In his 1974 Presidential Address to the American Philosophical Association, John Rawls told his audience that moral philosophers should be keen observers of the social world. He argued that moral philosophy, ‘the study of substantive moral conceptions and their relation to our moral sensibility’,Footnote 1 could proceed independently from other branches of philosophy using the method of reflective equilibrium. In a reflective equilibrium, our ‘considered convictions’ at different levels of abstraction – from judgements about concrete cases to those about the most abstract principles – are brought into coherence.Footnote 2 Rawls told his audience that such a method involves thinking of ‘the moral theorist as an observer’,Footnote 3 and cautioned them: ‘we must not turn away from this task because much of it may appear to belong to psychology or social theory and not to philosophy’.Footnote 4 Our goal in this article is to show what we, as moral and political theorists, might be able to gain by taking Rawls’ invitation to be ‘observers’ literally, paying attention to the situated experience of ordinary moral agents. We build a case for an ethnographic sensibility in moral and political theory, and aim to show how it can be useful for the purposes of normative inquiry.Footnote 5
While we take our intervention to be in the spirit of Rawls’ original proposal regarding how normative theory ought to proceed, we also take heed of a recent wave of criticism that has been leveled at how normative theory has in fact evolved. Despite Rawls’ insistence on carefully observing the social world, scholars writing in his wake have primarily devoted their energies to developing abstract principles for the basic structure of an ideally just society – an enterprise that has become known as ‘ideal theory’. This body of work has come under attack from proponents of ‘non-ideal theory’ for being too detached from reality to offer practical guidance,Footnote 6 and from political realists for being insufficiently attuned to the peculiarities of the political realm.Footnote 7 These critics have urged us to start the process of normative reflection from the here and now, with the situated experience of ordinary agents, trying to understand the practices of politics and morality as they actually exist. We believe that a turn toward ethnography can serve to anchor a more grounded approach to political theory, which is nevertheless compatible with the spirit of Rawls’ project.
Adopting an ethnographic sensibility involves being interested in what people do as well as why they do it. It is to be concerned with how they perceive, think about, and ascribe meaning to their environment and behavior. The enterprise is both descriptive and interpretive: it involves observing how people respond to specific situationsFootnote 8 and trying to make sense of what these situations look like to them – interpreting their interpretations of the social world.Footnote 9 In the context of normative inquiry, adopting an ethnographic sensibility means being attuned to how individuals understand themselves as situated moral and political agents. This involves paying attention to the features of the situations in which they find themselves (What normative demands are they exposed to? What constraints do they operate under?) and to their experience (How do they perceive these demands? How do they conceive of their roles and responsibilities?).
By using the term ‘ethnographic sensibility’ rather than ‘ethnography’, we follow a range of authors who maintain that participant observation, of the long-term immersive sort typically practiced by anthropologists, is not the only way to find out how people experience their social reality and give meaning to it.Footnote 10 One can also attain such understanding, or verstehen,Footnote 11 by closely examining the texts and cultural artifacts they produce, by conducting interviews, by being embedded in research sites for shorter visits or by consulting ethnographies written by other scholars. While some measure of personal involvement in the field is certainly valuable, it is the frame of mind with which the researcher approaches the material, rather than the specific research protocol, that is significant for our purposes.
We begin by articulating what an ethnographic sensibility consists of, and by distinguishing it from three other ways in which political theorists draw upon empirical evidence. We then offer five arguments in favor of an ethnographic sensibility in contemporary normative theory: (1) epistemic, (2) diagnostic, (3) evaluative, (4) valuational and (5) ontological. Arguments 1, 2 and 3 concern the application of normative principles to specific social contexts; Arguments 4 and 5 venture further, showing how a close look at social practices and institutions can lead to new insights about the grounding, justification, and conditions of possibility of normative values and principles. We illustrate each argument with examples from our own research or that of other ethnographically minded theorists. We end by discussing three dangers that are endemic to the ethnographic stance – perspectival absorption, bias and particularism.
