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Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2847526

The Necessity of Social Philosophy Nathan J. Robinson Harvard University

Due to the way academic disciplines are structured, many important normative social questions are not discussed with the scholarly rigor that they deserve. While mor- al questions concerning individual ethics and state policymaking have developed an extensive philosophical literature, moral questions about social life more broadly (such as those that arise in schools, families, workplaces, and communities) are frequently left untouched by those who study these domains empirically.

This may partly be due to the commitment of social scientists to a position of neu- trality on moral questions. Social science has attempted to remain agnostic on what people ought to do, preferring to analyze what they do in fact do. However, as critics of social science have pointed out, moral assumptions pervade sociology, anthropology, political science, and economics. The “scientific” mindset has not produced a value-free approach to studying social questions. Instead, it has simply forced the normative beliefs underlying empirical research to go undiscussed. It has also meant that “ought” questions, which are extensively treated in policy, business, and ethics literature, are addressed tacitly, but unsystematically and often incoherently. Yet just as political phi- losophy and ethics are important for developing clear frameworks for deliberation about how states and individuals should act, “social philosophy” can help in both developing useful concepts to guide social organization.

By conceiving of social philosophy as an important complement to social science, scholars can solve several problems. First, by moving values discussions to their own realm, they address the perennially disquieting problem of how to produce socially relevant knowledge without sacrificing a commitment to empirical neutrality. Second, by subjecting the values underlying social science to systematic scrutiny, scholars will ensure that unexamined political ideologies do not pervade social scientific disciplines. Finally, by paying attention to the role of “ought” questions in social inquiry, scholars can offer important new contributions to real-world social decision-making.

Social philosophy is not only useful, it is unavoidable, and ignoring it will under- mine both the intellectual credibility and practical relevance of the social sciences.

Introduction

t is impossible for anyone to escape from moral values. Everyone inhabits a social context, and in doing so internalizes a set of normative beliefs about what people ought to do and how things ought to be. If

a person refuses to acknowledge that she holds such beliefs, she does not thereby shed them and achieve some kind of objectivity or neutrality. Rather, she simply proceeds in accordance with her unstated moral assumptions, without stopping to ask why she believes them or whether they are coherent.

In the academic social sciences, the question of values creates particular problems. A physicist can happily study the way the laws of the universe operate, without ever having to face the question of how the universe should operate. It is meaningless for her to hold an opinion about what atoms or quarks ought to do rather than what they actually do. But the study of society (whether in economics, political

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The Necessity of Social Philosophy 2

science, psychology, anthropology, or sociology) cannot help but face certain moral dilemmas. The issues studied by social scientists are often profoundly morally important, and thereby invite innumer- able philosophical questions, ranging from what actions ought to be taken by social actors to whether the academic is among those responsible for taking or encouraging those actions.

Simply by studying something to begin with, one is already asserting that it ought to be studied. By conducting scholarly research into inequality, for example, one implicitly states that inequality matters. One cannot study everything, and by choosing particular subjects for inquiry, one is assigning them a certain worth. As Andrew Abbott writes, “the act of explanation categorizes social phenomena into things needing explanation and things not. Since the things so categorized themselves involve values (because values permeate the social process), the act of explanation entails implicit value-choices even if investigators are magically universalist” (2007).

The formation of social science concepts is also bound up with values. Take a recent article in the American Journal of Sociology: “The Persistence of Extreme Gender Segregation in the 21st Century” (Levanon and Grusky, 2016). “Persistence” and “extreme” make it clear that we are dealing with some- thing undesirable. Headaches and infestations “persist”; pleasurable things, by contast, are usually said to “last.” More basically, is it even possible to have a concept of “gender segregation” that does not see it as a social “problem” to be solved? The word “segregation” is inextricably tied to the history of Jim Crow, and carries a morally denunciatory subtext. When scholars discuss “discrimination,” “racism,” “hierarchy,” and “imbalance,” they are both offering a picture of the world as it ought to be and defining a set of cat- egories by which we ought to understand the world. By declaring those categories to be the proper ones, we reinforce their importance and take a stand on them.

The value judgments often seem so obvious that scholars forget that they are value judgments. In sociology, for example, there is a general consensus when studying racism that racism is wrong. A world without racism would be preferable to a world with it. In fact, many in the social scientists would see this as so self-evident that it need not be commented upon, hence the permissibility of assuming it implicitly. But it is the very fact that it seems axiomatic that proves the point. There are plenty of peo- ple, after all, who are proudly racist, or who think organizing a society along racial lines makes perfect sense. There are also plenty of people who do not think inequality is a particular problem at all, and believe that those who end up at the bottom of society are simply economic “losers” who did not try sufficiently hard. There are plenty of other people who are skeptical of democracy (see Brennan 2016, Caplan 2007), or who believe that traditional hierarchies are a sound and moral means of governing people. “Democracy is good, racism is wrong” may seem irrefutable moral truths to a liberal-minded social scientist, but they are in fact, deeply contentious in the public at large. As such, at the very least, the terms need to be clearly defined and the arguments clearly defended. Yet a small mountain of highly controversial values is simply assumed without argument.

This problem occurs throughout the social sciences; it is not unique to sociology. The same is true in the vast political science literature on “democratization.” Scholars may see themselves as neutrally observ- ing how forms of governance change, but they soon slip into endorsing particular ways of governing over others. An example can be seen in the work of leading democratization scholar Larry Diamond. In The Spirit of Democracy (2008), Diamond purports to study how and why countries transition to democracy. But he proposes that some countries are in a “democratic recession,” and suggests a vision for how “free societies” can be built. Diamond’s descriptions of truths about political processes are inseperable from his vision of what societies ought to look like, and the direction the world should take.

Introduction 3

Economics, the social science that most consciously emulates its natural science counterparts in phys- ics, has been heavily criticized for implicitly adopting a utilitarian view of human well-being, as well as a normative conception of rationality (Marglin 2010). But it’s also true that, because economists often serve as advisers to governments and social institutions, these normative values end up encoded in policy. As Cambridge University economist Jonathan Aldred notes, “[t]he scope of economists’ value judgments stretches beyond the obvious, the realm of economic policy making, to include all performative economic analysis, because in both cases these judgements affect the world.” (2009, p. 224) Aldred correctly notes that this problem becomes especially salient when scholarship has direct policy consequences.

More policy-oriented social scientists already acknowledge that their work has a larger purpose, and that they want it to cause changes in what governments do and what happens to people. The research coming out of, for example, the Harvard Kennedy School’s Inequality and Social Pol- icy program (of which I am part) is explicitly dedicated toward ameliorating inequality through government action. It is difficult to deny that such a “policy” orientation has a strong normative component, which is based on a series of philosophical premises about how equal people should or should not be.

Some have identified sociology in particular as deeply moral in its nature, perhaps even centrally defined by its moral commitments. Christian Smith, in The Sacred Project of American Sociology, draws on the work of Emile Durkheim to analyze sociology as being quasi-religious in nature. In the United States, sociology has a moral mission. It is “at heart committed to the visionary project of realizing the emancipation, equality, and moral affirmation of all human beings as autonomous, self-directing, individual agents (who should be) out to live their lives as they personally so desire, by constructing their own favored identities, entering and exiting relationships as they choose, and equally enjoying the gratification of experiential, material, and bodily pleasures” (2014, p. 7-8).

This is a refreshingly honest account of the moral impetus for sociological research. Yet if Smith is right, all manner of unclear and un-interrogated assumptions are shaping the direction of Ameri- can sociology. What is “moral affirmation” and why do people deserve it? Why does sociology think “experiential and bodily pleasures” have normative value; on what grounds do its claims trump those of religious doctrines that believe bodily pleasures should be suppressed in favor of spiritual ones? Can a person ever be truly “self-directing” or does “autonomy” simply mask more subtle forms of power? Why should we presume that a person knows what is good for them? What kinds of “emancipation” should be guaranteed, by whom, and why?

The moment a sociological assumption is interrogated, its foundations begin to wobble. Racism is bad. First, what should “race” refer to? Can everyone be racist, or only some people? Can “reverse” racism exist? Under what circumstances is using racial categories acceptable? Do labels of racism as “structural” wrongly relieve individuals of culpability for it? Should the concept of race itself eventually be abandoned? Why, precisely, is racism wrong to begin with? How do we know? Anyone concerned with meaningfully studying and/or addressing racial injustice should be consistently grappling with these questions. Yet social scientists, who are both intellectually and morally concerned with racism, spend little time exploring them.

There have been attempts to bring the underlying moral assumptions of the social sciences to the surface. In sociology, Michael Burawoy gave a public address as President of the American Sociological Association in 2004, acknowledging the inherently political nature of his discipline, and advocating a new kind of engaged academic practice that was openly oriented toward solving social problems in

The Necessity of Social Philosophy 4

addition to examining and theorizing them. Burawoy explained that all social sciences had their under- lying value systems, and it was up to sociologists to recognize their own:

If the standpoint of economics is the market and its expansion, and the standpoint of politi- cal sciences is the state and the guarantee of political stability, then the standpoint of sociology is civil society and the defense of the social. In times of market tyranny and state despotism, sociology—and in particular its public face—defends the interests of humanity (2007).

For too long, Burawoy suggested, sociology had been consumed by an obsession over method. It had therefore lost sight of its purpose, which was fundamentally moral:

We have spent a century building professional knowledge, translating common sense into science, so that now, we are more than ready to embark on a systematic back-translation, taking knowledge back to those from whom it came, making public issues out of private troubles, and thus regenerating sociology’s moral fiber.

Buroway recommended a renewed form of “public sociology,” in which scholars would engage with matters of “great public significance,” and would cease to deny the moral foundations and impli- cations of their work. Burawoy stingingly criticized those who “speak only to a narrow circle of fellow academics” and who “monopolize inaccessible knowledge” leading to “incomprehensible grandios- ity or narrow ‘methodism.’” Instead, Burawoy thought multiple different types of sociologists, some “professional” and some “public” could all coexist in a harmonious disciplinary tapestry containing “myriads of nodes.”

Burawoy’s vision of public sociology came under heavy attack from some members of his field, and spawned an intense debate. Some argued that Burawoy was cavalierly discarding the scholarly commit- ments of the discipline, in favor of an “activist” and “politicized” sociology that openly advocated social change rather than trying to understand how it happens. Burawoy was proposing a form of sociology with a naked political agenda, in which sociologists would structure their work around causes rather than pursuing knowledge for its own sake. Lynn Smith-Lovin (2007) argued that Burawoy’s form of sociology, which is “suffused with moral fervor” and “motivated to do the science of sociology by a perceived social need and a hope of political impact” would “lead to fracture, conflict, and distrac- tion.” Smith-Lovin insisted that there were good reasons why the Ivory Tower should be sealed off from the public. Arthur Stinchcombe offered a different criticism, arguing that the public sphere was no place for a social scientist. “The market for bad answers on editorial pages, in advertisements, and as rationalizations of our foreign policy is evidently infinite,” Stinchcombe wrote. “This is the pot public sociology proposes to stew in” (2007). Stinchcombe suggested that sociological findings were so modest, and so nuanced, that nothing good could come of trying to brandish them in public debate. The supposedly “engaged” sociologist would only end up misleading people about the nature of social science, and become mired in the toxic vapidity of mainstream political discourse.

