critiques proffered in in each debate were sustained in much of the subsequent research, we demonstrate that additional ways of responding to such criticism also emerged. One way was a partial reform of existing practices, and the other was the creation of ceremonial citation patterns that acknowledge critique but circumvent it, allowing researchers to continue working in a competitive field of knowledge production. We claim that the seemingly mundane workings of sociological research constitute a site in which sociologists often grapple with the ethics of the discipline and its impact on society. Existing scholarly efforts to define or reevaluate the ethical underpinnings of the discipline would benefit from accounting for ways sociologists already evaluate their work.

Authors

• Samuel David Stabler, Yale

• Shai M. Dromi