AN ETHNOGRAPHIC SENSIBILITY IN POLITICAL THEORY
Ethnography has long served as a valuable companion to interpretive, critical and conceptual strands of political theory. By drawing our attention to the experience of ordinary people, ethnographic research has played a part in unmasking hegemonic discourses, in uncovering conceptual blind spots and in revealing political biases implicit in the workings of our institutions.Footnote 12 By forcing us to come to terms with cultures and institutions different from our own, ethnography has also given us an external vantage point from which to criticize the functioning of our own societies and to interrogate their unsubstantiated claims to universality.Footnote 13 For all of these reasons, political theorists should welcome the recent resurgence of interest in ethnographic methods among political scientists.Footnote 14
Our goal in this article is to take the case for an ethnographic sensibility further, by showing that it has something to contribute to normative political theory as well.Footnote 15 By normative political theory, we mean the attempt to organize our beliefs about what is right or wrong, good or bad, into a body of systematic principles at various levels of abstraction and generality that can illuminate our considered judgements and provide us with guidance on how to act in the world. Such a form of theorizing might appear problematic to many ethnographers, who are trained to be acutely sensitive to local differences. Those imbued with an ethnographic sensibility might question whether our values and principles are sufficiently homogeneous to be incorporated into a coherent theory, whether we can speak in any meaningful way of ‘our’ values at all and whether attempts to develop a systematic political theory might relay ethnocentric assumptions under the cover of ‘universal’ principles.
We recognize the force of these reservations, and believe that they point to an important truth, namely, that even if there were a universal core of moral principles to be discovered – a possibility that some, but by no means all, political theorists entertain, and about which we here remain agnostic – the specific meaning and tangible features given to them would vary greatly depending on culture and context. It is incumbent upon political theory, as we understand it, to take this mediating influence of context seriously: not merely to articulate our concern for abstract and general principles like respect for human dignity, but also to understand the specific form that these take in particular social settings (What does it mean, in this situation, to show respect?).Footnote 16 At this mid-level of theorizing, normative political theory and ethnography can work hand in hand.
To adopt an ethnographic sensibility in normative theory, as we understand it, is to begin with the presumption that ‘the normative’ is not the exclusive prerogative of philosophers. Everyday life is suffused with discussions about what is proper and improper, right or wrong; about which institutional arrangements are to be welcomed, and which to be resisted; and about which values they embody or fail to do so.Footnote 17 To adopt an ethnographic sensibility is to embrace the idea that we can enrich our theorizing by observing how ordinary people discuss such matters, make moral choices, evaluate each other’s conduct, and deal with institutional constraints.Footnote 18
One might wonder whether it is necessary to call attention to the need for an ethnographic sensibility, or whether such a sensibility already pervades our discipline. There is a sense in which theorists are always ‘out there’, in the field: we live in communities and societies that are also moral communities. They contain a plethora of norms and values; moral reasoning, moral dialogue and moral disagreement are integral to them. It is in this sense that Michelle Moody-Adams describes moral theorizing as ‘fieldwork in familiar places’,Footnote 19 and that Michael Walzer provides an account of ‘interpretation’ as a ‘path’ to moral philosophy that starts ‘from where we are’.Footnote 20
These approaches suggest that theorists might be able to engage in normative inquiry in a way that is ethnographically sensitive without having to take on board additional material, such as ethnographies written by others or their own field observations. This is a plausible view for Moody-Adams and Walzer because they are interested in basic moral questions – and it is indeed true that we all inhabit a social world in which such questions, and discussions about them, already exist. But as Walzer himself emphasizes elsewhere, we also inhabit a world in which different spheres, communities and social roles exist side by side.Footnote 21
When one wants to ask more specific questions about the realization of values in these different spheres and from within these different roles, it is more tenuous to claim that we are truly ‘at home’ in them. We may know what it is like to be a ‘moral agent’ in general, but not what it is like to be, say, a frontline bureaucrat who must serve an endless stream of clients in an environment that is emotionally charged and where resources are chronically scarce. Although welfare bureaucracies are part of ‘our’ world, as academic philosophers we do not inhabit them in any straightforward sense. In order to understand what it is like to be a specific kind of moral agent, we might want to learn from those who play such roles every day. Thus an ethnographic sensibility suggests itself particularly when one is interested in how certain values can be realized in today’s pluralistic world with its multiplicity of realms, institutions and roles.
