Abstract
It is difficult to think of a timelier book than Moral Minefields. While allegations of cancel culture in American academia are hotly debated in the media, Shai Dromi and Samuel Stabler take a calm look at the way moral debates play out in American sociology. Their comprehensive and analytically rigorous account of such debates differs from what many critics outside, and partially also inside, academia suggest. Rather than following the rules of an increasingly polarized culture war that pits liberals against conservatives, American sociologists make use of diverse moral repertoires to engage in and respond to morally charged controversies, which the authors call moral minefields. Dromi and Stabler seek to demonstrate that rather than silencing debate, morality in science opens up new avenues for research and fosters innovation. As they make clear already in the preface and the introduction, their book is a plea for value pluralism. ‘The book demonstrates that the discipline has thrived by acknowledging multiple ways of evaluating the goods that sociology should provide’ (p. xii).
Chapter 1 introduces the theoretical framework of the book (which is also summed up again in the afterword) and shows that the lines of division in academic debate are by far more numerous than the currently polarized debate on this topic suggests. Dromi and Stabler take their analytical tools from the new French sociology of critique, spearheaded by the work of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot. According to the framework outlined in On Justification (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006), later extended by Thévenot and co-authors, justifications for action that individuals can draw on fall into seven different logics or measures of worth. These measures provide scholars with a discursive repertoire to judge what constitutes good academic work. Dromi and Stabler carefully adjust this general framework of Boltanski and Thévenot to the peculiarities of their case. In their view, the moral repertoire of American sociology consists of the efficiency repertoire (focused on the generation of value-neutral empirical facts), the network repertoire (valuing dialogue and cooperation), the anchored repertoire (following a mission to give voice to underrepresented groups), the charismatic repertoire (valuing the work of grand intellectual figures), the civic repertoire (promoting social equality and civic values), the creativity repertoire (focused on originality), and the marketability repertoire (focused on gaining public attention and external funding). Dromi and Stabler consider these repertoires to be incommensurable, that is, while they can be held sequentially or concurrently, they cannot be reduced to each other. It should also be noted that the authors take an agnostic position on the question whether scholars are in fact motivated by these values and instead study the way they are used in discourse, that is, their unit of analysis are not actors, but utterances, as they put it.
In the first chapter, the authors chart out the usefulness of this analytical framework by applying it to the hotly debated thesis that the process of modernization results in a decline of religion, known as the secularization thesis. Again taking their clues from the French sociology of critique, they argue that the debate over secularization demonstrates three common types of response strategies to moral controversy to be at work: delegitimation, partial reform, and reconstitution. These three strategies mark meta-communications that occur when the moral repertoires that are used to judge good work themselves are at stake. Chapters 2–4 are devoted to a detailed analysis of each of these response strategies.
Chapter 2 analyzes how scholars venture into controversial scholarly areas – academic ‘no-go zones’ – and face the challenge of having their work delegitimated. As examples serve long-standing moral contentions over research on human genetics and the culture of poverty, one a contentious issue for its history of facilitating racism and eugenics, the other notorious for a tendency to engage in victim blaming. Dromi and Stabler argue that scholars who do face ostracization for work on these controversial topics are those who ignore, rather than address, the ethical problematics of conducting such research and pretend their work is mere ‘normal science’. Yet if scholars acknowledge and debate the ethical grounds on which they delve, their work is not faced with delegitimating. Those blaming social scientists for censoring and encouraging self-censorship thus misunderstand the dynamics of moral discourse at work in academia.
Chapter 3 looks at partial reforms, that is, the work of renegotiating what counts as acceptable research. The example is research on the nation state, which is challenged by critics of methodological nationalism, who want to see it replaced by a more cosmopolitan sociology. Dromi and Stabler see cosmopolitan sociology as an expression of the network repertoire, which attaches worth to networked relations that cross traditional borders. Scholars on nations and nationalism respond to this criticism with partial reforms: rather than discarding research on nations and nationalism, as the critics of methodological nationalism would have it, these scholars draw on alternate moral logics, such as the anchored repertoire and the efficiency repertoire, to frame research on nations and nationalism as contributing to the common good.
Chapter 4 focuses on the strategy of reconstitution, which scholars employ to continue research in the face of seemingly irresolvable moral struggles in their field. Reconstitution is a way for scholars to redirect controversy by moving from a controversial terrain to a noncontroversial one, framing their research agenda in a way that does not bear on the stakes of the original dispute. The background to a reconstitution effort are fierce scholarly debates that result in a deadlock between advocates of different repertoires. New scholars entering the field thus either must choose sides or try to circumvent the situation. The examples for such initial deadlocks are debates on fertility intentions and on the social effects of breastfeeding. In these debates, a deadlock between the efficiency repertoire and civic repertoire was successfully circumvented by a mobilization of the anchored repertoire.
In the conclusion, Dromi and Stabler use the insights from these case studies to make their argument for value pluralism in sociology. Following the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, they describe value pluralism as the view that multiple and mutually exclusive ways of defining moral goodness coexist. Rather than thinking of value pluralism as a liability, they argue that it is one of sociology’s core strengths. A pluralism of the goals that sociological research serves allows the discipline to circumvent deadlock and to foster innovation.
With this tour de force across the moral terrain of sociology, the book advances considerable beyond discussions of the goals of science that are focused on the distinction between basic and applied science, that is, curiosity and mission driven research. Recognizing that there are more than two standards for judging good work in sociology is an important insight. At the same time, Dromi and Stabler overshoot their target by not making a distinction between moral and non-moral standards of worth. The question why some academic debates turn into moral minefields, while others do not, thus remains curiously unaddressed. If every standard of worth were a moral standard, then any kind of academic disagreement should turn into a moral minefield. While the authors explicitly state that not all research controversies are vested with moral meanings, they offer only one example for a sociological argument that is not morally charged. Yet not all arguments about good science are automatically moral arguments. Judgments about ‘good’ science, one could argue, are like judgments about ‘good’ food: there are multiple standards of worth for judging food, that is, it can be valued for being healthy, tasty, or ethical (i.e. good for the people who produce it and good for the environment), but only the latter is a strictly moral standard. In consequence, it is the transgression of ethical standards in food choice that leads to moral controversy, not the question whether it is tasty.
If we recognize that not every argument about good science is automatically a moral argument, the role attributed to value pluralism in science also changes. Dromi and Stabler argue that a pluralism of moral standards allows us to navigate moral minefields. Yet if we look at those fields in sociology where we already have an endorsement of pluralism, the opposite relationship can be observed as well. The discipline gradually moved toward theory pluralism since the mid-1970s, because sociologists increasingly abstained from treating theory choices as morally charged. Once Marxism was still on the global political agenda during the heights of the Cold War, for instance, theoretical debates on the work of Marx and Engels were politically charged and turned into moral minefields. We achieved theory pluralism by taking the morality out of this debate and by treating Marxism as a theoretical perspective like any other, rather than as a political program. Now, we can sidestep the moral debates of the past and value Marx and Engels’ writings because they foster theoretical creativity, add a global perspective, and so on. If every standard for judging good sociology were indeed a moral standard, as Dromi and Stabler suggest, value pluralism would be much less of a solution to the problem of moral conflict. It is only because some of our values are not moral values that pluralism helps us to navigate moral minefields.