Introduction

What are values? The prime aim of this chapter is to argue that social science's understanding of values is deficient, both with regard to their place in social life in general, and within its own methodology. In particular, I wish to attack the common assumption that values are beyond the scope of reason. Such an assumption implies that the values and valuations held and made by people cannot be assessed as better or worse, or more or less true of anything – as if the arguments over values and valuations that go on in everyday life were merely arbitrary, a matter of assertion and power. As such, while they may be perfectly proper objects of study for social science, they seem not to belong to the arguments of social science itself; indeed their alleged dogmatism and irrationality would render them antithetical to the project of social science. Yet in everyday life we regularly engage in reasoning about how to value things – about how children should be brought up, whether a certain kind of behaviour is acceptable, whether the tax system is fair, or whether people are becoming too selfish, and so on. Evaluation, judgement and reasoning overlap, and, I shall argue, sometimes we have to evaluate behaviour or people in order to be able to understand and describe them adequately – both in everyday life and social science.