Rawls’ method of reflective equilibrium in fact invites insights stemming from an ethnographic sensibility. It requires us to bring our considered judgements about values and principles and our intuitions about specific cases into harmony with one another. Insights from concrete cases can lead us to revise more abstract commitments.Footnote 22 Consider, for example, Jane Jacobs’ well-known descriptions of city life in Greenwich Village.Footnote 23 Through a rich array of ethnographic vignettes that chronicle people’s interactions on the street, Jacobs showed how city life in a vibrant and mixed-use neighborhood could achieve a balance between sociability and privacy. Sidewalks, shops and parks offer inhabitants frequent opportunities to meet and loiter, but also provide plenty of opportunities to interrupt conversations and withdraw. They thus enable a mode of non-committal social interaction that Jacobs called ‘contact’: one can participate in the vitality of city life while retaining some measure of reserve and independence. Years later, Jacobs’ portrayal of urban sociability was recuperated in a far more abstract debate by Iris Marion Young,Footnote 24 who saw in this model of interaction between strangers a desirable alternative to the atomism of liberal individualism and the togetherness of communitarianism.Footnote 25
Jacob’s book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, illustrates not only how an ethnographic sensibility can contribute to abstract debates in political theory, but also how ethnographic material differs from, and complements, three other forms of empirical data that political theorists frequently draw upon – causal claims about social mechanisms, opinion surveys about values and preferences, and experiments teasing out moral intuitions.
Political theorists often turn to social science to identify causal mechanisms that lead to social outcomes that are, according to their own theories, desirable or undesirable. Elizabeth Anderson, for instance, marshals a substantial amount of secondary evidence to show that segregation is responsible for the persistence of disadvantage along racial lines in the United States.Footnote 26 This serves as both an indictment of segregation and an indication of how we might begin to address the problem of racial disadvantage. It would be tempting to read Jacobs’ argument along the same lines, as showing that city life is instrumental in bringing about a desirable form of sociability. But as David Thacher observes, ‘to put it that way is to engage in a kind of revisionism’,Footnote 27 because the very ideal of sociability that Jacobs offers is one that most of us only came to recognize by reading her work. Her descriptions uncovered a dimension of city life that many readers found, upon reflection, valuable and desirable.Footnote 28 Ethnographies shed light not just on causal mechanisms, but also on meanings and values. As such, they can play a role that is internal to the process of normative reflection: they invite readers to think not only about how to attain ends they already have in sight, but also to reconsider the ends they seek.
Another way to find out what people value, of course, is to ask them about it directly, through opinion surveys. It is important, however, to distinguish between the data that such surveys yield and the type of empirical material generated through interpretive ethnography. A study like Jacobs’ does not simply report the values that people hold, as a survey would, but brings to light a set of implicit commitments that undergird their practices and actions, and that they may not be aware of. It uncovers, moreover, how these commitments are tied to other values and meanings: it not only tells us what people value, but also why they value it. One would first need to suspect the existence of such commitments before one could even begin to design an adequate set of survey questions to tease them out. Surveys are useful when we are looking for statistically significant answers to well-defined questions; ethnographies, however, can help us figure out what questions are worth asking in the first place.