Some of these criticisms were perfectly valid. Smith-Lovin rightly worried that if scholarship and activism became indistinguishable, people would cease to be interested in publicly funding scholar- ship. And there is something troubling about Burawoy’s embrace of a mission to “defend the interests of humanity.” Those who see themselves as being on such missions are often prone to discarding evi-

Introduction 5

dence contrary to their political preferences. It’s easy to see how Burawoy’s suggestion could translate into the presumption that politically liberal values unquestionably constitute the “interests of human- ity,” and the corresponding abandonment of any disciplinary pretense toward scientific humility and self-criticism. Furthermore, while Buroway’s framework allows for a person to conduct his research in the “interests of humanity,” it does not provide an obvious means for examining what those “interests of humanity” might actually be to begin with. Instead, it simply assumes that the values upon which sociologists will operate are values that are worth holding. Taken to its conclusion, this idea could become downright alarming. After all, there is nobody more terrifying than the man who believes he is sanctioned by either scientific certainty or divine right to impose his ideology upon the human race.

Thus the social scientific disciplines face a paradox: if social science is necessarily laden with value judgments, yet by embracing those value judgments it would lose claim to its scientific status, what is to be done about values? Both the default solution and the Burawoy solution seem unacceptable. The default is to simply pretend such values do not exist, and are not part of the social scientific enterprise, to treat the social scientist as separable into their “research” persona and “moral” persona. But this doesn’t work, as noted, because research into social problems is, at the very least, imbued with a conception of what constitutes a problem to begin with. Yet the Burawoy solution, of an “activist” social science, is equally untenable. It gives social scientists a free pass to produce advocacy and stop caring about dispas- sionate inquiry. It puts their biases in the open, but it does not subject those biases to critical scrutiny.

In the pages that follow, I lay out another possible solution to this dilemma. Instead of politicizing social science, I recommend that the questions surrounding the values and purpose of social science be treated as their own separate realm of discussion, the realm of “social philosophy.” Rather than ignoring normative questions, social scientists should recognize that such questions are fundamental to understanding what it is social science does and what it ought to do. There is nothing shameful about examining these “ought” questions; in fact, they are essential. But they need to be distinguished from the ordinary process of inquiry, and put under their own heading. By establishing “social philosophy” as its own distinctive type of thought, scholars can combine a recognition of the importance of the normative with an intensive critical inquiry into their unstated values.

Once social philosophy is recognized as a legitimate and separate (but complementary) topic of inquiry to social science, many of the thorny and discomforting issues surrounding “is” versus “ought” can be dealt with. Social scientists can make morally-grounded proposals for the alleviation of social ills, and can do so openly, without having to disguise normative ideals as science.

In fact, experts should be encouraged to offer actual useful ideas and positive programs, because they have studied issues more intensively than non-experts. But if the moral underpinnings of a per- son’s research are to be made explicit, as they should be, they must also be subject to inquiry. Critics of “advocacy sociology” are absolutely correct that unexamined moral assertions undermine the pursuit of knowledge. The solution, however, is not to avoid advocacy, but to put the moral questions themselves up for debate.

One reason that normative ideas are smuggled into social science is that everyone wants urgently to discuss them, but there is no place to do so in a rigorous way. A political scientist can do political philosophy and have a discussion about how the state ought to look. But a sociologist cannot have a discussion about how society ought to look. Her views therefore simply become subsumed into her empirical work. There’s no reason, however, why “the necessity of making social science useful” and “the caution against politicized social science” cannot be reconciled. All that is necessary is to under-

The Necessity of Social Philosophy 6

stand that normative debates must occur on their own. These debates are not social science. Instead, they examine the implications of social science, exploring the social philosophies upon which all scien- tific inquiry is explicitly or tacitly based.

I am not the first to propose a solution to the dilemma of values in scientific scholarship. Andrew Abbott, in responding to Burawoy, attempted to resolve the normativity problem by offering his con- ception of a “humanist sociology,” which he hoped would “avoid the Scylla of self-referential disen- gagement and the Charybdis of dogmatic politicization” (2007, p. 203). For Abbott, sociology should embrace its inherently moral nature. “On this argument,” Abbott writes, “the social process is made up of human beings, and our analysis of them must aim at being humane” (p. 202).

Abbott’s resolution is sensible, insofar as it recommends harmonizing the empirical and moral dimensions instead of attempting to discard one in favor of the other. He is also correct that it makes little sense to simply adopt a “division of labor,” in which some social scientists are rigorous empiricists, while others are politically-engaged social critics. As he points out, if rigorous empiricism is inescap- ably value-laden, there is no way to separate those who deal in moral questions from those who deal in factual ones.

But Abbott’s idea of a “humanist” sociologist doesn’t provide much of a practical guide for how such an individual is to make her way through the thicket of difficult philosophical issues that come with embracing this new way of thinking. She can declare herself a humanist, concerned with both fact and value, but what is she actually supposed to do? How is her research supposed to change? What are the kinds of things she ought to be trying to figure out? Is simply reconceiving herself enough? In Abbott’s new conception of the academic’s role, scholarly analysis should “aim at being humane.” But very little present-day social science is transparently inhumane; aiming merely to be humane is aiming very low indeed.

In fact, Abbott’s vision of the “humane” social scientist, when thought about in terms of its con- sequences, would change very little about present-day sociology. Abbott is explicit in distinguishing humaneness from “politics,” which he associates with activism: “The humanist social scientist is inter- ested in understanding the social world (as a value enterprise) rather than changing it… The humanist thinks it is presumptuous of the sociologist to judge the rights and wrongs of others.” Abbott says it is a mistake to think that “a moral person who understands the moral nature of the social process must necessarily want to change it” (p. 204).

Abbott’s plan thereby seems to countenance almost total inaction, and involves somehow taking morality more “seriously” without actually making any moral judgments or forming any proposals for what to do about anything. Yet Abbott cannot actually believe that the humanist social scientist shouldn’t make any judgments or try to effect any serious changes. After all, he soon goes on to say that “the left imagination has failed” at “imagining what a truly humane society could look like,” and that “we advance by imagining what the future could be.” Abbott praises Karl Marx, of all people, for having “a vision of what a new society might look like,” and says that “we should live up to his exam- ple.” This makes the warning against change seem bizarre; after all, Abbott’s view that scholars should “understand” rather than “change” is directly contrary to Marx’s famous insistence that philosophers had spent too much time interpreting the world and too little time trying to change it. If the exercise of imagining and proposing new societies is anything more than an idle fantasy, it must necessarily involve making judgments and proposing changes. One can be Karl Marx, or one can be a dispassion- ate humanist, but one cannot be both.

Introduction 7

The tension in Abbott’s argument is perfectly understandable. Abbott is struggling with the fact that every attempt to suggest a morally visionary social science seems to sacrifice its rigor, and every attempt to stick to rigor ends up sacrificing moral vision. Much as he would like to have neatly resolved the facts/values problem, it isn’t possible to do so and still be left with something called “social science.” If you’re conjuring utopias, and proselytizing in favor of their implementation, you’re not acting as any kind of scientist. (Karl Marx may have thought he was, but Karl Marx was wrong.) Thus Abbott wants to be able to be “humane” without actually being “political,” even though the distinction oper- ates solely to rob “morality” of any actual substantive content or consequence beyond not conducting overtly inhumane research.

Fortunately, viewing “social philosophy” as something separate and legitimate helps one escape from this paradox, by providing an organizing framework for discussing the issues. It clarifies what these questions are, how they relate to empirical practice, and why we are asking them to begin with. Nobody need try to figure out how to cram advocacy into his empirical work without becoming polit- icized. Instead, he should be engaged in two separate kinds of debates: one over why he is doing what he is doing and whether it is useful, and another over whether his work is empirically valid.

There are two ways to embrace the “normative” aspect of social science. The first is to champion a “politicized” conception of academic work, in which scholars are open about the fact that their empir- ical research serves their values, and in which they become unapologetic advocates for causes. The sec- ond way, while sharing the presumption that values are unavoidable, suggests that advocacy and values be just as much subject to debate as the empirical research itself. If a scholar wishes to be an advocate, she will be expected to be able to defend the coherence and consequences of her normative claims just as strongly as she is expected to defend her empirical ones.

Immanuel Wallerstein has proposed that this type of rigorous moral debate could strengthen the social sciences. The morally engaged thinker isn’t simply a blind advocate for a political cause, but rather works on “clarifying the assumptions about reality that are hidden in the moral philosophies, and subjecting these assumptions about reality to standard scholarly/scientific analysis to see how plau- sible they are.” In this way, she helps “root out false debates and narrow the divergences about moral issues.” Wallerstein recognized that “the world is better off if there is interactive reflection on the fun- damental issues under debate” (2007, p. 173). It’s far more preferable for the underlying moral issues to be brought up and sorted out than simply to be disguised or treated as irrelevant.

Perhaps the unwillingness to engage in these kinds of discussions reflects a belief that values are subjective and axiomatic, and arguing about them would thereby be pointless. But as every moral philosopher knows, this is an elementary mistake (see Kagan 1998, p. 12). Moral values can’t be determined scientifically, but they can certainly be challenged, enriched, and refined through reasoned inquiry. The fact that moral debates cannot be resolved by appeal to a mutually-agreed transcendent authority does not mean that moral debate is in itself impossible.

It’s perfectly reasonable for a scholar to write a quantitative paper on the persistence of gender segregation. But if he is going to take an implicitly normative stance, he must be prepared to defend it, by answering the serious philosophical questions raised by his position: Should any kinds of gender segregation be permissible? If societies naturally splinter into separate gender roles, would they still be problematic? Should gender categories be reinforced or eliminated?

These, and many others, are the sorts of questions asked by social philosophy. By giving them the atten- tion they deserve, scholars can both enrich their research and usefully contribute to social decision-making.

I. The Philosophical Gap in the Study of Society

The subjects studied by social scientists raise innumerable deep philosophical questions. Some of these are normative questions of what ought to be done, some of them pertain to defining (and then defend- ing) the usefulness of concepts. Yet many of these questions are buried. They lie in the background of social science literature, but are never probed explicitly or argued about with any particular rigor.

