An Essay on the Intrinsic Relationship between Social Facts

and Moral Questions

ANNE WARFIELD RAWLS

Bentley University and University of Siegen

Abstract
Value neutrality and science are often equated. This paper argues that
the work of doing science and engaging in scientific practices with
meaningful objects depend on social facts which have moral prerequisites
and are not value neutral.

Résumé
La neutralité au niveau des valeurs et la science sont souvent assimilées.
Cet article propose que le travail scientifique et l’engagement dans les
pratiques scientifiques par rapport à des objets porteurs de sens se
fondent sur des faits sociaux ayant des pré-requis moraux et qu’ils ne
sont pas neutres en termes de valeur.

THE QUESTION OF VALUE NEUTRALITY has been a contested issue

since the early twentieth century. Its original formulation in 1917 is at-
tributed to Max Weber, but there were other early proponents. The idea is
that the social scientist should not allow an orientation toward values to
influence their work. The problem is that the social facts that are typically
the subject of such research are comprised in the first place through a mu-
tual orientation toward values. Therefore, trying to do value-free research
can obscure the actual nature of the social phenomena in question—a big
distortion that keeps the research from being scientific. In other words,
the way the question has generally been taken up, the possibility of value

Anne Warfield Rawls, Department of Sociology, Bentley University, Morison Hall 149H, Waltham, MA
02452. E-mail: arawls@bentley.edu


C 2017 Canadian Sociological Association/La Société canadienne de sociologie
Social Facts and Moral Questions 393

neutrality rests on a hypothetical separation between fact and value that

has long been contested by social thinkers, including Weber himself. It
was also an important issue for Durkheim, who argued that social facts
not only depended on value orientations, but were also properly moral facts
because without them and the cooperative work of making them, we would
not be human; a consideration that he pointed out most philosophers and
social thinkers had overlooked. Garfinkel’s argument that social objects
and identities depend on reciprocity conditions that are damaged by in-
equality is similar in drawing an intrinsic relationship not only between
social facts and a value orientation in social practices—but arguing that
there is a properly moral issue involved.
The idea of value neutrality was hotly contested by social thinkers
throughout the 1920s and 1930s with Talcott Parsons (1937) championing
the positions of both Durkheim and Weber against the idea. It was only
with the advent of World War II that a preference for trying to achieve
value neutrality finally gained ascendancy—bolstered by the belief that
value neutral methods would more efficiently deliver “immediate” results
to support the war effort. Whether the statistical and demographic stud-
ies that became predominant at that time were really practical or useful
was of less importance to disciplinary leaders than the speed with which
results could be delivered and their relevance to winning the war—that is,
wartime research was expected to both address social questions that would
help win the war and at the same time remain value neutral—a deep con-
tradiction. Given this paradox, it is important to ask in what sense any of
these studies could have been value neutral. They were often statistical
and demographic. But, the idea that this gained value neutrality for them
is a false belief. Statistics are no more value neutral than the social pro-
cesses and value orientations that are used to create those statistics. The
same is true of the “categories” that demographers count. These methods
were preferred during the war precisely because they could be aimed at a
“value”: the political aim of winning the war.
And here we come to two connected misconceptions that have ani-
mated the discussion for a long time: first, the false belief that methods
that rely on statistics have a greater potential to be value neutral or value
free; and, second, that fact and value can be separated in doing social
research. Making the argument about the possibility of value neutrality
assumes that facts are natural objects that can exist apart from a relation-
ship to society, culture, or social interaction. Believing that statistical and
demographic methods have a greater potential to be value free assumes
that the categories of person and action that statistics count, as well as
the counting procedures themselves, are free from value-oriented social
relationships: they are not.
Both assumptions are false. Even categories such as male/female
and Black/White that are used to compile simple apparently straightfor-
ward demographic data are social categories with no natural or biological
394 CRS/RCS, 54.4 2017