Ethnographies differ, finally, from a third type of empirical material used with increasing frequency in normative theorizing – experiments designed to capture moral intuitions. Experimental philosophers capture data about how people react to thought experiments or vignettes involving morally laden decisions.Footnote 29 These experiments typically involve choice situations that are framed in detail by researchers and sets of options that are well demarcated. In contrast, ethnographies give us insight into how people frame moral questions on their own, and how they conceive of the options available to them. Another important difference is that while experiments capture people’s decisions at a particular moment in time, ethnographic research, which is often conducted over a period of months, can uncover how people make choices that have real consequences on a repeated basis, and how they come to live with such choices, or revise them over time. By expanding the temporal horizon, ethnography allows us to explore not only one-off decisions, but also practices and habits of thinking.
FIVE ARGUMENTS FOR AN ETHNOGRAPHIC SENSIBILITY
We offer five arguments for adopting an ethnographic sensibility. Each of them corresponds to a central task of contemporary normative theory:
1) To understand the nature of the normative demands that individuals face in certain situations or social roles (epistemic);
2) To diagnose the nature of the obstacles that individuals encounter when trying to respond to these demands (diagnostic);
3) To evaluate whether the practices that individuals engage in, and the institutional arrangements in which they are placed, are conducive to advancing a given set of values (evaluative);
4) To probe, question and refine our comprehension of what these values are, and what they ought to be (valuational); and
5) To uncover the social ontologies that undergird our system of values (ontological).
These arguments fall into two broad categories: Arguments 1–3 concern the application of normative principles to particular social contexts, while Arguments 4 and 5 lead, in different ways, from the interpretation of existing social practices to new insights about normative principles.
Applying Normative Principles Here and Now
The epistemic argument
Ethnographic attention to how individuals operate in specific contexts can help us map out the normative demands they must contend with. This exercise often reveals a moral terrain that is more complex and nuanced than one may have suspected from afar. Some of this texture can be gleaned by taking a close and extended look at the context and situations in which individuals find themselves, by probing them about their motives for action and by listening to the justifications they offer for their conduct. We may also be alerted to the absence or presence of relevant demands by observing a disjuncture between how people act, and how we think they ought to act.
Of course, the fact that individuals recognize certain demands as having moral force does not mean that they are necessarily right to do so. When examining a given situation, we must keep track of which demands the people we study believe are at play; compare those demands to the ones that we, as observers, can identify; and reflect on which of those are justified and which are not. An ethnographic sensibility is in no way a substitute for independent moral reflection. Rather, it provides us with the material on the basis of which we can engage in such reflection.
Consider, for example, the norms regulating post-mortem organ donations. Transplant professionals insist on keeping the identities of organ recipients and donor families secret from each other. Such anonymity is meant to provide both parties with a sense of closure; it is also justified on the grounds that it would insulate fragile recipients from the emotional volatility of donor kin, and allow them to regain a healthy sense of ownership over their bodies.
In contrast to this consensus among transplant professionals, Lesley Sharp, a medical anthropologist, has shown that donor families and recipients often go to considerable effort to meet each other, and that when they manage to do so, they frequently form strong sentimental bonds of ‘fictive kinship’, incorporating ‘one another as mothers and fathers, sisters, brothers, and children’.Footnote 30 According to Sharp, ‘the fact that donor flesh coexists (and literally, bonds) with the recipient’s through successful transplant surgery facilitates the literal reading of this bond as a “blood” tie’.Footnote 31
By identifying and describing these distinctive ties, and showing how much value they have for those involved, Sharp’s ethnography informs our normative thinking.Footnote 32 It unsettles our tacit assumptions about the importance of closure, and makes us reconsider whether current practices favoring anonymity are justified. The ethnography, of course, does not conclusively settle the question of how we ought to regulate organ donations. It does not tell us, in particular, what proportions of recipients and donors are eager to meet each other, a fact that might be essential to any policy decision. If we wanted to know that, a survey might serve us better. But Sharp’s ethnography alerts us to the existence of a valuable kind of interpersonal bond, and suggests a set of relevant questions that we might otherwise not have thought to ask.
