Shai M. Dromi & Samuel D. Stabler, (2023)
Chicago: University of Chicago Press
About this book. An analysis of the effects of moral debates on sociological research.
Few academic disciplines are as contentious as sociology. Sociologists routinely turn on their peers with fierce criticisms not only of their empirical rigor and theoretical clarity but of their character as well. Yet despite the controversy, scholars manage to engage in thorny debates without being censured. How?
In Moral Minefields, Shai M. Dromi and Samuel D. Stabler consider five recent controversial topics in sociology—race and genetics, secularization theory, methodological nationalism, the culture of poverty, and parenting practices—to reveal how moral debates affect the field. Sociologists, they show, tend to respond to moral criticism of scholarly work in one of three ways. While some accept and endorse the criticism, others work out new ways to address these topics that can transcend the criticism, while still others build on the debates to form new, more morally acceptable research.
Moral Minefields addresses one of the most prominent questions in contemporary sociological theory: how can sociology contribute to the development of a virtuous society? Rather than suggesting that sociologists adopt a clear paradigm that can guide their research toward neatly defined moral aims, Dromi and Stabler argue that sociologists already largely possess and employ the repertoires to address questions of moral virtue in their research. The conversation thus is moved away from attempts to theorize the moral goods sociologists should support and toward questions about how sociologists manage the plurality of moral positions that present themselves in their studies. Moral diversity within sociology, they show, fosters disciplinary progress.
Excerpt: “Pragmatism in sociology goes back to the earliest days of the discipline in the US,61 to the work of W. E. B. Du Bois in the sociology of race and to George Herbert Mead’s thought on self and society. After several decades of disregard, sociologists recently rediscovered the work of pragmatist philosophers like Charles Peirce, John Dewey, and William James, and applied it to social phenomena ranging from historical bird- watching to responding to microaggressions. As Neil Gross notes, while many of his fellow sociologists have tended to use pragmatist concepts to study micro- level occurrences such as interpersonal interaction or problem solving, pragmatism has much to say about macro- level phenomena as well. Meanwhile, French sociologists like Luc Boltanski, Laurent Thévenot, Ève Chiapello, Ilana Silber, and Cyril Lemieux have recently developed a view of participatory democracy wherein actors employ different “moral theories” to make sense of common situations and to criticize injustice. This “Sociology of Critique” (often called “the New French Pragmatist Sociology”) shares core concerns with US pragmatist sociology. By adopting a pragmatist approach, we turn attention from questions about what sociologists ought to do, to questions about what sociologists already do when it comes to the moral underpinnings of their research. […] First, we subscribe to Dewey’s view that individuals— academics or others— can grasp complex ethical orders and deliberate between moral theories. Boltanski and Thévenot aimed their studies of social critique at describing “the actor’s sense of justice— or, more precisely, their sense of injustice” and charting the “models of the competence with which actors have to be endowed in order to face ordinary critical situations.” Pragmatist sociology sees individuals as capable of comprehending nuanced logics of worth and applying them to concrete situations in their daily lives. This includes actors who articulate their understanding not as refined philosophical arguments, but as concrete statements about the moral worth of their actions.74 In the academic context, we identify the frameworks of ethical reasoning that inform sociological debates. To this end, we develop tools to trace nuanced logics of reasoning and to follow sociological debates in action. Even the mundane decisions of academic life require moral evaluations: when comparing the value of research proposals in a grants committee; when addressing controversial research; when cooperating with department members who have diverging research agendas on securing a new hire. Thus, we see engagement with questions of good and bad, of morality, as a core aspect of sociological knowledge production and as integral to the lived experience of working sociologists. Our approach is pragmatist in that it focuses on the history and cultural limits of moral debate, “to understand the practice of critique and, thus, understand why it is so difficult to criticize,” as Boltanski put it. Second, in contrast to structural or ideological critiques of academia, we take authors’ stated intentions in conducting research at face value, rather than seeking out unseen factors that predetermine their stances or treating their positions as some form of false consciousness.” (p. 9/10)