counterpart. They are social facts that are defined differently in different
places and times. There are a range of different biological conditions for
sex. It is societies that decide how these correspond with the social cate-
gories of gender. The way people are assigned the categories male/female
represents these arbitrary social definitions. The same is true for race. A
person can be Black in one country and White in another. How societies
decide to draw the lines is a social matter, determined by social relations;
by social orientations toward values, beliefs, and social practices, not by
biology.
It is not just that the categories themselves are social facts, but that
each social institution develops its own unique ways of recording, count-
ing, and processing those social facts. There are many social processes
involved in creating the institutional data sets that so-called “value-free”
approaches often use. Take crime rates for instance. There is a general
misperception that they report the number of crimes. They do not. Some
crime rates measure self-reported crime, some large portion of which never
resulted in arrest and a significant portion of which does not meet the legal
definition of crime. Most local and state crime rates represent the rate at
which police officers and courts record and process crimes. The police work
and prosecutorial decisions involved are not unmotivated or value free. In
a society like the United States, which has a serious race problem there is a
higher recorded crime rate for African Americans. This does not mean that
they commit more crime—although the crime “rate” is generally treated as
though it did mean that. It means that Black Americans see more police
action, and that law enforcement is less likely to give them breaks. That
is, they are “processed” more often. This is, of course, a serious moral is-
sue that is embedded in the statistics themselves. Institutional statistical
data sets like this are not value free. Treating them as if they were—and
pretending to do “value-free” research based on them—creates even more
inequality and reifies the prejudices that led to the statistical imbalance
in the first place. The question becomes “Why do Black Americans commit
more crime?” and there is a whole industry producing explanations that
often posit the inferiority of Black Americans on one or another measure
as an explanation.
In this way “value-free” research tends to support the inequalities
that exist in a social system: so it is actually the opposite of value free. As
Garfinkel wrote in 1946, letting the values and assumptions of a culture
into the categories unexamined lets “ethnocentrism” in (Garfinkel 1946).
Is there a good alternative argument? Yes, and it is a classic. Two
decades before Weber penned the argument that became the anchor of
the “value-free” movement, Durkheim had begun making the important
argument that all meaningful facts and objects are social facts and that all
social facts are moral facts. Durkheim intended by this argument not only
the idea that social facts depend on social cooperation to make them, but
that the cooperation involved was an essentially moral enterprise because
Social Facts and Moral Questions 395

it created the ideas, identities, and social relationships without which we

would not be recognizably human. Durkheim considered the social com-
mitments that this creation depended on to be “sacred” and therefore the
underlying requirements of the social process to be moral. This was not a
functional argument. It was a constitutive argument. If Durkheim is right
about this, there is no possibility of value-free science. Durkheim saw this
as a plus and argued that the new discipline of sociology that he was found-
ing should become an advocate for social reforms that would better support
the needs of social fact making processes in modern society.
For Durkheim, this moral advocacy was more scientific than ap-
proaches that treated facts as natural for two reasons: First, they are
not natural facts and therefore treating them as if they are leads to huge
mistakes. Durkheim ([1893] 1933) laid the major paradoxes of philosophy
and social science at the feet of this error (for instance, positing a conflict
between individual and society when the individual would not exist with-
out society, or arguing that social requirements are not properly moral
requirements when the human individual would not exist without them,
etc.); and second, he argued that the approach that recognized the moral
implications of social facts is more scientific because it looks beneath the
surface of the facts into the social processes and moral relationships used
to create them and on which they depend. For instance, if Durkheim had
studied crime rates in the United States today and found that the high
Black crime rate was the result of differential attention by law enforce-
ment to the Black community, he would have argued that sociology had
a scientific duty to expose those rates as the result of a distorted moral
relationship. Garfinkel did exactly this in a study of North Carolina court-
rooms in 1942 (1949). Durkheim believed that this new scientific approach
to morality should be taught in public schools so as to firmly ground modern
society on the moral foundation it needs.
Durkheim was only the first of many important social thinkers to
tread this path. From the late nineteenth through the twentieth century,
other notable social theorists and philosophers also began arguing that
most of the facts we have to deal with—and every one that achieves shared
meaning—is a social fact and not a natural fact. The philosophers Wittgen-
stein (1953) and Austin (1955) made the argument between 1939 and 1955.
The sociologists C. Wright Mills (1940), Harold Garfinkel (1940, 1942,
[1947] 2012, 1949, 1967), and Erving Goffman (1951, 1959, 1961) elabo-
rated the position in sociology between 1939 and 1960. The economist Her-
bert Simon (1953) came close to a social fact position in the 1950s with his
conception of “bounded rationality” and Joseph Stiglitz (2011) and Thomas
Piketty (2014) are elaborating the cost of inequality in economics in related
terms today.
Given the omnipresence of social facts, the almost complete reliance of
social persons on them, and the need for a high degree of cooperation and
mutuality to create them each next time, the possibility of value neutrality
396 CRS/RCS, 54.4 2017