Perhaps it would be best to begin with a list of examples, in order to more precisely understand what kind of gap is being referred to. Below are some normative and conceptual questions pertaining to the subjects studied in social science:

Why should anyone care about “inequality”? Can there be gender segregation without gender hierarchy? If some inequalities occur “naturally,” are they acceptable? Can “equal opportunity” and “equal outcomes” be meaningfully distinguished? What is “oppression”? Is “tradition” a defensible grounds for sustaining a practice? Does human nature compel certain forms of social organization? Are there more “rational” forms of ordering soci- ety? Is “privilege” inevitable? How can inclusive decision-making occur, and why should inclusivity be valued? Do hiring criteria of academic departments have deleterious effects on scholarship and the advancement of knowledge? What constitutes the advancement of knowledge to begin with? When should communities suppress harmful dissent, and through what means? Which kinds of inequality are unjust? Are there “legitimate” forms of author- ity? What is “entrepreneurship”? Should corporations be organized in the interests of their workers, their consumers, their shareholders, or their stakeholders? To what extent should cultural differences be respected? Should religious exemptions from social expectations be granted? What is the role of private institutions in supplying social services? Should the Internet be considered a democratic commons? Is localism inherently regressive? Do “com- munities” or “societies” exist to begin with? How can unjust social norms be undone? Do people need work to be happy? Should rewards accrue to someone based on their intelligence? Are any ideas of “merit” tenable? How should individual disabilities be accommodated? Should people be encouraged to listen to ideas that upset them? Do universities have social obligations? Should education be training for employment? Should a class of “intellectuals” exist? Can power relations ever be equalized? How do we know when someone is harming others? Do developers have obligations to communities? What is the distinction between “public” and “private”? What is “coercion”? Can legal constraints on individual freedom of action be distinguished from non-legal constraints? Is consumerism unhealthy? Is language a significant reproducer of injustice? Why can one be “transgender” but not “trans-race”? Is race a coherent concept? What is “prejudice”? Do markets corrupt sacred things? What is the role of “charity”? Does meritocracy always reward amorality? Are some people on “the wrong side of history”? Are individuals entitled to “bodily integrity,” and what is it? Are all conceptions of mental “health” arbitrary? What is the purpose of academic knowledge? Are some viewpoints unfairly excluded from mainstream discourse? Are sports cruel? What are the boundaries between leadership and manipulation? Should lonely people be comforted, and by whom? Should criminals be denied jobs? Are social classes inherently oppressive? How should society discourage things that are immoral but not illegal? Should immigrants

The Necessity of Social Philosophy 9

be encouraged to assimilate? What constitutes social progress? Can a “selfish” society hold together? Is “creative destruction” oxymoronic? Should the social realm be “secular”? How should society treat someone who almost certainly committed a horrific crime, but has not been found guilty? Does the concept of “free speech” have applications beyond the limitation of government interference? Is economic power “coercive”? Is there such a thing as “cultural appropriation”? Are stereotypes necessary or pernicious? What kinds of interventions in the lives of others are justified? Does religion help or hurt social cohesion? Are national bound- aries desirable? Do people have collective “identities”? Should people’s self-conceptions be deferred to? What is “wealth”? Are all media propagandistic by nature? What obligations do current societies owe to future ones? What is human well-being? What is society?

Every single one of these questions is in some way important. Discussions about them, by people who hold different moral values, would advance the state of human self-understanding. And yet they are all without a disciplinary home. If one were to write a paper on, say, whether academic knowledge is socially useful, or when assimilation is desirable, the only place it would be published is in one’s desk drawer, or perhaps on one’s mother’s fridge.

Yet are these questions less open to rigorous scholarly inquiry than those asked in political philos- ophy and ethics? If it is possible to write an essay in moral philosophy proposing a novel solution to the so-called “trolley problem” (a philosophical hypothetical in which a person must decide how many people to mash beneath the wheels of a runaway streetcar), it should be perfectly possible to produce a scholarly article in social philosophy on the question of whether economic institutions should be seen as “coercive,” and if so, under what conditions.

The failure of these questions to find a home in academic discussions seems to be a quirk of dis- ciplinary organization, more than the product any actual principled plan. In fact, one can plausibly speculate as to how this unfortunate gap may have come about. Political science allows for normative questions, but because it is primarily concerned with the state, these do not touch moral questions that arise in non-state social institutions. Sociology studies non-state social institutions, but insecurity over its implicit normative component has led it to a failure to deal substantively with “ought” questions.

One might expect philosophy departments to deal with these questions. But normative philosophy is roughly divided into political philosophy, which is solely concerned with the state, and moral philos- ophy/ethics, which is concerned with the actions of individuals. The political philosophers will address questions of how the state should apportion entitlements. Ethicists will deal with abortion rights, animal rights, euthanasia, lying, and other matters about how an individual should behave in isolated circum- stances and under professional codes. But they, too, rarely ask questions about social organization, and a question like “What constitutes social progress?” would be out of place in the moral philosophy literature, even though a no less normative question like “Is there a right to die?” fits easily into the tradition.

There are places where the discussions take place about how social institutions should be organized. Unfortunately, they are law schools and business schools. Law is concerned with figuring out how dis- putes can be equitably resolved. As such, it necessary deals in both empirical and normative issue. For example, legal scholar Robert Ellickson’s Order Without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes analyzes the role of social norms in the settling of disputes that are often thought to be subjects for the courts, using the example of cattle ranchers in California resolve issues surrounding cattle trespass (1991). Ellickson suggests a new role for social norms, and believes legal professionals should make room for cooperative

The Necessity of Social Philosophy 10

social dispute-resolution alongside formal legal adjudication. The business literature is full of normative debates, and business journals like the Academy of Management Journal and Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice frequently publish articles examining how “firm performance” can be improved. The Harvard Business Review itself is a splashy business magazine pitched at executives, with features like “How the Best CEOs Get the Important Work Done” (Allen 2016) and “The Difference Between Good Leaders and Great Ones” (Bailey 2016).

It makes little sense to leave “ought” discussions to occur solely in these realms. But that is where they presently lie. There is no place within contemporary scholarship where one can debate the ques- tion of whether “leadership” itself is justified, and if so, when. All discussions about the moral dimen- sions of leadership are left to the business scholars, who naturally frame questions in terms of corporate executives attempting to maximize firm performance.

But when social scientists abandon serious questions about what people should do, or answer those questions without acknowledging that they are answering them, legal and business scholars do not step in and resolve them. Instead, normative questions get answered in particular narrow areas, rather than systematically, while in the social sciences, serious problems develop. First, particular (sometimes highly questionable) sets of values guide research without ever being challenged. Second, the natu- ralness and usefulness of particular concepts becomes taken for granted, even when those concepts contain contradictions or are misleading. Finally, the scholar fails to consider both the purpose of her research and its potential unintended consequences.

I. Normative Assumptions

The theme of the 2016 Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association was: “Rethink- ing Social Movements: Can Changing the Conversation Change the World?” Its opening plenary featured Democracy Now! Journalist Amy Goodman and Seattle’s socialist city council member (and Fight for 15 campaigner) Kshama Sawant. Other panels covered Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter, and aimed to “interrogate the wider social movement landscape.” A panel on the present-day U.S. labor movement featured “extraordinary strategists” and activists from the National Domestic Workers Alliance.

“Thematic sessions” over the three-day conference were designed to “delve into important social and political issues, explore international and interdisciplinary viewpoints, and speculate on different visions of future possibilities.” The forty-six sessions included the following:

w Challenging Economic Inequality: Leveraging Cracks in the Structures of Business Power w Re-Imagining Movements for Environmental and Climate Justice: Can They Change Everything? w Precarity and Polanyi: Transforming Labor, Citizenship and the Neoliberal State w Changing the Academy: Comparing Efforts of Feminists Cross-Nationally w Silos or Synergies? Can Transnational Social Movements Connect across Issues?

Others covered topics such as “social change,” “gender equity,” “movement building,” “transna- tional feminism,” “urban protest,” and our “neoliberal age.”

Setting aside any particular judgment about the quality or subject matter of the ASA’s panels, it is instantly clear that there are deep and particular moral values being assumed. The sociologists believe that present-day societies ought to be changed, and that that change should take the form of oppos- ing “racism” and “neoliberalism,” while advancing “labor” and “feminism” through the form of social

The Philosophical Gap 11

movements. (I place those terms in quotations not to cast doubt on these values, but to indicate that the content and implications of the terms are highly debatable.)

A simple glance at the ASA’s schedule should remove any doubt that sociology is an openly polit- icized discipline. A particular set of political values, grounded in a particular moral outlook, is shared across the entirely of the conference. It is left-wing, and believes in a “struggle against oppression.”

It would be wrong to assume, however, that there is something inherently irrational or anti-sci- entific about being “political.” After all, as previously indicated, it is impossible not to be political. A value-free social science is impossible, because by deciding how to study and describe the world, one is placing importance on certain aspects of it. The economist’s view centers marketplace decisions at the center of social life, while the sociologist views power, identity, and injustice as fundamental. Neither of these is necessarily scientifically incorrect (one can make marketplace decisions and exist within a web of injustice and social hierarchy), but the emphases of what is “important” as in “worth studying and emphasizing” (a necessarily subjective judgment) differ.

It is no condemnation of the ASA, then, to suggest that it is “political” and follows a normative set of shared moral assumptions. Everyone has moral assumptions, and even if it were possible to abandon them, it may very well be positively immoral to do so. “Political” is often simply a pejorative describing that which is motivated by a person’s moral maxims, yet it is impossible for one not to be motivated by one’s moral certitudes, since they are one’s moral maxims. If a person’s guiding morality didn’t guide them, it wouldn’t be their guiding morality to begin with.

The ASA does, however, have aspects that are antithetical to sound scholarship. These have nothing to do with the presence of normative values, or the fact that solutions to social problems are being deliberated. In fact, the problem is quite different: values are present, but are oddly unacknowledged, and therefore go unelaborated and unchallenged. There is no part of the ASA dedicated to asking “What are our values, where do they come from, and are they worth holding?” Instead, the values loom silently, present in everything but never spoken of explicitly.

Thus there is something dishonest about the proceedings. The ASA discusses racism, labor move- ments, and “social change” of a particular sort. But it does not discuss why it discusses these things, what unifies them. What unifies them is a particular set of liberal moral values. But if you asked an attendee about what unites the panels, she might tell you that it was an opposition to “injustice” and “oppression.” That treats “injustice” and “oppression” as incontestable facts about the world rather than particular interpretations of the world based on moral dispositions.

Sociologists should know that “objective” moralities are a fantasy. Yet they would recoil from acknowledging that their scholarship treats one set of values (the anti-neoliberal) as superior to another set (the neoliberal). The ASA is shot through with a particular conception of what “social justice” means, and a belief in the kind of means through which that justice ought to be achieved.

But values are far from as certain as one might gather from attending the ASA. “Oppression” is a vague and difficult concept, likewise “racism.” Plenty of people believe that is what is referred to as “neoliberalism” (a market-oriented representative government) has brought untold wealth and prosperity to the world. Those people may be wrong in both their presentation of the facts and hold self-contradictory moral values (e.g. a supposed commitment to “human rights” without a sufficient recognition of the human costs of markets). But such people are also numerous, and so their claims must be dealt with, rather than merely assumed to be false.

If values are assumed to be easy rather than hard, complications and contradictions may well be

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overlooked. For example, what if the “social movements” we celebrate turn out to produce counter- productive social consequences, or end up replicating certain kinds of injustice? Recent scholarship on Cesar Chavez’s United Farmworkers has revealed certain ugly truths about Chavez’s leadership style, suggesting an autocratic and hierarchical order and a troublingly bureaucratic management style (Pawel 2014, Bardacke 2012). That creates a difficult question: should one’s opposition to autocracy be sacrificed in the name of advances in labor power? Resolving it depends on reflecting on what one’s own underlying values are, whether those values prioritize participatory democracy or the material condition of laborers. It may be, of course, that these two things need not be in opposition; the UFW under Chavez likely undermined the long-term interests of farmworkers, thus autocracy and ineffi- ciency can easily occur simultaneously. But to decide how organizations should look, it is not enough to speak the words “participation” and “anti-oppression.” One must figure out what these things really mean, which is a more difficult philosophical question than is presumed.

It sounds almost politically conservative to state that “the ASA is predicated on unquestioned liberal values.” But such an interpretation would be flatly mistaken; it is because one opposes unjust hierarchies that one should be concerned with figuring out what unjust hierarchies are. One has a moral instinct that something called “democracy” is good, but building a world based on that instinct requires one to understand it as fully as possible. A person could recoil from the idea of debating values, replying that “whether racism is wrong should not be up for debate.” But that is not what is up for debate. What is up for debate is what one means by “racism” and “wrong,” and what the actual implications of this belief are, and what precisely we are aiming to eliminate beyond racism and oppression in the abstract.