Sometimes, the findings brought about by ethnographic inquiry are valuable because they dispel myths about the nature of ordinary moral practice in the social institutions that surround us. Bernardo Zacka’s research examines the everyday moral life of frontline workers, or ‘street-level bureaucrats’, who serve as mediators between citizens and the state.Footnote 33 It is based on eight months of participant observation in a publicly funded anti-poverty agency, the Norville Community Development Initiative (NCDI), which is responsible for helping low-income families apply for food stamps, fuel assistance, earned income tax credit, head start programs and citizenship in a large Northeastern US city. Over the course of his fieldwork, Zacka was struck by the extent to which the directives that frontline workers receive are conflicting and underdeterminate. In contrast with popular representations of bureaucratic work as rule-governed, especially at the lowest rungs of an organization, such workers had to routinely navigate a complex moral terrain mined by normative dilemmas with little direction on how to do so.
Part of this normative complexity stemmed from the fact that frontline workers received competing normative guidance from various constituencies. The NCDI had recently rolled out a new case management software, and senior managers were keen to use it to improve efficiency; middle managers were primarily concerned with upholding ‘professional’ standards of impartiality and detachment; the majority of frontline workers had a background in social work, and were committed to a more involved ethic of care; and clients were concerned above all with responsiveness to their particular needs. Frontline workers were left to figure out how to reconcile these competing demands.
The majority of cases discussed in textbooks on administrative ethics revolve around the problems posed by loyalty to hierarchy:Footnote 34 what should one do when the demands one encounters as the bearer of a social role (that is, as a subordinate hired to implement hierarchical directives) conflict with the demands of ordinary morality? The types of dilemmas that Zacka observed, however, were of a different sort. They did not involve a conflict between demands that were internal vs. external to the role, but between a variety of demands that were all internal to the role. Frontline workers were involved in the arduous task of figuring out what it meant to perform their role responsibly.
As in the case of organ donation, describing the moral terrain that street-level bureaucrats must navigate does not by itself resolve the normative dilemmas they face. It serves, however, to clarify the range of normative demands to which they are exposed, and this is a necessary first step towards determining what they have most reason to do, all things considered. A close acquaintance with context, of the kind ethnographic observation provides, is key here as well, because context can change the weight of the reasons that agents encounter. Context is especially important to moral particularists, who believe that the weight of reasons as well as their valence – whether they count as reasons for or against doing something – depends on the full constellation of reasons an actor encounters.Footnote 35 In both of these ways, the process of carefully mapping out what demands apply in a given situation is integral to the process of moral reasoning. To sum up, then, an ethnographic sensibility can play an epistemic role in the process of normative reasoning by shedding light on what people value, by uncovering the normative reasons they encounter, and by helping us reflect upon the weight and valence of these reasons in a specific context.
The diagnostic argument
One of the distinctive features of ethnographic inquiry is that it requires researchers to look at social reality from two perspectives: that of the practitioners they study, and their own. The discrepancy between these two perspectives, and the capacity to move back and forth between them, gives ethnography much of its purchase as a tool for moral reflection. In our own work, we have found such perspectival duality particularly useful for the diagnosis of obstacles to moral agency.
Failure to respond to moral demands can be due to several factors, including inattention, unwillingness, lack of resources, distorted moral perception, and incorrect moral reasoning. In some cases, individuals can rightly be blamed for failing to respond, whereas in others, blame is unwarranted. ‘Ought implies can’ is a common refrain in normative theorizing. It blocks moral demands whenever individuals find themselves confronted with obstacles they are not responsible for and cannot overcome. But this escape clause can easily be abused by agents who try to shield themselves from moral demands that are rightly directed at them. ‘Ought implies can’ may also serve to cover up substantive disagreements about the nature and strength of moral demands in specific contexts. This is why a careful examination of obstacles and a teasing out of such obstacles from substantive moral disagreements is needed in order to properly attribute moral responsibility.