approaches zero. It is not even desirable to achieve value neutrality if the

conditions for the making of the social facts we rely on are in themselves
moral imperatives. As such they cannot be separated from their moral
conditions. Hence, scientific studies of the conditions for social fact making
will necessarily involve moral prescriptions because moral conditions are
requirements for successful social fact making. Such studies are done by
those inspired by Garfinkel in studies of science, communication, and work.
These studies of moral conditions are required in order for studies to be sci-
entific insofar as social fact making actually has such moral conditions. In
other words, insofar as practices are constitutive of essential human goods,
they involve issues of morality proper. Exclusion of some from such prac-
tices is a moral evil. Studies of this moral evil can be scientific. It is when
social facts are artificially separated from the moral conditions of their
making—as often happens in the attempt to be “value free”—that distor-
tion, subjectivity, and ethnocentricity make their way into scientific prac-
tice. Unfortunately, misunderstandings about this have made it difficult
for those working to document the moral relations involved in social facts.
Because of these misunderstandings, a short review of Durkheim’s position
is in order.

A SHORT HISTORICAL REVIEW OF THE DEBATE

Durkheim was the first to argue this social fact position, initiating a social
fact lineage that was taken up in sociology by Talcott Parsons and then by
Garfinkel and Goffman. The argument is that scientific rigor is achieved
precisely through the recognition that facts and values are inextricably
linked—and then focusing on that link. In taking up this argument in 1938
and running with it after the war (1950), Parsons maintained that the ar-
tificial separation had resulted in a reductionist individualism that had
damaged sociology Parsons (1938, 1950). One could argue that the most
rigorous empirical studies of social facts have come from Garfinkel, Goff-
man, and others who recognized the intrinsic connection between facts and
values. I would argue that Weber himself recognized such a linkage and
that his urging to keep research value neutral recognized that values would
nevertheless be a necessary part of scientific research. In other words, his
position has been misunderstood. Weber meant that a researcher’s own
personal values should not obscure their understanding of how the facts
and values of the people they were researching were linked (i.e., mutually
constitutive).
Durkheim took a different tack. It was Durkheim’s view that scientists
could understand the moral prerequisites that were a required foundation
for making social facts in a certain form of society by looking at regulations
(including the constitutive requirements of rituals) and their sanctions.
Because these moral prerequisites could be documented scientifically, the
scientists who discovered them should also advocate support for those
Social Facts and Moral Questions 397