The failure to reflect on what one actually believes, rather than simply assuming that one’s values are coherent and that one’s actions conform with them, has been the cause of untold disaster in the history of left-wing movements. Marxists, who have dreamed of a world free of oppression and exploitation, have build some of the most oppressive and exploitative governments in the history of humankind. That is enabled by a failure to reflect on what those terms actually mean. If one insists on being anti-oppression, but implicitly defines oppression as what capitalists do to workers, then one will not notice when one’s own vanguard party begins to commit acts that mirror such oppression in form but not label.

Supporting the labor movement and ending injustice may seem unquestionably correct to those attending a sociology conference, but the effort to turn words into practice will inevitably give rise to philosophical dilemmas. What if the labor movement advances the cause of some workers at the expense of others? (For example, what if the success of the American labor movement makes workers in Vietnam worse off?) What if one ends the injustice of male domination of women by expanding the injustice of the prison system? (For example, by expanding mandatory minimum sentences for sex crimes.) In order to discuss such issues sensibly, and in a way that actually does further the ends of justice, one must be willing to question one’s stated presumptions and values in order to determine what is most important.1

Concealing normative values serves nobody. It does not make the ASA less politically ideological; it is clearly already deeply politically committed, and it is hard to think how the conference could become more tilted toward a particular political point of view. Instead, it simply keeps us from asking a series of

1 It may also be true that if one dedicates a portion of one’s academic conference to asking why one holds the values that undergird the conference, one may ultimately realize that an academic conference is actually a poor vehicle for the advance- ment of those values. If the ASA admits that it cares about injustice, and asks openly and self-critically how someone who cares about injustice should act, it may find that it is not defensible to address injustice by holding reflexively ideological ASA panels about it.

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important questions, questions that if asked would both make the conference less ideological and advance the cause of justice. Once values are probed, we cannot hold them dogmatically, and we will be called out if we attempt to secrete them into our research while pretending we do not hold them. But we will also refine them and improve them and ultimately be able to do a lot of people a lot more good by knowing what we actually think and why we might think it.

Robert Nozick once joked that “normative sociology, the study of what the causes of problems ought to be, greatly fascinates us all” (1973, p. 247). But buried normative values cannot be laughed off; unex- amined ideologies are incapable of producing real scrutiny of the causes of injustice, and are therefore incapable of redressing it. The values of the ASA may seem self-evident to the sociologists, but it is not self-evident that they are self-evident. Until the field makes room for some examination of its premises, it will undermine itself both empirically and in its commitment to actually (rather than rhetorically) addressing injustice.

2. Conceptual Distinctions

Social scientists debate terminology all the time. But shying away from the normative dimension affects the character of those debates. Useful terminological discussions recognize that when one dis- cusses whether a term applies, one is actually debating whether a particular term is useful and what the consequences of applying it would be. The question “What is sociology?” has no answer, because there is no truth of the matter. But the question “What are the consequences of defining ‘sociology’ this way versus that way?” can be discussed. Definitional questions lead nowhere unless their norma- tive dimension is recognized. The only way to meaningfully ask a question like “What is identity?” is for it to mean “What is the most useful way to define ‘identity’ and how should we apply it?” Termi- nological debates are not debates over eternal truths, but are normative debates over which labels we should develop to apply to what, and why. Thus obscuring the normative dimension of social science inhibits its ability to clarify its terms. It means questions will be asked about, for example, what race “is” rather than how we should conceive of race. The lack of a normative approach means that one will fail to recognize that terminological discussions are about making normative choices between various ways of defining a term.

Inequality is an obvious example of a concept that is accepted as both meaningful and important without being subjected to regular and careful philosophical dissection. Since the 07-08 financial crisis, inequality has become a major research subject in sociology (3 out of the 9 articles in the most recent American Sociological Review are concerned with inequality). But there is little place for questions about whether inequality should matter in the first place, and if so, why. Sir Anthony Atkinson’s Inequality (2015), a summing-up of his research into the subject, begins with a discussion of what inequality is and why we should care about it. Such a discussion should necessarily deal with the original justifications for valuing equality, and the longstanding tension between welfare-based theories of the social good (which prioritize the maximization of overall aggregate well-being) and egalitarian ones (which prioritize the equal distribution of well-being across persons). Yet in his discussion of “why inequality matters,” Atkinson does not actually discuss these original questions over the justifications of egalitarian thinking. Instead, he launches immediately into a discussion of the differences between “equal opportunity” and “equal outcomes.” The oversight has major consequences for the empirical discussion that follows. Without discussing “welfare” versus “inequality,” social policy discussions can be deeply misleading. After all, it is

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possible to have a society in which there is gross inequality, but everyone is quite well off. (For example, we could imagine a society in which 99% of people have 1 billion dollars each in wealth, and 1% of peo- ple have 1 trillion dollars each.) It is also easy to imagine a society in which there is perfect equality, but only insofar as everyone is equally poor and miserable. The standard moral argument against inequality is that “it is unfair for so few to have so much while so many have so little.” But in that case, the problem isn’t inequality in isolation, but inequality in a situation where some are deprived and impoverished. That raises the question of whether it is actually the deprivation, rather than the fact of imbalance, that is more central to the moral objection.

Discussing this is crucial, because it will affect the kind of solutions we try to offer. After all, if we do just care about inequality, then a perfectly sensible solution is taking money from rich people and burning it. Since nobody would propose that, there’s more going on than inequality, which means the philosophical underpinnings need addressing. Yet Atkinson, one of the most celebrated inequality scholars of all time, skips these foundational questions entirely, dwelling entirely on rising inequality without engaging the difficult corresponding issues about welfare. Atkinson does write that “the possibility that the cake will be shrunk by the proposals is not a knock-down argument against pursuing them, since a smaller cake more fairly distributed may be preferable to a larger one with present levels of inequality” (p. 247). But this still doesn’t get at the underlying of question of why we need to address inequality.

Perhaps opponents of inequality worry that, if they were asked to justify their beliefs, they would be forced to respond that these beliefs are merely instinctual at their root. And it may well be true that where one comes down in the “inequality” versus “welfare” divide has much more to do with a vague sense of jus- tice than with rigorous moral reasoning. But that doesn’t mean that reasoning can’t occur, or isn’t helpful. In fact, the failure to examine premises can result in in the misspecification of the underlying moral value, as when “inequality” is casually used as a synonym for “poverty” when each can exist without the other.

There is a need, then, to examine terms carefully from a normative perspective. It’s necessary to look at what we care about, and whether our terms accurately capture that. If not, the terms may need refining, in order to better serve our underlying values.

3. Wider Consequences

Everything anyone ever does has consequences. Even the most rarified academics, who often do work of seemingly small social effect, automatically have some consequences. After all, inaction is its own form of action, and indecision is a decision. The fruits of one’s actions are as much made up of the things one has not done than the things one has done. As Immanuel Wallerstein points out, a scholar who views her research as isolated from the social world is simply deferring decisions to other parties:

The scientist/scholar can argue that [proposing moral or policy implications for her work is] not her or his function, but then what is happening is that the reading of the implication of these choices is left to others and the intellectual analyst has merely acceded in advance to their evaluations and recommendations. The intellectual has not thereby avoided making the choices but has simply done so passively rather than actively (2007, p. 172).

A scholar cannot exist in isolation from the world, for the scholar’s failure to engage the world is in itself an act that changes the world. (The classic example here is that of Martin Heidegger. Heidegger

The Philosophical Gap 15

may have reassured himself that it was not his role as a scholar to oppose the Nazi regime. But a lack of resistance is tacit acquiescence, because it is impossible to logically distinguish between “acts” and “non-acts”—there are no “non-acts,” just different sets of acts with different consequences.)

Total disengagement, then, is impossible. But even if such a thing were possible, it would not auto- matically be clear whether it was justified. The question of when one should think about consequences is an important philosophical question, one that can be debated, and yet it is simply left for scholars to figure out on their own. Alone, they may drift into the complacent (and comforting) conclusion that the adjustment of society is no business of theirs, that the “role of the intellectual” is to think produce knowl- edge, and it is up to others (who have their own roles) to figure out what to do with that knowledge. But that position deserves scrutiny. Why do some people have “roles” and where do roles come from? How can a person separate their personal moral obligations from their professional ones, and which should they prefer when they conflict? How should the production of knowledge be arranged in a society?

A recent case illuminates the point clearly. Harvard economist Roland Fryer recently published a study on racial bias in police shootings, examining whether different kinds of use of force were applied disproportionately based on race. Fryer concluded that:

On non-lethal uses of force, there are racial differences – sometimes quite large – in police use of force… Yet on the most extreme use of force – officer-involved shootings – we are unable to detect any racial differences in either the raw data or when accounting for controls (2016, p. 35).

Fryer’s finding was given a major story in the New York Times. In the Times story, Fryer was quoted as calling the finding of no bias in shootings “the most surprising result of [his] career.” Popular con- servative media outlets like the National Review, Breitbart, and Daily Wire quickly trumpeted the result. The right-wing Washington Times ran the headline “No racial bias in police shootings, study by Harvard professor shows.” While Fryer had found that there was racial bias in police uses of force other than shootings, it was the finding on shootings that made headlines.

Fryer insisted that the conclusion simply came from a dispassionate analysis of the relevant facts. “Protesting is not my thing… data is my thing,” he told the Times. Yet Fryer’s factual findings quickly received intense criticism. They had not been peer-reviewed and relied entirely on data collected from police sources; Fryer himself acknowledged that the police departments most likely to enthusiastically turn over data may be the ones most certain that they are unbiased in their shootings. Even worse, Fryer’s most detailed data also came entirely from the city of Houston, despite his strong conclusions.

The Fryer case demonstrates the consequences of burying normative questions. Fryer insisted that he was focused solely on “the data,” that he has no interest in “protests.” But this was dishonest for several reasons. Fryer had already introduced a normative component into his paper, indicating that his findings could imply that “Black Lives Matter should seek solutions within their own communi- ties rather than changing the behaviors of police.” But Fryer also bolsters his findings through moral appeals. The last words of the paper were the simple three-word declaration “Black Dignity Matters.” Fryer says that he was motivated to pursue the research by “his anger after the deaths of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray,” after which he “decided I was going to collect a bunch of data.” A Washington Post story on the finding began “Roland Fryer Jr. never cared much for the cops.” Thus Fryer gave himself additional credibility by simultaneously saying that he was sympathetic to the cause but was taken in another direction by the data. Since once would expect that a person sympathetic to the cause (and

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someone who is African American, and angry over recent deaths) would require extremely persuasive and reliable data in order to reject charges of bias, Fryer used a moral and rhetorical component to boost the perceived reliability of his data.

Roland Fryer knew precisely what consequences his findings would have; he knew he would receive significant publicity as an African American Harvard professor undermining the idea that police shoot- ings are biased against African Americans. Furthermore, Fryer deliberately acted in such a way as to maximize the publicity he would receive. The concluding paragraph of his study makes statements about bias in “police use of force” without mentioning that it was dealing with particular places rather than nationwide trends. By insisting on how “surprising” his result was, and downplaying the study’s limited data set and lack of peer review, Fryer knew that he would gain much attention in the press, and that conservatives would be gleeful.

If Fryer were asked about the moral consequences of his work, and the fact that it could be used by conservatives to advance their politics, he would likely reply that this should not be a factor con- sidered by a social scientist. And yet Fryer was thinking about consequences: his entire research was framed deliberately in such a way as to deliberately maximize the impact it made, and to downplay its limitations. Social scientists think about consequences constantly. If they are not thinking about political consequences, then they are certainly thinking about consequences for their own careers, and for whether their peers will hold them in esteem.

