This page intentionally left blank Why Things Matter to People Andrew Sayer undertakes a fundamental critique of social science’sdiffi- culties in acknowledging that people’s relation to the world is one of concern. As sentient beings, capable of flourishing and suffering, and particularly vulnerable to how others treat us, our view of the world is substantially evaluativ e. Yet modernist way s of thinking encourage the common but extraordinary belief that values are beyond reason, and merely subjective or matters of convention, with little or nothing to do with the kind of beings people are, the quality of their social relations, their material circumstances, or well-being. The au thor shows how social theory and philosophy need to change to reflect the co mplexity o f every- day ethical concerns and the importance people attach to dignity. He argues for a robustly critical social science that explains and evaluates social life from the standpoint of human flourishing. andrew sayer is Professor of Social Theory and Political Economy in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University. His most recent publications include The Moral Significance of Class (2005) and Realism and Social Science (2000). Why Things Matter to People Social Science, Values and Ethical Life andrew sayer cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521171649 © Andrew Sayer 2011 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2011 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Sayer, R. Andrew. Why things matter to people : social science, values and ethical life / Andrew Sayer. p. cm. ISBN 978-1-107-00114-5 (hardback) 1. Social values. 2. Social norms. 3. Values. 4. Normativity (Ethics) 5. Social sciences – Moral and ethical aspects. I. Title. HM681.S29 2011 303.3 0 7201–dc22 2010038774 ISBN 978-1-107-00114-5 Hardback ISBN 978-0-521-17164-9 Paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Some discouragement, some faintness of heart at the new real future which replaces the imaginary, is not unusual, and we do not expect to be deeply moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heartbeat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity. (George Eliot, Middlemarch) We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. (Wittgenstein, 1922, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus ) Contents Acknow ledgem ents page viii 1 Introd uction: a relat ion to the world of concern 1 2 Val ues within reason 23 3 Reas on beyo nd ratio nality: values an d practical reason 59 4 Bein gs fo r whom things matter 98 5 Under standi ng the ethica l dimension of lif e 143 6 Dig nity 189 7 Criti cal social scienc e and its rati onales 216 8 Impl ication s for social scienc e 246 Append ix: Com ments on philos ophical theories of ethics 253 Referen ces 264 Index 279 vii Acknowledgements I am indebted to the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for the fellowship I held in 2004–5 on ethics and social theory, which allowed me to pursue this research. Many people have helped me in various ways. I am indebted to the graduate students at Lancaster University who took ‘Contemporary Debates in Sociolo gy’ over the last five years with me, and who had to endure earlier versions of some of the contents of this book. I’d also like to record my appreciation of Lancaster Sociology Department’s excel- lent support staff team of Claire O’Donnell, Jules Knight, Ruth Love, Karen Gammon and Cath Gort on. There are many friends and colleagues I’d like to thank for their support, feedback, guidance, inspiration and beneficial distraction: John Allen, Margaret Archer, Pat Batteson, Ted Benton, Sharon Bolton, Keith Breen, Gideon Calder, Eric and Cecilia Clark, Norman Fairclough and Isabela Ietcu-Fairclough, Steve and Anne Fleetwood, Bernhard Forchtner, Anne-Marie Fortier, Bridget Graham and Tom Fairclough, Costis Hadjimichalis and Dina Vaiou, Frank Hansen and Helle Fischer, Iain Hunter and Sue Halsam, Bob Jessop, Russell Keat, Richard Light, Kathleen Lynch, Dimitri Mader, Marie Moran, Kevin Morgan, Caroline New, Phil O’Hanlon, Betsy Olson, Diane Reay, Bev Skeggs, Eeva Sointu, Sylvia Walby, Dick Walker, Ruth Wodak, Erik Olin Wright, Jill Yeung, Karin Zotzmann, and friends in the Over the Hill walking club. Special thanks to my good friend Linda Woodhead, fellow member of the Lancaster Neo-Aristotelian Dining Club, who commented both critically and encouragingly on much of the book and helped me think more clearly, and likewise to John O’Neill (once again) for his invaluable advice on philosophical matters. For music therapy I would like to record my thanks to Celso Fonseca, Gillian Welch, David Rawlings, Nitin Sawhney, Per Kindgren, and the late Thomas Tallis and Roberto Baden-Powell; more locally and viii [...]... well as in momentous decisions such as 1 2 Why Things Matter to People whether to have children, change job, or what to do about a relationship which has gone bad These are things people care deeply about They are matters of ‘practical reason’, about how to act, and quite different from the empirical and theoretical questions asked by social science If we ignore them or reduce them to an effect of... evaluative beings, continually having to monitor and evaluate how we and the things we care about are faring, and to decide what to do Some of this evaluation is done ‘on automatic’ through our ‘feel for the game’, 23 24 Why Things Matter to People but some involves reflection or ‘internal conversations’ (Archer, 2003; Bourdieu, 2000; Murdoch, 1970) In social science, it is common to regard values in emotivist... tend to address their readers as fellow participants in life, in first or second person mode; 12 Why Things Matter to People when discussing examples of actions, particularly moral actions, they refer to what ‘we’ or ‘one’ would do or ought to do If they refer to ‘what a rational person would do’, readers are implicitly invited to identify with such a person and to check such claims by reference to their... important to people It seems that becoming a social scientist involves learning to adopt this distanced relation to social life, perhaps so as to be more objective, as if we could become more objective by ignoring part of the object It therefore often tends to produce bland accounts of social life, in which it is difficult to assess the import of things for people One might of course try to report people s... dispositions to people as a feature of their ‘humanity is only partly an empirical claim It remains also partly an aspiration’ (Glover, 2001, p 25) Thus, whenever anyone says something like ‘certain conditions x tend to produce a compassionate response in observers’, it will be easy to imagine counter 18 Why Things Matter to People examples, but to dismiss the claim on that perfectionist basis is precisely to. .. ‘soft domination’, but with 1 This is also what I tried to do in my Moral Significance of Class (Sayer, 2005) 10 Why Things Matter to People people’s well-being and their evaluative orientation to the world, particularly through their relations to others (Bourdieu, 1990) For example, in her book Personal Life, Carol Smart attempts to do justice to how lives are lived and notes that, while there is a... science to understand ourselves as evaluative beings and to delve into ethics, try recalling occasions when you have felt a burning sense of outrage at some injustice, cruelty or selfishness, whether to yourself or to others These were things that presumably mattered, and hence are worth trying to understand Then try explaining why you responded in that way; what caused or warranted that response? Why did... conducive to respectful treatment of others, friendliness or selfishness? 8 Why Things Matter to People Although this ethical dimension of life matters enormously to us, social science is often poor at acknowledging and understanding it, preferring to account for action in terms of self-interest, or norm-following, or habitual action, or discursive constitution, which comprehensively fail to deal with... one-sided and incomplete, so that social science is still in their grip, and hence it struggles to treat values as involving a kind of reasoning about things and circumstances This weakens social science’s ability to understand and convey why anything matters to actors, why values and norms have normative force, or why actors or researchers see anything as good or bad (Archer, 2000a) While it has ... social scientists would actually say such bizarre things in such a context But many do make such assumptions 4 Why Things Matter to People when practising their social science, and I invented the example to point to their absurdity The non-social scientist is saying that her judgement is not arbitrary or merely subjective but reasonable in relation to what it’s about – ‘real suffering’, she might say . these matters to people, one might expect social science to have a better idea of what ‘well-being’ and so on mean. How could 8 Why Things Matter to People . relation imply 6 Why Things Matter to People or provide a warrant for paternalistic, illiberal intervention: people still have the right to decide for themselves