To draw such distinctions, however, one first needs to carefully diagnose the nature of the obstacles that individuals encounter when trying to live and act morally. Some of these obstacles are painfully clear to those who belong to the relevant community of practice, and ethnographers can learn about them through interviews or informal conversations. Other obstacles, however, are less visible to practitioners, and ethnographers can play a valuable role in uncovering them. This is often true, for instance, of obstacles that are structural in nature, and that stem not so much from failures of specific individuals or organizations, but rather from basic institutions or cultural patterns in a society. Other obstacles that can be difficult to spot for practitioners are ‘internal’: they have to do with the mental setup with which they approach certain questions. For example, they may develop habits of moral reasoning, or adopt views about their own role, that focus disproportionately on certain moral considerations and systematically downplay others. After many years on the job, their moral perception and sensibility can become biased, a phenomenon that is sometimes described as déformation professionelle.
In order to detect these obstacles, it can be helpful to pay attention to subtle differences between how we, as observers, understand what is morally at stake in a situation and how those directly involved understand it, or between different kinds of vocabulary, with different moral valuations, used by observers and practitioners. Ethnographers, even those who work close to home, are not always fully socialized into the specific community of practice they study. This may, at times, enable them to spot and analyze obstacles that are difficult to see for those who are caught up in the routine of everyday work.
An example from Lisa Herzog’s work can illustrate these points. Over a period of eighteen months, she examined the practices of a development agency, here referred to as ONEBANK, which offers financial services to clients in developing economies, with an explicit commitment to sustainable development and the fight against poverty. Her research included extensive interviews with managers, visits to the bank’s training centers, conversations with employees and two week-long field trips. Herzog’s fieldwork revealed that situating ONEBANK within its field of competitors – other environmental agencies or NGOs that offered financial services, as well as commercial banks – was pivotal for understanding the obstacles it faced to fulfilling its mission.
Consider, for instance, the training of staff. In order to fulfill its moral mission, ONEBANK needed well-trained employees. Hiring such employees, however, is a challenge in countries where few people finish high school, let alone university. As Herzog learned during her field visits, this was not just a question of providing candidates with a final polish, or teaching them the details of ONEBANK’s business model. It also involved imparting a host of basic skills on them, including how to give presentations and negotiate with clients. ONEBANK circumvented the problem of recruiting qualified employees by training its staff in house. The training it offered was so thorough and wide ranging that new recruits often came to see their instructors as quasi-parental figures.
But as Herzog also learned from conversations with managers and employees, the trust relationships built during these courses did not prevent a certain percentage of employees from leaving ONEBANK upon completing their training or shortly thereafter. They were lured away by competitors who offered them higher salaries. Those who stayed with ONEBANK sometimes described such cases in terms of a breach of loyalty, and were outraged that other banks did not offer their own training courses. Had they created a survey to delve deeper into these issues, they would probably have framed questions in these highly moralized terms.
To an outside observer like Herzog, however, this way of framing the problem seemed somewhat partial and incomplete. The challenge that ONEBANK faced was structural, even though her interlocutors did not describe it as such: the sector as a whole under-invested in the training of employees because well-trained employees were an asset that could easily be reaped by others. This was a typical ‘commons’ problem, not the result of flaws in individual moral character. ONEBANK, with its explicit moral commitments, faced this problem in a particularly acute way. But other competitors would also have benefited from a training system for employees if only they could coordinate their efforts to build one on fair terms.