Even for the social scientist who most firmly believes that consequences should not be considered in pursuing research, there must be limits to the principle. If one’s research was destined to not only be misinterpreted, but to cause some world-ending catastrophe, there may be ethical reasons to either refrain from publishing, or refrain from publicizing. But the separation of fact from value prevents serious discussion of what the scope of “consequentialist” thinking in research should be. As we can see in the case of Roland Fryer, this does not mean it doesn’t happen. It simply means that “empirical rather than moral” becomes a piece of (frequently dishonest) rhetoric, disguising the profound ways in which conse- quential considerations influence both one’s work and the presentation of it. Without making normative questions a priority, and by treating academics who tout their commitment to data as somehow being “non-political”, the academy’s politics become ever more influential without ever being examined.

II. What Should “Social” Philosophy Consist Of?

1.Scope

As we have seen, it is possible to identify a large body of normative social questions that go unstudied. There is also an argument that the failure to address these questions has negative conse- quences for the advancement of social scientific knowledge, by burying its assumptions, allowing its concepts to develop haphazardly, and letting the consequences and purposes of social scientific inquiry go uninvestigated.

But if a “gap” is being identified, how can it be more precisely specified? What unites the questions that “go unanswered”? And what would it look like to address them?

If we examine the list of questions proffered in Section I, we can see that they share some common threads. First, they are philosophical questions. They inquire into the roots of terms and concepts, seeking clarification of what particular words and phrases mean. Second, they are largely normative.

The Necessity of Social Philosophy 17

They ask how things ought to be. How should a term be defined? How should an organization be set up? How should an issue be thought about? Finally, they operate in the “social” realm. They do not share political philosophy’s emphasis on the state, nor moral philosophy’s emphasis on individual choices. Frequently, they overlap these realms, but they often stand between and apart from them. A question like “Who should be the constituency of a university/corporation/church?” is not a question about an individual choice, or about the arrangement of government power.

Thus the best classification for these kinds of questions is “social philosophy.” They are not social science, because one cannot determine who the constituency of a university should be through empir- ical analysis alone (though empirical analysis can obviously provide evidence to be used in reasoning). Nor is it accurate to place them in any of the traditional sub-disciplines of philosophy, since they are not strictly moral and are political only in a very broad sense of the term.

Instead, social philosophy has the relationship to sociology and economics than political philoso- phy has to political science. Political philosophers ask how states should look, social philosophers ask how societies ought to look.

The introduction of social philosophy as a distinct area of inquiry therefore fills a significant gap. It finally gives a label for important questions like: “What conception of ‘merit’ should determine social advance- ment, if any?” or “To what extent should the question of likely consequences guide scientific research?” or “How should a commitment to women’s equality be reconciled with a belief in religious liberty for faiths with patriarchal aspects?” These are the questions we all want to ask when reading social science literature, but which nobody ever seems to get around to dealing with methodically.

Of course, there are various areas in which social philosophy topics are already covered. But they tend to be narrow and particular. Media studies, for example, often looks at normative questions surrounding the role of media and advertising in society. Women’s and gender studies tries to uncover oppression and injustice in the realms of sex and gender. But confining social philosophy questions to these types of programs means that a number of areas (justice in the school, the workplace, etc.) fall through the tracks. Social philosophy is treated inconsistently, with some subjects discussed normatively at length and others never discussed at all.

Social philosophy draws from this wide variety of other literatures. And while it asks the “ought” questions, it depends on findings from the various extensive bodies of inquiry into what “is” the case. Psychology tells us how we think about authority (when we are willing to obediently administer electric shocks to people, for example), while social philosophy wonders what kinds of authority (whether state or non-state) we ought to respect. Anthropology tells us all of the various ways in which humans have set up their cultural practices; social philosophy asks us to choose which of these cultural practices to adopt or encourage (if indeed some should be preferred). Social philosophy takes social science and then wonders

Type of Inquiry Sociological Method Political Science Method Economics Method

Empirical Inquiry Sociology Political Science Economics

Descriptive Theory Social Theory Political Theory Economic Theory

Normative Theory (Social Philosophy) Political Philosophy (Social Philosophy)

Epistemology Philosophy of Social Science/Sociology

Philosophy of Social Science/Pol. Science

Philosophy of Social Science//Economics

The Necessity of Social Philosophy 18

what we do with it, how we use it to make life better, and what it means for things to be better. (There are certain subjects that social philosophy does not touch, even those that span both philoso-

phy and social science. For example, social philosophy does not refer to the “epistemological” questions about the formation of social scientific knowledge. This is covered by the “philosophy of social science,” which asks how we know whether we know things, whether particular kinds of empirical claims can be supported, and what it means for something to be “supported” anyway.)

2. Methodology

If social philosophy is a subject that can be addressed with the care and rigor demanded of academic work, it must be able to be addressed methodically. How does social philosophy proceed to answer the ques- tions it poses?

Social philosophy’s methods of inquiry need not be new, however. They are the methods deployed in the other philosophical sub-disciplines, supplemented by the facts supplied by the social sciences. The method is organized argument grounded in moral theory and empirical fact. It is nothing more, nor does it need to be anything more.

That may be discomforting to the social scientist, for whom the development of highly specialized methods is key to the development of knowledge itself. The idea of simply “making arguments and sup- porting them” does not seem like an actual “method,” but simply a broad description of how all scholarship works. Yet this criterion, argument and support, is consistently deployed successfully by philosophy, which is methodologically ecumenical and diverse. A paper by a philosopher makes an argument, using the princi- ples of reason, and marshals whatever evidence is necessary to support the point. A counterargument points out deficiencies, explains why the evidence doesn’t support the point, and enumerates holes in the logic.

It should be recognized that social philosophy is being proposed as a new way of organizing inquiry into particular types of issues. That means that it will inevitably take time to develop traditions. The systematiza- tion of method occurs over time; the rise of particular methodological conventions in the social sciences did not occur instantaneously, but comes out of the multi-century incubation of the disciplines. Social philoso- phy formalizes the questions, the formalization of methods will occur over time.

But the easiest way to understand how social philosophy can be done is to take a look at several examples of issues covered by the discipline, and reflect on how one would go about inquiring into them or debating them.

3. Examples

Let us proceed briefly through three examples of problems that can be explored using social philosophy. By showing what sorts of things this kind of philosophy seeks to address, and hazarding some suggestions for how it might address them, it can be more clearly demonstrated that the enterprise of social philosophy is worthwhile, feasible, and impossible to conduct within the existing disciplinary frameworks.

Equality Across Domains—As mentioned in Section I(2), the study of “inequality” raises important questions that need to be addressed by social philosophy. Some of these questions are definitional (“What is inequality? Are there different types of inequality?”) while others are normative (“Why should we care about inequality to begin with? Is it inequality that we actually care about?”) Both categories of question are presently neglected in inequality studies.

A key question surrounding inequality is the difference between “equal opportunity” and “equal out-

What Should “Social” Philosophy Consist of? 19

come.” Those debates occur frequently in political philosophy, where Rawlsian distributional questions are central. But they are passed over quickly elsewhere, even though they present a number of serious dilemmas. For one thing, both are impossible, both theoretically and in practice. (Even if all social opportunities could be equalized, one would still be unable to eliminate biological differences; some people will always run faster.) Figuring out whether each of these terms can even be useful, and the extent to which they can be applied, is the task of social philosophy.

Because it goes beyond the state, social philosophy also asks what the import of equality is in different domains. In a meeting, how can participants be treated equally? In the workplace, what kinds of equality exist, or ought to exist? What does it look like to treat the students of a school “equally”? Is such a thing even possible?

It is easy to imagine how a social philosophy paper on the subject might look. We begin by describing different potential types of school arrangement. We look at examples. We then examine different definitions of the concept of equality, and attempt to see how they align with the different arrangements that have been described. We offer a thesis defending a particular conception of equality, as applied to a particular type of learning. In doing so, we have produced a work that is interesting, thoughtful, and useful.

Cultural Appropriation—The phrase “cultural appropriation” attracts an extraordinary amount of atten- tion in popular media, but has been subjected to little philosophical scrutiny. Who owns cultural objects? Who should own them? Can groups have intellectual property rights? What kinds of cultural insensitivity cause offense? What is insensitivity? Non-academics ask these kinds of questions. But social scientists and philosophers do not. Such issues inhabit the strange, neglected no-man’s-land between those two fields.

Social philosophy can try to get to some of the root issues underlying the cultural appropriation debate. The issue has arisen recently in the context of white writers producing fiction stories about mem- bers of other ethnic groups. These writers have been accused of wrongfully “appropriating” stories that are not their own. Who is right: the writers, who believe that fiction should be able to cover any topic, or the objectors, who believe that there is something almost neo-colonial about a white writer going to Africa and gathering stories off of which to profit? Perhaps both of them are right, and the issue is not exactly about “ownership” at all. Perhaps the problem is not with white writers telling African stories, but with white writers telling African stories without actually understanding them, or telling African stories while African writers cannot get book deals to tell their own stories. By reflecting carefully on the problem, we can try to figure out whether the objection is to white people indulging in other people’s culture, or white people being the only group able to make money off a culture that is not their own. For example, it may not be a problem if a white TV chef learns Vietnamese cooking, and opens a successful Vietnamese restaurant. But what if in doing so, he puts Vietnamese restaurants run by Vietnamese chefs out of busi- ness? And what if Vietnamese chefs with equal skill cannot get television shows, because audiences prefer white chefs? How should the arrangements of the economic market for a particular ethnicity’s cultural products affect our analysis of what “appropriation” might be? Figuring out satisfactory answers to these kinds of questions could help resolve a tense public debate.

Speech, Power, and Organizations—Debates over matters of free speech only occasionally involve explicit state restriction of speech. Yet many matters involving speech have little to do with the First Amendment. Instead, they are questions like: should a private university allow a group calling for a boycott of Israel to use student space? What about a pro-white supremacist group? If one, but not the other, then who should make the decision as to which? Are there any (moral rather than legal) obligations that a private group has to allow particular kinds of dissent? To what extent is it morally permissible for employers regulate the outside speech

The Necessity of Social Philosophy 20

of their employees? Is there anything valuable in arguments that “all speech is a kind of power relationship, thus free speech will always be distributed unequally”?

Such questions come up constantly in everyday life, yet the philosophy we do have about freedom of speech is hard to apply. That’s because there is frequently not a legal question at stake here, yet free speech discussions are often framed in terms of the constitutional protections on speech. As a social concept, though, one with important implications for how humans interact with each other and how they set up organizations, free speech is tremendously important. A social philosophy literature examining the problem of free speech within private organizations could be of immense practical interest.

I have chosen these three examples advisedly. The first, “inequality,” has produced voluminous litera- ture in sociology and political science, yet much of the scholarship is isolated from the extended debates in moral philosophy over notions of desert. The second, cultural appropriation, has ignited fierce arguments in newspapers, magazines, and blogs, but its academic treatment has been marginal, confined to journals of cultural theory that do not seriously engage the philosophical difficulties of the concept. Finally, “free speech” has been left to legal scholarship, even though questions about who should be allowed to speak and when go well beyond questions about the application of the First Amendment.

Thus, in each of these cases, we have a concept that clearly matters to a great many people. It pro- duces social consequences, which will vary based on how people think about the concept and what they choose to do about it. Each of these three concepts is a worthy subject of philosophical inquiry, one that can and should be treated rigorously. Yet each is left out of the academy. The path for social philosophy is therefore clear.

