Realism, values and critique

ABSTRACT

This is a lightly edited transcript of a plenary talk given at the Beyond Positivism conference, Montreal, August 8–10 2017. The talk followed others by Christopher Winship and Frédéric Vandenberghe, which are mentioned in the text. The paper argues that critical social science needs an ontology of values, and that a coherent ontology must recognize that values are created by human beings in social settings, rather than being objectively true. Recognizing this, however, need not expose us to the moral nihilism of extreme relativism. Drawing on the work of Habermas and the capabilities approach, I argue that we can reason about what sorts of basic values we should be committed to, without invoking the concept of objective values. This provides us with material that we can build on to construct more complex constructive critical arguments.

KEYWORDS:

• Capabilities approach
• discourse ethics
• ethical naturalism
• moral realism
• relativism

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Ito Jimenez for recording the talk and to the Templeton Foundation for funding my attendance at the conference where this paper was given.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dave Elder-Vass is a Reader in Sociology at Loughborough University, UK. His recent book Profit and Gift in the Digital Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2016) develops a theory of appropriative practices in the digital economy and their implications for social theory and politics. He has also published extensively on social ontology and social theory from a critical realist perspective, including The Causal Power of Social Structures (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and The Reality of Social Construction (Cambridge University Press, 2012).