The Value of Value Judgments in Sociology

Abstract

DAVID J. GRAY, in a recent issue of this journal (1968), expresses a number of judgments about the current practice of sociology and its dominant ideology. I wish to expand some of his points and to issue a cautionary note. Mr. Gray urges sociologists to follow the example of Weber and Durkheim in addressing themselves to problems which are important and not refusing to make judgments about what needs to be done (1968:176-178). Sociologists who attempt to be free, he maintains, do violence to their vocation in two ways: First, they bind themselves over to the values of others. At the least, they sell their service to those with the most power and money as distinguished from those with the greatest need. Mr. Gray mentions the flowering of lucrative specialties such as industrial and medical sociology and the withering of sociological theory, history of social thought, and the sociology of religion (1968:179). Mr. Gray raises the spectre that this relatively venal prostitution may so debase the profession that value free sociologists will come to serve any master no matter how vile, just as physical scientists and engineers served the Nazis (1968:179). In the second place, scientists who abstain from judgments are prone to glorify method at the expense of substance (1968:182-183). Quantitative and experimental methods are best wherever they can be applied, but they cannot be applied to all the most important questions. To insist that only those inquiries are which use ideal methods condemns sociology to triviality. Mr. Gray suggests that many sociologists, especially those who look upon their work as an occupation rather than a calling, deliberately choose minuscule problems because they are easy to solve by scientific methods (1968:184). They provide a quick road to advancement in the institutional hierarchy. The wages of sin are death--in this case, the death of a discipline, a death by irrelevance and triviality-the assassins of sociology its very body guards, the advocates of value-free detachment.