4. Existing Literature

Social philosophy is not a new type of philosophy. Instead, it is a new way of classifying a particular subset of philosophical questions. So long as there has been philosophy and social inquiry, then, there have been thinkers that can be identified as part of a social philosophical tradition.

In fact, there is something downright odd about the fact that social philosophy is rarely discussed, and that the term itself seems so familiar but is so rarely used. Social philosophy has, for example, a Wikipedia entry, which consists almost entirely of a list of thinkers who might be classified “social phi- losophers.” There is no actual description of what social philosophy does uniquely, and how it operates. Everyone seems to know social philosophy exists, but nobody has taken the time to figure out what it really is and what it ought to be (perhaps because this is the sort of question that only social philoso- phers would ask).

But a “list of thinkers” is certainly what the field does have. In fact, once the field’s scope is defined, its list of practitioners is lengthy and distinguished. Plato, of course, was a social philosopher, who touched off two millennia of debate about the proper ordering of society, yet whose model of the philosopher with a wide scope of subject matter and practical concern for human affairs has all but disappeared from today’s specialized, anesthetized philosophical scholarship. The social philosophy tradition includes all those who have debated the proper arrangements for human affairs in the realm that lies between indi- vidual ethics and state action: Confucius, Locke, Rousseau, Bentham, Mill, Spencer, Marx, McLuhan, Freud, Arendt, Marcuse, Fromm. Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) is a paradigmatic work of social philosophy. So is Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949). Any thinker who has simul- taneously explained how society is and suggested how they ought to be is a social philosopher.

What Should “Social” Philosophy Consist of? 21

Unsurprisingly, the African American philosophical tradition has produced some of the most important social philosophers: W.E.B. DuBois, Hubert Harrison, Martin Luther King, Jr., Patricia Hill Col- lins, Cornel West, Tommie Shelby, Eddie Glaude, Adolph Reed, Jr., Kwame Anthony Appiah, Audre Lorde, to name only a non-representative sample. Black philosophy has, by necessity, dealt with nor- mative issues of social justice, and has also, by necessity, had to conceive the “political” as broader than individual relationships with the state (since racial issues inhabit many domains of social life). Unsurprisingly, feminist philosophers from Mary Wollstonecraft to Judith Butler have been similarly concerned with a form of social philosophy capturing relationships between people rather than simply questions of individual rights vis-à-vis the government. In fact, the realm of social philosophy has been most well-developed in gender studies, cultural studies, Chicano/a Studies, and African American studies. It is the need for their insights to spread beyond their individual domains that makes social philosophy a necessary complement.

Many important social philosophers have been from the “libertarian socialist” tradition of think- ers. Thomas Paine, Charles Fourier, William Godwin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin: all tended toward a combination of socialistic economics and the skepticism of large state institutions. In fact, it is no coincidence that the tradition of social philosophy is evident most obviously in anarchist and left-socialist thinkers. Because libertarian socialists, unlike Marxists, have tended to be skeptical of organized powers in all forms, they have tended to notice the common ele- ments between the oppression of capitalists and the oppression wrought by states and revolutionary vanguard parties. Because they are both libertarian and socialist, they have seen restrictions on free- dom as existing in both the state and economic realm. That has led them to have a broader focus than conventional political philosophers, who tend to see the state as the primary domain in which issues of freedom are relevant.

That said, there are plenty of social philosophers from the right. Edmund Burke, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Ayn Rand are all social philosophers. Those conservative thinkers who go beyond discussing the state, in order to discuss how the moral order of society ought to work, practice social philosophy.

There are several (though not many) contemporary social philosophers. Noam Chomsky is an obvious example. Joseph Heath of the University of Toronto, whose The Efficient Society (2001) tries to explain why Canadian society “works,” combines economics and normative philosophy to create a form of social philosophy. Harvard’s Michael Sandel is a prominent social philosopher, and his What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (2012) is a useful example of what a work in social philosophy might look like. Sandel explores how markets may corrode the underlying moral purposes of goods, pondering how things change when we put them up for sale. This is not quite an ethics question, not quite a political question. It is a question of social philosophy. (It might be argued that Sandel’s famous undergraduate “Justice” course, which has been televised and turned into a best-selling book (2008), is successful partly because it asks the social philosophical questions that people yearn to debate, but are unable to find an outlet for.)

Once we define social philosophy (“normative philosophical questions about the arrangement of society and the concepts used in understanding it”), we see scraps of it all over the social sciences. One can endlessly name figures who have done social philosophy at some point or other in their careers, because anyone who has normative ideas (which is everyone) has likely at one point let one or two of them slip. Social philosophy collects these disparate thoughts together as a literature worthy of debate.

III. The Alternatives to Social Philosophy

Social philosophy already exists, it has just been imprecisely specified and often strangely overlooked. But it is worth considering whether social philosophy is best conceived of as its own domain, or whether its topics are more productively addressed under some already well-established disciplinary sub-specialty. (It should be noted that this question in itself, that of how academic dis- ciplines should be optimally organized, is precisely the kind of “social philosophy” question that is so regularly neglected.)

1. Political Philosophy v. Social Philosophy

Many of the social philosophy questions I have outlined are the same kinds of questions asked in political philosophy. Since before Plato, political philosophers have been pondering the nature of the just society and what people’s obligations are within it. Normative questions of the collective good are hardly a stranger to academic inquiry.

But conceiving of social philosophy as coextensive with political philosophy is mistaken in an important way: it presumes that questions about the state and questions about the social good are the same question. Likely due to the long tradition of social contract theory, political philosophy speaks frequently of collective social decision-making as state decision-making. Thus when we examine questions about the just society, we are examining questions of what the government should do.

But the government is only a piece of society; it has the same relationship to the society at large as political science does to sociology. There are also groups, institutions, organizations. Each faces their own unique set of normative questions. What should the relationship be between a university and the town in which it is located? What should be the function of neighborhood organizations? Are some kinds of multiculturalism self-destructive? Such questions fall beyond the scope of polit- ical philosophy, because they are “political” only in a broader sense.

Interestingly, while there is no shortage of references to “social philosophy,” it is nearly always taken as a synonym for political philosophy. Nearly every text or journal supposedly devoted to “social philosophy” is in fact devoted to issues regarding the state. In the most recent issue of the Journal of Social Philosophy, four out of five articles are devoted to traditional questions of political morality, focusing especially on debating Rawlsian principles of distributional justice. Joel Feinberg (1973) and Gerald Gaus (1999) have each written books entitled Social Philosophy, but each is entirely dedicated to the same traditional questions of justice between individual and state. Other books with titles like Social and Political Philosophy dwell entirely on the political and completely neglect the social. It is rare to see any mention of what justice might look like in the neighborhood, the workplace, the school, or the church, even though moral questions are just as salient in these realms as in the individual’s relationship with the government.

Disentangling the two has important implications. It keeps us from seeing the government as the only institutional means through which justice can be effected (And ending racism becomes not just about which “policies” to pass, or what kinds of “distribution” are justified, but also about how to transform the moral and spiritual fiber of a society. It also allows us to see how the moral concepts we apply to the state may be relevant across domains. For example, we may discuss the nature and purpose of political democracy, and produce a theory of how it ought to work. But should democ-

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racy include workplace democracy? Is democracy a single vote, or does it require meaningful partici- pation in power? Do the principles of democracy apply to private entities as well as the government? Does it make sense to speak of a university as undemocratic because its president is not voted on by the students? Social philosophy allows us to examine whether “economic democracy” might be just as important as democracy in government.

Political science is actually unique among the social sciences in that it does allow normative ques- tions to be addressed in a serious way, through political philosophy. But because political science is concerned with the state, rather than society at large, the inquiries of political philosophers correspond to the topics of political science rather than sociology.

2. Social Theory v. Social Philosophy

When I first suggested to a colleague that social philosophy was a necessary complement to empir- ical inquiry, his immediate reply was: “But we already do that. It’s called social theory.” Many social scientists might react similarly: “We have social philosophers.” Karl Marx was a social philosopher. In fact all of the founders of the discipline were philosophers. Durkheim, Weber, and Simmel were social philosophers, too.

But the very fact that the distinction between social theory and social philosophy is non-obvious proves the point. If one tries to construct a system of thought that makes rational sense, the two should be extremely different topics. Social theory, after all, is about producing theories. It shouldn’t be normative at all; it should be descriptive. It aims at providing explanation, at “accounting for the functioning of some kind of social system,” as James Coleman put it in Foundations of Social Theory (1990, p. 2). The building of social theories is part of an aspiration toward replicating the methods of the physical sciences. But those theories are not (or at least, shouldn’t be) assertions about the moral good. They are supposed to be conceptual schema designed to improve our understanding of the social world. Even Karl Marx, the theorist most associated with the advocacy of revolutionary change, would object to the idea that he was positing a normative view of the social good. Marx believed himself strongly committed to describing things as they were rather than things as he thought they ought to be. He believed himself an economist, scientifically describing the features of the capitalist system, and the contradictions that would inevitably lead to its ruin.

It’s telling, then, that “social theory” and “social philosophy” seem to be the same thing. If they are difficult to distinguish, this may suggest that social theorists have been exceeding their purview, attempting to tell us what things ought to be rather than what they are. Certainly, in the case of Marx, this is clear. Under the guise of constructing an objective theory, Marx invented and promoted a polit- ical ideology. But anyone concerned with the advancement of knowledge should be concerned by this. A question of social theory and a question of social philosophy should be different kinds of questions, overlapping in places but taking different perspectives on social issues. The theorist builds a theory as to how society works, the philosopher probes the theory’s assumptions and ponders what it should lead us to do. Thus the very fact that social theory and social philosophy have merged together suggests a large part of the problem with contemporary social science.

Putting social philosophy on its own, and demarcating its boundaries clearly, will resolve this at last. No longer will social theory involve the imagining of utopias. Drawing up plans, and seeing if they work, is the task of the social philosopher.

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3. Social Science v. Social Philosophy

Can social philosophy be incorporated into social science itself? On Andrew Abbott’s “humanist” model a social scientist should simply recognize the moral dimension of her work, while being careful not to effect too much “change.” Why can’t social philosophical questions simply be incorporated into the existing research paradigms?

Combining the philosophical and the scientific sounds an ideal approach. But when one thinks about what this actually means, it becomes less apparent what it would consist of. An example of a social science question is: “How do differences in parents’ education levels affect a child’s life chances?” An example of a social philosophy question is: “What should an education consist of, and what kind of life chances does a person deserve?” These two types of questions are answered in entirely different ways. A person studying the importance of parent education levels should hardly take a detour halfway through a research paper to talk about the nature and purpose of education. But it’s also true that some- one should be discussing the nature and purpose of education. It is not a bizarre, simplistic, or useless question. It is just not the kind of question that belongs in social science research.

Social philosophy therefore allows the social science researcher to put on a different hat, to consider different kinds of questions using different intellectual tools. But it’s clear that there is a difference. Any attempt to produce a serious body of thought on questions in social philosophy will have to draw extensively on findings from social science. It is difficult, however, to do both at the same time. First one produces a finding, then one decides what to do with it. Or perhaps one decides what one would like to do, and this determines the kind of empirical paths one pursues. On either approach, the actual act of scientific discovery is separate from the preceding and succeeding debates over what one is sup- posed to actually be trying to accomplish.