moral prerequisites. Because each form of society could have different

moral prerequisites, it is important to scientifically ascertain which form
of morality is necessary in each case. Without this information and the
advocacy that should follow it, Durkheim argued in The Division of Social
Labor ([1893] 1933) that modern society was likely to fail. It was his grand
scheme that sociology should be the science to both document the moral
needs of modernity and educate people about how to secure the necessary
moral prerequisites for its success.
Before World War I, this project was well under way in France.
Durkheim’s arguments about moral education were taking hold and his
school of sociology was becoming established and influential. Unfortu-
nately, the Durkheim school was practically wiped out by the World War
I. This not only eliminated Durkheim’s immediate students, but left his
approach open to critics who have badly misinterpreted it. Changes in so-
ciology and social science that quickly swept through American sociology
during the World War II finished the job. The idea that value neutrality
was possible and preferred became entrenched.
For Durkheim the new types of social arrangements and practices that
developed in modernity required justice: a requirement for the making of
social facts that he worked to establish empirically. This was especially
true for the new constitutive practices of science and occupations. As social
labor became more divided, more equality was necessary. Establishing the
required justice, he argued, would also require that natural inequalities
not be enhanced by social conditions (better access to education, nutrition,
jobs). This would mean, in turn, that new laws and regulations are required
to support the transition to equality. The new morality should be taught
in public schools so that everyone understands what is required.
So, if Weber, however inadvertently, became the author of value neu-
trality, Durkheim was the original advocate for a scientific sociology of
social facts that would support moral advocacy and moral education.

GARFINKEL PICKS UP THIS THREAD

Much misunderstood as the author of a sociology that was indifferent to

moral and political issues, Garfinkel from the first focused inequality, ex-
clusion, and the difficulties confronting the socially marginal. In his earli-
est publications, he focused on Black and Jewish Americans, the transgen-
dered, and political and social outcasts (Garfinkel 1940, 1942, [1947] 2012,
1949, 1967). He considered their statuses to be interactional achievements
of what he called “Passing” that could shed light both on what was going
wrong with interaction and what needed to be done to achieve mutual
reciprocity.
Like Durkheim, Garfinkel considered the requirements of social
life inherently moral—even though actual social conditions usually vi-
olated moral requirements. He argued that such violations threatened
398 CRS/RCS, 54.4 2017

intersubjectivity and could render interaction meaningless. The possibil-

ity of coherent collaborative social action required an underlying moral
commitment to the needed reciprocity. He maintained that the underly-
ing reciprocity conditions that he called “Trust” (Garfinkel 1963) was a
constitutive requirement for the social practices that are the bedrock of
social solidarities. That means for Garfinkel that the moral questions in
contemporary life were located in constitutive practices. Because marginal
status was consequential for the acceptance of persons into moral reciproc-
ities, the trust requirement was always relevant to social justice issues.
Excluding people from trust conditions excluded them from coherence.
Instead of asking the kinds of questions that sociologists who believe
in value neutrality tend to ask, like “How many Protestants choose X?” or
“What effect does income have on life choices?,” Garfinkel asked what it is
about the organization of the social practices themselves that would work
to exclude anyone. If race is part of how courtroom practices are organized,
as he argued in his 1942 MA thesis, then the life chances of persons will
be affected by their racial identification in the courtroom. His analysis
in the 1990s (Ethnomethodology’s Program 2002) of how a certain way of
queuing for coffee (the “crush”) makes it difficult for Helen—who is blind—
to get coffee is characteristic of how he approached questions of exclusion.
Approaching the question this way goes to the heart of why social justice
is so resistant to attempts at change that focus on attitudes and formal
institutions rather than on the collaborative processes of exclusion that
make inequality a concrete reality.
Garfinkel’s first two publications written in 1940 and 1942 at North
Carolina (published in 1940 and 1949) examine the social processes that
produce and sustain racial inequality in the American South. His later
focus (Garfinkel 1967) on interactional processes, and in particular on the
reciprocity commitment, social skills, rules, practices, and devices that
facilitate meaningful cooperation would extend that interest. Garfinkel
refers repeatedly in his early writing (through 1952) to the difficulties
faced by Jews, Negroes, Reds, and Criminals, expecting the performance
of self to be more difficult, the Trust conditions more tenuous, and the con-
sequences of failed reciprocity to be more serious for members of marginal
groups.
For Garfinkel, all of these categories are social creations that consti-
tute marginal statuses, but the social practices by which this marginality
is accomplished are different in each case, and thus result in a different
positioning of possibilities vis-à-vis the majority for each minority group.
His Harvard PhD dissertation in 1952 proposed that highly motivated
and successful Jewish minorities would be more negatively impacted by
negative feedback than other students. Findings from a study of Harvard
undergraduates supported this. The question of how constitutive practices
and the reciprocity requirement differentially impacted minorities and
marginal persons he would pursue lifelong. His study of “Agnes” (Garfinkel
Social Facts and Moral Questions 399