This put ONEBANK’s managers in a predicament: they saw themselves as bankers, providing financial services in order to promote economic development. They did not see ONEBANK as a charity offering free education to young employees, but in some countries it had effectively taken on this role, which detracted considerable resources away from its core mission. While the diagnosis of such an obstacle does not tell us precisely how it should be overcome, it directs our attention away from individual or organizational solutions and toward the importance of establishing systems of co-operation that enable competitors to solve collective action problems together.Footnote 36
The evaluative argument
One of the main tasks of normative theory is to assess how well individuals’ conduct measures up against the values that we take to be central to our moral and political culture. Our discussion so far has presupposed a certain picture of moral life that is familiar to moral and political philosophers. According to this view, individuals hold certain values, perceive demands that apply to them, and decide how to act accordingly. Sociologists of culture have long argued, however, that this picture of human action is highly selective.Footnote 37 They have pointed out that individuals often cannot articulate what motivates their actions, and that when they appeal to moral ‘values’ it is often after the fact, in the form of post hoc rationalizationsFootnote 38 or post hoc ‘sensemaking’.Footnote 39 Much human action occurs in the form of routinized, and largely unreflective, activities that are taken for granted – in the form of practices.Footnote 40
To evaluate human conduct, therefore, we must look not just at the actions that people consciously and reflectively perform, but also at the practices they engage in. To evaluate a practice is to evaluate its effects – the work it does with respect to an independently specified set of values. This involves examining the consequences of the practice for the parties involved in it, and the meaning it carries for them. What makes such an evaluative exercise challenging is that it must rely on knowledge that belongs to those who are involved in the community of practice, and on their shared interpretive sensibility, which often goes unspoken. The only way to bridge this gap in knowledge and sensibility is to observe practices at work up close, and to probe those who participate in them.
Take, for example, the practice of small talk that Zacka repeatedly observed at the frontlines of public service delivery.Footnote 41 In a cramped and emotionally charged environment, with more clients than they have the capacity to serve, what justification could street-level bureaucrats possibly have for exchanging lengthy pleasantries with clients, inquiring about their plans for the weekend or the latest recipes they had tried?
The answer to such a question hinges, in part, on an understanding of what the bureaucratic encounter means for the concerned parties. As Zacka realized over the course of his fieldwork, and in line with the findings of other scholars, bureaucrats and clients see their encounter not only as an occasion for the provision of services, but also as a moment in which status is assigned. For clients, especially, the encounter is an occasion in which they can feel respected or demeaned at the hands of public authorities. In this context, clients tend to see small talk as an expression of regard or concern, which validates them as particular individuals, in the midst of the highly impersonal and frequently alienating world of bureaucratic procedures.
But the value of small talk is not merely expressive or symbolic. The cumulative effect of these seemingly trivial interactions is to put clients at ease and to create a modicum of trust between the two parties. Such trust proves invaluable in facilitating the disclosure of sensitive information (on topics such as disability or immigration status) that clients would otherwise be reluctant to share. This information, in turn, enables case managers to provide clients with more effective assistance.
As is often the case with social practices, those who participate in small talk may not be fully aware of its benefits and may engage in it simply ‘because that’s the way things are done here’. But these benefits become all too palpable in retrospect, if the practice is suspended. Researchers have found, for instance, that following the latest wave of welfare reform, caseworkers in Louisiana were under so much pressure to process clients at greater speed that they could no longer build personal relationships of trust with them.Footnote 42 As a result, clients felt less comfortable disclosing personal information, and cases of domestic violence started going undetected at a greater rate. As one worker put it: ‘you just don’t have time to pull [domestic violence] out of somebody, unless they come here with visible observations [bruises]…’.Footnote 43
While a closer understanding of social practices can help us better evaluate them from the standpoint of independent normative principles, it is important to add that the nature of these practices can also, at times, be relevant for determining what the relevant principles of assessment are. In the words of Andrea Sangiovanni, practices can sometimes trigger relational normative principles – principles that apply because of the nature of the relations that bind participants in a given practice.Footnote 44 If frontline workers at the NCDI must be especially careful to treat their clients with respect and consideration, it is, in part, because these clients tend to be particularly vulnerable, because their interaction is traversed by a deep imbalance of power and because the workers’ actions carry extra symbolic weight since they are not carried out in a private capacity but, however indirectly, in the name of the state. The ethnographic analysis of social practices can help us understand the relational duties that arise from them.
Note that this is not the same as saying, as relativists would, that social practices can determine all principles of political morality, that all our standards of assessment are ‘internal’ to practices. Our reasons for holding certain principles may have nothing to do with existing practices, yet these practices may still play a role in determining which of our principles apply in a given situation.