Social philosophy is also not an effort to merge the social sciences, even though some have pro- posed that it is senseless not to do so. Herbert Gintis has suggested that the “behavioral” sciences (economics, sociology, anthropology, psychology, political science) should develop a unified set of theories of human behavior, pooling their resources and reconciling their differences, a task he believes may be impossible thanks to the “semi-feudal nature” of the disciplines (2009). But whether sociology and anthropology should merge is irrelevant to the question of whether social philoso- phy ought to exist. A unified social science can be divided into empirical and normative work, just as social philosophy can exist in between the social sciences as presently constructed. Putting the social sciences together does not, in itself, address the problems that give rise to the need for social philosophy, and the debate over social philosophy’s usefulness is separate from other debates about the proper arrangement of the social sciences. But social philosophy does aim to draw from and illu- minate debates in all social sciences.

IV. Advantages of Social Philosophy

1. Making Terms and Assumptions Clear

The purpose of social philosophy is to help make ideas about society clearer, to subject them to test- ing and to allow for deliberation over the things that ought to be done. Engaging in social philosophy is therefore intellectually refreshing and exciting, insofar as it looks at issues of major importance and tries

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to figure out what we actually mean, and what we ought to mean, if indeed we ought to mean anything. It is only through social philosophy that we finally get up the courage to ask questions like “Isn’t neo- liberalism just a confusing new term for some very old tendencies?” or “Do the words ‘hermeneutics’ and ‘dialectics’ actually mean anything? (Like, actually though?)”

Because social philosophy is interested in figuring out what terms mean (and, naturally enough, must also ask what meaning itself means), one might expect it to lapse into the sorry state characteristic of so much philosophizing: an endless dispute over which terms to use, at the expense of an examina- tion of their purposes (and at the expense of any action). But here is where the normative dimension of social philosophy offers such power. For social philosophy is concerned with definitions of terms only insofar as it attempts to find the terms that will best solve particular goals. Social philosophy is interested, above all, in being useful.

Let’s take the example of “neoliberalism.” In a recent article in the American Journal of Sociology, David Jacobs and Jonathan C. Dirlam (2016) attribute the rise of economic inequality to the rise in the power of “neoliberal” politicians. Jacobs and Dirlam write that “in the Reagan era and thereafter, neoliberalism became the primary ideology that motivated U.S. policy elites from both political par- ties,” and define “neoliberalism as “an ideology [that] rests on a simplified version of microeconomic theory that gives rise to a singular faith that citizens are rational agents who invariably respond appro- priately to incentives.”

Social philosophy, seeing such a claim and definition, asks a few questions. First, it tries to figure out what we are actually talking about. What is an “ideology”? If the “neoliberals” would disagree that they have a “singular faith”, how do we know they have one? Can neoliberalism truly be distin- guished, other than in its time period, from classical economic theory? (Also, how sure are we that the people who believe in “neoliberalism” are actually incorrect?) These are important foundational questions in the analysis of any social scientific claim about neoliberalism, questions that Jacobs and Dirlam do not answer.

But if we are social philosophers, we do not just care about prodding the word neoliberalism until it falls apart. We care most of all about the usefulness question. What do we get from this term? Does it hold together enough to be useful in analysis, and (more importantly) what is the analysis we are conducting with it useful for? The analysis of terms in social philosophy, because it is normative, is constantly concerned with where those terms actually lead us and whether it is someplace we wish to go. Thus, evaluating a term, we can use heuristics oriented toward helping us actually do something with it. (For example, one sensible rule for the evaluation of terms is as follows: does the time and effort necessary to understand the term exceed the time and effort saved by the term’s improvement of our understanding of the underlying concept, i.e. does it confuse more than it clarifies?)

Social philosophy helps us answer the important questions: how do we avoid theorizing endlessly without actually doing anything? How do we develop language that is minimally opaque and intricate, in order to better serve the humanistic ends toward which we are committed? How can we keep social theory from spiraling off into infinitude, and quantitative research from becoming ever narrower and less consequential?

Thus social philosophy, done well, does not ask terminological questions without purpose. It rec- ognizes that terminology is only useful insofar as it serves the purpose of clarifying, and therefore asks what we are trying to clarify and why. The task of social philosophy is to get to the bottom of things, so that we can get on with sorting out our human problems.

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2. Defining a Realm for Normative Questions

There is nothing wrong with discussing what ought to happen. There is nothing impossible about discussing what ought to happen in a scholarly way. But there is something both wrong and impossible about attempting to avoid the question of what ought to happen, deliberately shying away from the facts of one’s consequences and allowing unexamined normative frameworks to seep into one’s work. It is “wrong” because moral values are important, and anyone who holds them should act in accordance with them. It is “impossible” because values are inescapable, and if debates over them do not happen in universities, then they will happen in op/ed pages and on cable news.

The committed dispassionate scientist rightly fears the creeping of “political” values into “schol- arly” work. But since creating the political/scholarly distinction is in itself a political choice, the aspi- ration is unachievable. The best available alternative is to make values clear and subject them to careful analysis, encouraging the revision and refinement of values in the same way one revises and refines empirical findings.

Social philosophy offers a way to do this. It encourages us to examine our presumptions, and to state how we feel things ought to be. For those skeptical of normative academic work, social philoso- phy should come as a relief. Values no longer need to be smuggled into empirical work, because there is a designated space in which values-talk can be deployed.

3. Making Knowledge Useful

One reason it is vital to ask social philosophy questions is that without them, knowledge is adrift. Social science (rightly) never spends its time asking “What is social science for?” and “What should we do with this knowledge?” But someone must spend time asking these questions.

Instead, social science builds up an impressive array of facts and theories, many of which could be extremely useful. But debates over use and purpose are set aside. A glance at the leading journals in political science and sociology will confirm that “What are these findings for?” is not a question frequently asked.

For example, say we casually wade into the most recent issue of the American Journal of Sociology. What will we find over the course of its pages? There are seven main articles, plus 18 book reviews. What sorts of new information does each give us about the world? In the articles we learn the following:

ww A study of three early 20th century U.S. companies shows that low-skilled immigrants were largely unable to climb job ladders within companies to achieve well-paying positions. This is contrasted with the position that immigrants quickly assimilated and had high levels of economic mobility. The study also found that “[h]aving a relative in the firm is associated with starting at a higher position” and that “having training in a trade dramatically increased the odds that a worker was hired in a craft/managerial/professional position” (Catron 2016).

ww A study of 3.9 million police stops in New York City finds that “incidents of extreme violence against police officers can lead to periods of substantially increased racial disparities in the use of police force.” That is to say, if a police officer is killed by a black person, there will be a temporary spike in police violence against black people. The author says that this finding is important, because it shows that racial discrimination does not operate at some constant level, but fluctuates over time in response to local conditions, and it shows how particular events can trigger discrimination. (Legewie 2016).

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ww A study looks at the period of time in which U.S. congressmen used to live together in board- ing houses (specifically examining the years 1825-1841). It finds that when congressmen lived together, their levels of partisanship decreased. The author believes this finding has implications for contemporary partisanship, suggesting that the less time congresspeople spend socializing together, the more partisan they will become. (Parigi and Bergemann 2016).

ww A study adds to the literature on how membership of organizations affects people’s levels of polit- ical involvement. The author’s results “suggest a more limited influence of civic organizational engagement on political activism than is the case for membership in political organization. She suggests that “we need to devote more attention to specifying and refining our tests of the theoretical mechanisms of the differential influence of more passive and active membership forms, rather than continuing to get bogged down in debates about whether there are any relevant ‘internal effects’… of more symbolic forms of organizational membership” and that “[w]e also need to think more carefully about how even membership in organizations that are not expressly political in purpose might situate participants for more intensive engagement in nonconventional modes of political behavior.” (Minkoff 2016).

ww A study analyzes U.S. tax statistics, in order to examine the causes of economic inequality. The study identifies two important factors: (1) the increasing power of “neoliberal” politicians and (2) skill-biased technological change (which occurs when technology changes the kinds skills that are in demand, and thus the kind and quantity of jobs that are available). (Jacobs and Dirlam 2016).

ww A study’s authors ponder why it is “that women and men continue to work in extremely segregated occupations, with women still crowding into a relatively small number of female-typed occupa- tions.” They suggest two different explanations for segregation: (1) “the presumption that women and men have fundamentally different tastes and proclivities and are accordingly suited for very different types of occupations (what they call the “essentialism”) and (2) that men are “more com- petent, committed, and status worthy than women” and thus more deserving of particular jobs (what they call “verticalism”). They find that the importance of the “essentialist” explanation is under-appreciated, and that while society may have succeeded in reducing the idea that men are more competent and deserving of higher-level work, it has failed to change the idea that men and women are better suited for different kinds of tasks. (Levanon and Grusky 2016).

To dismiss this accumulation of new knowledge as negligible would be shortsighted. Leaving aside all questions over method and the validity of particular findings, many of the subjects and scholarly findings discussed in the American Journal of Sociology are far from trivial. It seems useful to have evidence undermining stories about immigrants getting off the boat and instantly climbing the class ladder. It seems quite important to know that certain kinds of violence against police can cause increased discrimination. But the fact that these findings are of “seeming” importance should be concerning. “Seems” is a term of imprecision. Many of these findings appear relevant, but rele- vant for what? What do we do with such a piece of knowledge?

The authors largely leave these questions to others, content to make the case for why the findings are significant in terms of the scholarly literature. But since it is clear that one examines racially-biased police shootings, the persistence of gender segregation, and economic inequality because one thinks such things must be dealt with, what is the link between the “dealing with” and the “writing about”? Without that link being made, these new facts are fragmentary and adrift, certainly “interesting” without it being clear just how interesting they are and what the scope of their possible uses is.

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This is not to imply that the work in the AJS is without use. In fact, the opposite is true. The work plainly does have social use, which is why it is puzzling that there is no place where the social uses are actually discussed. It is because the work of social scientists can be valuable and relevant that the values and relevance cannot afford to be left aside. What does the work on organization membership and political participation tell us about the type of organizations we ought to form if we want to increase people’s political participation? How can we build an organization, anyway? The findings of the AJS are potentially very useful, but in order for them to actually be useful one must care about figuring out how to use them.

Of course, it is also true that an investigation of the use question will reveal that some work has more purpose than others. It’s also true that we will always want to balance the interesting and the useful. When we do so, we may find that while certain kinds of work have value, the amount of use they have is disproportionate to the time and effort it takes to produce them. Or perhaps we will find the oppo- site, that social science’s de facto conception of what it ought to be producing is the correct one. At the moment, however, there are few serious inquiries made into the question of what social science is trying to do, and how the interesting and the useful ought to be balanced.

It is possible that, upon proposing that the producers of knowledge must have some conception of its usefulness (or at least be willing to discuss the topic), one will be met with a radical answer: there no role for usefulness whatsoever. No is supposed to “do” anything with knowledge. What are findings for? They’re not for anything except themselves. What social scientists do is produce knowledge “for knowledge’s sake.”

It should be noted that the phrase “knowledge for knowledge’s sake,” so often spoken, is a tautology. It cannot literally mean what it says it means, else it is empty of content and justifies nothing at all. It may be justified to pursue knowledge aimlessly. But the aimless pursuit is not the justification, the jus- tification is the justification. We might believe knowledge should be pursued “for its own sake” because curiously wandering down pathways leads to unexpected discoveries, or because instrumental concep- tions of the search for knowledge are incoherent (since you don’t know the potential instrumental uses beforehand). But those are the justifications.