1967, chap. 5 and appendix, Studies) and 14 other transgendered persons,

which began in 1958, also extends these early interests.
Garfinkel devoted a great deal of attention to detailing the moral prob-
lems that result from a failure to examine such constitutive practices in
details (race, class, and gender discrimination hidden in statistics and
other unexamined reified categories). He was concerned that conventional
sociological approaches that treated these categories as givens were not
only missing the point, but actually making things worse in their quest
to be scientific by allowing institutional categories to hide the work of
racism (and other categorization work) that went into creating the statis-
tical records that were being treated as “objective” data. His commitment
to elaborating the moral basis of society was longstanding.
The key point is that the rules that facilitate cooperative exchange
must meet constitutive reciprocity requirements for any of this to work—
and these are moral requirements. This is the aspect of the argument
that Marcel Mauss took up in The Gift ([1925] 1954), and it dovetails
with both Garfinkel and Goffman. There are rules and expectations for
social fact making. These can be studied, and their constitutive and moral
character can be located in the sanctions that follow from not orienting
toward rules and expectations in recognizable ways. In an open democratic
society, the rules must also be such that anyone can orient them. According
to Durkheim ([1893] 1933:407):

it is not enough that there be rules; they must be just, and for that it is
necessary for the external conditions of competition to be equal . . . . what
characterizes the morality of organized societies, compared to that of seg-
mental societies, is that . . . It only asks that we be thoughtful of our fellows
and that we be just, that we fulfill our duty, that we work at the function we
can best execute, and receive the just reward for our services. The rules which
constitute it do not have a constraining force which snuffs out free thought;
but because they are rather made for us and, in a certain sense, by us, we are
free.

Modern society and the moral basis of “humanity” may be in crisis. But,
“The remedy for the evil,” according to Durkheim ([1893] 1933:407), “is not
to seek to resuscitate traditions.” That is what most social thinkers have
proposed. For Durkheim returning to tradition will destroy everything.
“What we must do to relieve this anomy,” he argues, is to eliminate external
sources of inequality such as inherited wealth and “introduce into [social]
relations more justice . . . .” (p. 407).
The big problem, from Durkheim’s point of view, is that modern divi-
sion of labor society has not achieved the justice in fact that it has realized
in shared sentiment. Many modern people believe in justice. But believ-
ing in justice and feeling its necessity is not enough. It must be actual to
support the required constitutive reciprocity work. While public morality
tends increasingly, Durkheim says ([1893] 1933:386) to demand “an exact
400 CRS/RCS, 54.4 2017

reciprocity in the services exchanged,” the legal system does not support
the conditions necessary to effect fair exchange. People can “believe” in
equality and nevertheless produce enormous amounts of inequality. The
common practices of inherited wealth and differentiation between the sta-
tus and wealth of laborers and business owners both violate the implicit
conditions of contract.

