Social Thought and Social Change: Methodological Dilemmas at the Intersection of Science and Ethics

My dissertation, entitled "Social Thought and Social Change: Methodological Dilemmas at the Intersection of Science and Ethics," defends the "positive" claim that ethical convictions are crucial to the maintenance and transformation of formal social institutions, and proceeds to advance a "normative" account of the relationship between ethics and rationality, drawing heavily on the work of Gadamer, MacIntyre, and Charles Taylor. Ultimately these two arguments converge in a proposal for how to better understand institutional change and how to devise more effective interventions in areas where social science has been least successful. In doing so, the investigation criticizes three dominant methodological approaches in social science, namely, pragmatic empiricism, rational choice modeling, and biological reduction. Although each is useful within certain domains, all are ill equipped to understand the nature and importance of ethical convictions, which often blinds researchers to important resources for social change, such as possibilities for persuasion. This claim is illustrated by particular case studies of development projects in Africa and Asia and theorized through a framework drawing on New Institutional Economics. In addition, the distinctive methodological treatment of ethics developed in this project at large also challenges schools of thought within social theory that aspire to ethical naturalism and pluralistic neutrality.

Although this project engages a wide range of issues, it is held together by a sustained set of claims about the relationship between ethics, rationality, and our understanding of human society. Focusing on the phenomenon of persuasion, it ultimately argues that debates about visions of "the good" matter profoundly for human flourishing and aims to show how such debates may hope to constitute a rational enterprise under certain conditions.