A belief that knowledge is valuable regardless of its usefulness leads to untenable conclusions. For example, I may go outside and meticulously count the number of leaves on the tree in my front garden. In doing so, I will have produced a quantitative finding that was previously unknown to humanity. The number of leaves on this specific tree had never previously been totaled. Now they have been.

But such an exercise, as everyone recognizes, would be useless except as a form of light self-amuse- ment. That is because the production of knowledge for knowledge’s sake is not inherently valuable. Instead, there are assumed hierarchies, by which certain kinds of knowledge are prioritized over others. The determination as to which kinds of knowledge constitute scholarship rests to some degree on that knowledge’s uses. Counting the leaves on my tree is not scholarship because, while it builds knowledge, it is without any significant use or implication.

There is, then, an implicit value system by which the worth of knowledge is measured, and certain kinds of knowledge are classified as “scholarly” while others are not. That value system may be defensi- ble, or it may not (perhaps there is no principled reason to exclude my leaf-counting, considering that other, equally useless, kinds of knowledge production are considered worthy scholarly pursuits). Exam- ining which knowledge ought to be valued, and why, is a task for social philosophy.

But since there must be some theory beyond the “knowledge for knowledge’s sake” tautology as to

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what is valuable, and since that must have something to do with purposes or uses, it is reasonable to inquire into the question of how an empirical finding like that produced by regularly by the AJS is to be used. Unless it is just leaf-counting (which I do not think it is), it is surely produced with some sort of purpose in mind. That purpose may not be direct. For example, in the same issue of the AJS previ- ously cited, Matthew Lawrence and Richard Breen (2016) offer a study of how parental characteristics affect the likelihood of children getting a college education. They show that for men, attenting college increased the chance of their having a child that went to college, while for women, going to college did not increase this chance. Producing this finding was difficult, and involved innovative thinking about methods, and the gathering and processing of large amounts of data. But what have we ultimately got here? What is this in aid of? Lawrence and Breen could say that they wish to enrich the literature on the intergenerational reproduction of education, so that better educational policies can be designed. In that case, the focus would be on enriching the literature, rather than specifically improving the education policies. But something like improving educational policies must necessarily lurk in the background. If one was enriching the literature for the sheer pleasure of seeing its enrichment, one might as well be practicing Scientology or compiling baseball statistics. At some level, there must be a theory as to what social function the production of knowledge ought to serve. Otherwise, why produce it? Surely not “for its own sake,” since anything at all could be justified by such a logic. There has to be a “sake” that does not simply consist of repeating the word whose sake we wish to uncover.

Social philosophy allows one to seriously discuss the implications of small findings like that of Lawrence and Breen. What should we adjust in response to their discovery? Is their discovery a discov- ery at all? Was it worth producing? Does it make sense to advance knowledge through a series of such incrementally more refined empirical findings, or does it lead us down a blind alley into the obsessive gathering of facts at the expense of actual understanding? What will learning more about the topic allow us to actually do, and what are we trying to do to begin with?

Academics are often irritated by the infamous “So what?” question. That is partly because it is dis- missive and impertinent, and partly because of its anti-scholarly implication that all knowledge needs some kind of immediate “cash-value.” After all, paleontology and astronomy are never asked what they are useful for.

But the purpose of studying society is somewhat different than studying the stars, or at least is more expansive. Social science does not just study human beings because they are interesting, but because studying them can provide helpful insights in solving human problems. One can see this from the American Sociological Association panels. Sociologists are not just interested in describing what peo- ple do, they are interested in finding ways to help people do those things better and more justly. And that “political” task is not some kind of aberrant departure from the true purpose of social science; it is foundational to it. That is because, unlike in astronomy, it is impossible to even conceive of separating moral questions from scientific questions in sociology, because of the very nature of the subject matter. Could one study poverty and human suffering without caring about whether poverty continues to exist or not? Unlike in the case of the paleontologist, for whom studying fossils dispassionately requires no particular suspension of moral judgment, removing the moral element from studying poverty would require a commitment to callousness.

One could reply that this is what doctors do: they separate their objective medical judgments from any emotional investment they might have in the lives of their patients, and try to reduce that investment to a minimum out of necessity. But the case of doctors proves the point. A doctor can be dispassionate

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but still care, can render a judgment grounded in science without denying that she has a normative interest in being useful and in making life better for the patient. In fact, she is usually perfectly honest about these things. And the opposite stance would be abhorrent. If the doctor said she was interested in medicine for matters of pure intellectual interest, and didn’t particularly care whether her patients lived or died, one might actually lose confidence in her judgments. If one legitimately cares about being useful, this will improve rather than inhibit one’s capacity to seek factual truth. That’s because the more one knows about reality, the more useful one can be.

This fact is often misunderstood. “A social scientist should be useful in solving social problems” is taken to mean “a sociologist should be ideologically motivated.” If these two conceptions were indistin- guishable, that would indeed be troubling for the social scientist’s capacity to perform rigorous empirical work. But for the social scientist who truly cares about being useful (as opposed to merely advancing an unquestioned set of political preferences), a desire for usefulness motivates a greater rather than lesser willingness to face uncomfortable facts. That is because, if we truly care about human beings, we rec- ognize that fudging the truth, or producing flimsy, ideological research, does not actually help them.

For example, say we have three social scientists. The first is committed to a reflexive liberal political ideology. The second is committed to a vision of the academic as dispassionate and neutral, and believes it is not his role to try to improve the world. The third is committed to the principle of “useful knowl- edge,” and is a social philosopher who recognizes that he has particular commitments, but believes they should be regularly challenged.

Our three social scientists begin to study overt racial discrimination in a particular kind of work- place. All of their findings are consistent: they do not produce evidence of any overt racial discrimina- tion in this particular kind of workplace. What attitudes do they take toward their findings?

Well, our liberal social scientist might be tremendously uncomfortable. Committed to the idea that racial discrimination is universally pervasive, he may deploy a battery of statistical techniques in order to produce at least some mild evidence of discrimination. He will resist his finding no matter how empirically sound it may be. Or he may simply not try to publish his result, and move on to other work, quietly pretending it never happened (there is no obligation to try to publish anything, after all). Our second social scientist, the Objective and Neutral one, may do something rather different. He may publish his results. The conservative media picks up the story, and uses it to insist that liberal claims about pervasive racism are false, the product of a nefarious politically correct agenda. Perhaps white supremacists will repost the story, accompanied by slurs and threats. Meanwhile, our social scientist will happily give interviews explaining his findings. If it is pointed out to him that his work is being used by racists, and is having frightening political consequences, he will insist that he is a mere social scientist who cannot be held responsible for how his research is misused by others.

Neither of these approaches is satisfactory. The liberal allows preexisting beliefs about discrimina- tion’s wrongness to guide his empirical findings, while the neutral scientist is committed to reporting discomforting political findings, but does not care whether these findings end up making the world worse or end up (in their ultimate consequences) producing less truth rather than more.

But consider what our third social scientist, the one who cares about useful knowledge, may do. The third social scientist will not be uncomfortable with a finding of no discrimination. In fact, if it is true, she will be pleased, because less discrimination is better than more. Recognizing, however, that such a finding may have political consequences, she will take great care to make sure it is accurate before she publishes it. If it doesn’t square with her previous understandings of the ubiquity of discrim-

The Advantages of Social Philosophy 31

ination, she will not discard it (after all, maybe it is her previous understandings rather than her new findings that were incomplete). But when a finding is counterintuitive and possibly explosive, she will treat it with caution.

Responsible social scientists already do these things (although as we can recall from the Fryer exam- ple, some do not). But the truly useful social scientist will go one step beyond. She will consider it her duty to figure out the meaning and implications of her work. That means that she will try to figure out not just where discrimination isn’t, but where it is. She will try to understand whether her finding implies that workplaces generally contain little overt discrimination, or whether there are reasons why this type of workplace is an exception. She will do this because she realizes that this is the real question her work presents. If she doesn’t figure out the answer herself, others will speculate on it for her. Thus the potential consequences of a finding are important in determining how certain one needs to be, and how much additional work one ought to do.

If it turns out, however, that our scholar has produced good evidence that discrimination in the workplace is negligible, she will do two things: (1) she will not shy away from reporting this, because it is true, and truth is important and (2) she will try to figure out where the useful areas for addressing racial injustice are, and recommend those pursuits. She will make sure that her finding is not framed as “racial discrimination no longer exists in the workplace,” for this connotes “racial discrimination no longer matters.” Instead, she will frame her finding as “racial injustices are to be found primarily in realm X rather than realm Y,” which is a useful framing that actually helps guide activists toward pursuing the true sources of injustice.

Thus it is not only possible to be committed simultaneously to usefulness and empiricism, but if done with the proper reflectiveness and moral humility, these two positions enhance one another rather than conflict. The moral social scientist should want only to say true things, the truth-seeking social scientist should recognize that the inevitability of value judgments is in itself a truth.

Social philosophy enables this kind of usefulness, because it encourages us to ask questions about why we are doing what we are doing and what it is for. How should social scientists’ values guide their work, and how should their work cause them to reevaluate their values? Social philosophy brings an unsparing critical intensiveness to the question of the “role” of intellectuals, asking what they owe and to whom, rather than allowing these questions to be addressed casually or passively. By probing into what ought to be done, and why we believe it ought to be done, social philosophy encourages the harmo- nious union of rigor and commitment. Social philosophy addresses the real problems that come from living together in groups, and having to negotiate among competing moralities. It helps make academic knowledge relevant, without undermining scholarly independence or empirical integrity.

Conclusion The Necessity of Consistency

There is no such thing as entirely value-free science. At the very minimum, by studying something, we assume that it ought to be studied. When a scholar makes an argument for her position, she would like her readers to accept it. And the very act of creating categories helps to define the way we see the world. As it exists presently, however, social science has even more strongly embedded moral assump- tions than this. Economists are dedicated to the spread of markets and “economic freedom.” And sociologists are dedicated to solving the social problems of racism, poverty, and injustice.

The Necessity of Social Philosophy 32

Those moral visions do not mean that rigorous social science is impossible. But they do necessitate examination, if scholars are to be intellectually honest. By conceiving of “social philosophy” as a legit- imate domain of inquiry, one can finally start to look deeply into the moral underpinnings of social science, using the powerful tools developed by philosophers over 2,000 years of history. And once someone begins to engage in serious social philosophy, many of their bedrock assumptions, which were simply assumed rather than probed, may begin to appear less certain.

In closing the case for social philosophy, I would like to point out that its necessity arises largely from the simple need to be consistent. If questions of justice are important in analyzing governments, so that the objects of political philosophy are worthy of discussion, then questions of justice and moral- ity are also important in analyzing the rest of society, because morality is no less operational in the social realm than the political realm. Political philosophy is valuable, but it does not make sense to have political philosophy without also having social philosophy. Political philosophy is also too frequently divorced from ordinary social dilemmas; very few of us will ever find ourselves behind a veil of igno- rance, trying to set up a state. Moral philosophy can help us to reflect on ordinary decision-making, but it leaves out many questions that go beyond individuals.

There is something of a tragedy here. Questions like “How should a school be set up?” and “What kinds of judgments constitute discrimination rather than discernment?” are interesting, complicated, and useful. But to the extent that they are discussed at all, they have been shunted to political websites and blogs, and are never looked at with the thoroughness and dispassion that is the distinctive trait of the scholarly mind. Academic knowledge need not be “political,” but it should certainly strive to be useful, and social philosophy is deeply useful in both helping us figure out what we know and guiding us as to what to do next.

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