INSISTING ON VALUE NEUTRALITY AS A CRITERIA

FOR SCIENCE PREVENTS THIS REMEDY

Durkheim’s Division of Social Labor introduced a new conception of social

facts as cooperatively constituted objects and argued that a constitutive
sense of justice and a constitutive type of social practice develop in modern
society to support social fact making in contexts of diversity. The argu-
ment parts company with classic philosophy and social science not only
in its conception of social facts as depending on immediate constitutive
work for their creation, but in proposing a distinction between two types of
social practice: one suited to traditional societies and the other to moder-
nity. As such, the book marks a division between classical and modern
social thought, and many important social thinkers went on to elaborate
similar distinctions between social and natural facts and between types of
social facts over the course of the twentieth century: Wittgenstein’s (1953)
“use” practices, Rawls’ (1954) “constitutive” versus “regulative” rules, and
Searle’s (1969) constitutive criteria for “Speech Acts” all based important
philosophical arguments on a similar point. Garfinkel’s “constitutive rules”
versus “institutional accountability,” his “Trust conditions” for engage-
ment in constitutive practices, and Goffman’s “working consensus” and
“Interaction Orders” are important sociological arguments that rely on a
similar premise. In spite of the importance of these arguments, however,
and the rich vein of research they have inspired across many disciplines,
they have not yet had the impact on social theory and philosophy that they
should have.
The mistake about value neutrality is one of the things that has gotten
in the way. The rise to prominence of Pragmatism in the latter twentieth
century was necessitated by the failure of the earlier “practice conception”
to secure its point about the importance of constitutive rules and practices
in philosophy. One could also argue that the failure of sociology to appre-
ciate the importance of the new social fact argument explains the current
condition of the discipline—which now more than ever treats social facts as
if they were natural facts; reifying values in the process. Durkheim argued
that success in reforming society would require establishing a comprehen-
sive approach to practice that was based on empirical observation. At this
point the research is in hand. But, it is not “value-free” research. It cannot
be value free. Achieving acceptance for the scientific status of this research
that focuses on practices and the reciprocity and equality they require is
Social Facts and Moral Questions 401

important. This in turn requires an explanation of how the research fits

into a comprehensive—and alternate—theoretical framework.
This is where a regrounding of Garfinkel and Goffman in Durkheim’s
social fact lineage is essential. The functionalist and structuralist mis-
interpretations of Durkheim do not help. It is the work of Garfinkel, in
particular, that provides the empirical demonstration of Durkheim’s origi-
nal point about constitutive practices of science and occupations. Goffman
offers demonstrations of Durkheim’s argument about the dependence of in-
dividual freedom on social relations. Not only did Durkheim propose an em-
pirical approach to social facts/orders as constitutive (using that term), he
proposed an integral connection between those orders and an egalitarian
form of social relations that he argued was an underlying requirement for
their achievement—and he did so in the context of a comprehensive theory
of modernity. Given the empirical character of constitutive practices, the
study of these practices and their moral requirements, he argued, must also
proceed empirically. The argument supports the development of an obser-
vational sociology focused on constitutive detail such as Garfinkel’s; not the
statistical sociology that claims Durkheim as a founder, which is based on
generalization and static categories that obscure the cooperative practices
that are the centerpiece of Durkheim’s argument and allow ethnocentrism
and cultural inequality into the data.
The problem is that Durkheim’s social fact argument got lost. The re-
lationship he drew between the social fact argument and morality also got
lost. In the process, social theory itself got lost. Rereading Durkheim offers
a blueprint for recovery. Garfinkel elaborates that blueprint. Rather than
assuming that meaningful social contexts exist as a backdrop for posing
questions of social and moral order, Durkheim asked how the coherence
of meaningful social contexts is made possible in the first place by moral
relationships. This initial achievement of coherence he treats as the true
purpose of morality (and in a traditional society he proposes the need to
achieve coherence as the true purpose of religion). This raises to promi-
nence the questions—“Which empirical details of cooperative constitutive
practice are necessary for mutual coherence to be achieved?”—and “What
underlying conditions do they require?”
Garfinkel asks how in and through these details we achieve meaning-
ful social facts.
Justice is necessary because of the fragile character of the social objects
and meanings that need to be cooperatively created through reciprocities.
Garfinkel and Goffman both document this fragility in detail and talk about
the trust, reciprocity, and working consensus they require. In a sufficiently
fragile situation in which positions are not preallocated, all participants
have an interest in protecting all positions. They have an obligation to
protect every identity and/or position that belongs to a situation and its
identities which could become their own. If they do not do this move by
move, meaning and identity can fail. If there are categories of person who
402 CRS/RCS, 54.4 2017

