Politics and Political Philosophy
These moral issues that might be faced by the researcher have wider implications. Whether we are thinking about female circumcision, capital punishment or social stratification, we are implicitly or explicitly taking a stand on what sort of society we want to live in, and what the ‘good’ society might look like.
Some social sciences and social scientists have been intimately involved with political arguments and processes - from Marx’s leading role in the foundation of the International Working Men’s Association to Anthony Giddens’s involvement with New Labour and the ‘Third Way’ (from the sublime to the ridiculous?). Government advisers include economists, political scientists, social policy and other experts (although interestingly not many psychologists and historians), all of whom would regard themselves as in some sense or another social scientists. It is not just in the social sciences that we find this connection, since modern governments have teams of natural science advisers. The main difference is that in the latter case, scientific advice is commonly treated as a clear warrant for or legitimation of action.Be that as it may, the social sciences raise issues about the desirability and possibility of different types of society, and this takes us into issues of political philosophy. This will become most apparent when we discuss the idea of an ‘emancipatory’ science - a science whose aim is human liberation - and theories of feminist epistemology, developed from Marxism, that suggest that an oppressed group has access to knowledge in a way that other groups do not. Politics will, however, always be close to the surface.