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Soc (2013) 50:592597DOI 10.1007/s12115-013-9716-3
SYMPOSIUM: FACTS, VALUES, AND SOCIAL SCIENCE
Truth, Fact and Value: Recovering Normative Foundations for Sociology
Reha Kadakal
Published online: 2 October 2013# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
Can sociology have normative presuppositions? Is the purpose of sociology to study society as it is or how it ought to be? Can we task sociology with serving moral and ethical ends? If so, are there universal categories by means of which we can define what constitutes a good society? Or are all such categories in the end but particular constructs unique to particular cultures and traditions, and hence bound by relativism? The history of the social sciences has proven these to be profoundly formidable questions to answer. In fact, far from providing a systematic conceptual framework, contemporary social theory in its current state consists of diverse and often contradictory theoretical standpoints and ethical presuppositions that make any single approach to normative foundations of social science appear to be limited, partial and ultimately untenable.
Philip S. Gorskis Beyond the Fact/Value Distinction: Ethical Naturalism and the Social Sciences raises some of these fundamental questions, as his central concern is whether sociology can help us tackle the question of good society.1 Arguing against the conventional understanding of the fact/value distinction in the social sciences, Gorski not only reminds us that values inflect facts infundamental and less tractable ways but also argues that values are fact-laden, have an experiential basis, and hence are open to empirical investigation. Accordingly, Gorski advocates for ethical naturalism, a brand of moral realism that conceives an independent territory between facts and values, a middle kingdom of moral factscontaining discoverable truths about the good life and good society.2
The goal of ethical naturalism is, among other things, to discover ethical truths, which exist independently of the human mind, as a matter of social scientific knowledge.3 Such an approach, Gorksi hopes, would also counter some of the ethically self-contradictory implications of moral relativismcontradictions that become fully clear when it comes to questions of harm and depriving human beings of the material conditions of a dignified life. One fundamental premise of ethical naturalism, in Gorskis view, is an Aristotelian notion of flourishing that emphasizes the importance of the social order as the source of...