are not seen as equal participants (by race, gender, or culture for instance),
and therefore cannot be recognized as participants, it will not be possible
to create mutually intelligible social facts with them. Similarly, those, who
through incompetent performance become ostracized from the group, will
not be able to participate.
For this reason, social solidarity based on exclusion cannot sustain a
diverse modern society. Justice and equal and open participation are nec-
essary. In a perfectly just situation, all persons would be eligible to par-
ticipate and all positions would be exchangeable. Given sufficient fragility
in the process, all participants are obligated to protect all positions in or-
der to preserve their own interests. The cooperative requirements of these
fragile constitutive orders demand a different kind of attention and care
than the durable categories and objects of traditional societies. Justice is
a functional necessity for constitutive orders of practice.
Garfinkel and Goffman argue that underlying trust conditions, or a
working consensus, are necessary and constitutive of the coherence and
stability of communication and interaction. They also argue that the frag-
ile and momentary character of social facts requires close cooperation
based on equality and reciprocity. That each next response can change
the meaning of what has gone before—also an essential feature of Mauss’
gift argument—is foundational to both Garfinkel and Goffman.
Because what is moral and marked as such is determined by social
needs, not abstract principles, morality will vary as social needs vary. In
traditional societies, this means that to the extent that social needs vary
between groups, the result is a strong element of moral relativity. But,
in Durkheim’s view that relativity is remedied in modern differentiated
society by the fact that the social requirements of constitutive practices
under the division of labor become more and more the same. Ironically
this happens as the particulars of identities, practices, and beliefs become
less and less the same. In other words, the increasing specialization of
work and differentiation of identity leads to an increasing sameness in
the underlying constitutive requirements. The moral imperatives of the
new social needs thus become one big interconnected “is” that imposes one
increasingly universal “ought” that Durkheim refers to as justice.
It is the social and moral relations of constitutive practice and the
cooperative commitment to them on which the existence of the perceiving
self, its social identity, and the coherence of mutually intelligible social
objects depend. All mutually coherent social facts are, on this view, moral
facts and none exist independently of social relations.
It is not surprising that the greatest sociological and philosophical
minds of the twentieth century took up this idea, which offered solutions to
the major classic dilemmas. Every social object, identity, or meaning needs
to be cooperatively created by people who make a moral commitment to
constitutive practices and their underlying moral prerequisites. The idea
of “value-free” sociology is as much an illusion as the economists’ idea of
Social Facts and Moral Questions 403

a “Free Market.” In a modern highly differentiated social context, social

solidarity and the coherence of things and ideas depend on the constitutive
practices that create and sustain mutually available social facts. Thus, our
commitment to those practices and their distribution among the population
(equal or unequal) is a moral issue of huge practical consequence. It is a
moral issue in the philosophical sense. A moral failure is a failure to secure
a basic human good. Any failure to achieve justice in differentiated modern
publics threatens the coherence of all social facts and situations. By the
same token, any consideration of social facts, which is the business of
sociology, would of necessity also involve considerations of morality.
Durkheim’s approach to functionalism has been misunderstood largely
because it is closely tied to his argument about moral requirements, which
has been misunderstood. It is not that social relations are moral because
they are functional. Rather, the argument is that they are functional be-
cause they fulfill constitutive moral requirements. Even though reciprocity
and cooperation are in some abstract sense moral ideals, Durkheim ar-
gues that when the ends are essential social goods (reason, social facts,
self, mutual coherence, social solidarity), the cooperative social processes
necessary to create and maintain those ends become moral requirements.
The solution for Durkheim was to go forward—not back—basing re-
forms on new empirical understandings of the practical and moral re-
quirements of modernity that would be delivered by sociology. Garfinkel,
Goffman, and other qualitative researchers have been delivering on that
promise. But, until social science recognizes that the value-free project
is a dead end—progress will battle against the false idols of statis-
tical reification—rife with embedded unexamined moral assumptions—
“ethnocentrism” passing for natural facts.

References
Austin, J.L. 1955. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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