Etika u društvenim i humanističkim naukama
Ethics in social sciences and humanities

Author(s): Jovan Babić
Subject(s): Politics / Political Sciences, Philosophy, Social Sciences, Ethics / Practical Philosophy
Published by: Институт друштвених наука
Keywords: ethics; ethical analysis; natural sciences; social sciences and humanities
Summary/Abstract: In addition to everything else, the modern world is also characterised by a huge discrepancy. It concerns the status and role of social sciences in the overall life of people in the world. While on the one hand, we perceive a huge progress in technology, as well as in natural sciences on which such technology is based on, on the other hand we witness a spiritual and civilizational crisis which manifests as a general scarcity of the ideas which could serve as the basis for sustainable and morally acceptable values and criteria. In the last two centuries, natural sciences have created the foundation for an unprecedented progress in taming the nature and expanding human freedoms when it comes to tools for the attainment of previously unreachable goals. However, examination of nature, structure, as well as validity of these goals is not a subject of natural, but rather of social sciences, and these lag far behind the galloping technology which often renders current civilizational and ethical standards inapplicable and/or inadequate. There are a couple of reasons for such condition. The greatest and most important of them is a certain scholastic inertia which drives social sciences towards recycling certain pieces of research, long exhausted, and many of these gain no real results. Scholasticism drastically narrows down the domain of what is being perceived as an appropriate and welcome, even legitimate research subject. The next reason for this situation is the easiness of utilisation of social sciences for the creation and justification of utopian ideas and of the ideologies based on them, which offer the false promise of a shortcut to happiness and satisfaction. This partially parasitize on the fact that the criteria for plausibility and relevance in social sciences are hard to establish precisely and in a timely manner. It sometimes takes very long time to identify what is really relevant in them, and what is not. In the meantime, social sciences may easily serve for various apologetic purposes. However, all this cannot diminish their importance, as in the overall scheme of things, social sciences deal with something which is ultimately more important than what natural sciences deal with: goals. While natural sciences, in their attempts to explain causalities of the world, engage in research of nature and structure of resources for undefined goals, social sciences actually deal with these very goals and their potential justifications. This requires a much more complex concept of time and inclusion of different theoretical principles and contents than those that comfortably delimit research to finding and mapping causes in explaining phenomena: the introduction of final goals and theoretically quite risky parameters for articulation of potential value criteria. This risk is immediately evident in the social sciences’ imperative of impartiality and objectivity in researching what is essentially the matter of interest, i.e. the goals we care for, or we should care for. Here is perhaps where the main problem lies when it comes to social sciences: when we need to cross what we care for with what we should care for – while still maintaining the position that this is all a matter of liberty, rather than of values and facts. This crossroad of real, the causality of which is ever thoroughly explained by natural sciences, and possible, which is ever elusive, just like horizon, and can usually be attained only with major efforts, is the location of ethical analysis of social sciences and humanities.

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