From the Here and Now to Normative Principles
The valuational argument
So far, we have argued for the usefulness of an ethnographic sensibility when applying normative principles to the social world. But ethnography can also help us better understand, and sometimes even revise, our normative principles and values.
This can happen when we encounter individual cases about which we have strong intuitions. These intuitions may lead us to reassess our commitment to more abstract values or principles. Ethnographic writing shares with literature and journalism the power to capture experiences vividly and to put them before our eyes in a way that can profoundly resonate with us.Footnote 45 Susan Okin’s attack on multiculturalism from a feminist perspective, for example, is explicitly informed by interviews with women affected by polygamy and by reports about ‘overcrowded apartments’ and ‘lack of private space for each wife’.Footnote 46 While Okin may not have conducted ethnographic work herself, and while she may have failed to notice some of the cultural complexities around the issue, the testimonies she drew on influenced her position on more abstract principles, as well as that of many readers.
There is, however, another way in which ethnography can inform our thinking about normative principles: by helping us interpret and understand existing social practices. As Sangiovanni points out, many higher-level principles have an ‘open texture’.Footnote 47 To understand how they bear on concrete questions, we need ‘mediating principles’, that is, ‘principles that bridge the gap between the higher-level principles and the lower-level norms and rules constitutive of the practice as it currently is’.Footnote 48 In order to find the ‘mediating principles’ that ‘spell out’ what higher-level principles mean for a given practice, we need to interpret the practice’s ‘nature and structure’; we need to ‘try to understand [its] point and purpose […] by seeking to characterize its underlying or motivating value or goodness (should it have any)’.Footnote 49
The search for mediating principles, and the exercise in social interpretation that goes along with it, are processes in which ordinary moral agents are very much involved, and ethnography can help us gain access to their thoughts and experiences. Our social world is replete with individuals trying to live their lives according to certain values and principles, in the context of certain institutional arrangements. Doing so involves finding concrete interpretations of what higher-level principles and values such as ‘equality’ or ‘freedom’ mean in these different settings. By closely observing these various ‘experiments of living’,Footnote 50 and by reflecting upon them, we can clarify, revise or update our own mediating principles. Of particular interest, in that respect, are situations in which individuals deviate from what is considered ‘normal’ and explore new, potentially progressive practices – experiments that, in Mill’s words, ‘if adopted by others, would be likely to be any improvement on established practice’.Footnote 51
In Beyond Adversary Democracy, Jane Mansbridge offers an example of how an ethnographic sensibility can contribute to the search for mediating principles.Footnote 52 The book, which in many respects exemplifies the approach we have been advocating, relies on a close study of an urban crisis center, Helpline, the staff members of which share a belief in participatory democracy and a strong commitment to egalitarian values. Despite this egalitarian ethos, Mansbridge found that inequalities in political power persisted within the center, and, more surprisingly perhaps, that staff members were genuinely unperturbed by them.
In trying to make sense of this apparent contradiction, Mansbridge came to realize that staff members did not see equal political power as a necessary expression of their commitment to democracy and egalitarianism. Instead, they believed that such a commitment could be better embodied through three other mediating principles: equal protection of everyone’s interests, equal respect and personal growth through participation in collective affairs. After observing Helpline at work, Mansbridge was forced to conclude, moreover, that these three normative principles could sometimes be better served by means other than equal power among members.Footnote 53 In ‘unitary’ settings like that of Helpline, where members know each other and have shared interests, where respect derives from sources other than power and where all members contribute as much as they can to collective pursuits, it is possible to have fervent democratic practices and a commitment to equality even in the absence of equal power. Mansbridge’s findings, drawn from the lived experience of a particular community, have wider resonances: she invites us not to treat equal political power as a sine qua non of democracy, but rather to focus on the mediating principles of equal protection, equal respect and personal growth, and to be open to different ways of realizing them.
Herzog’s experience at ONEBANK led her to reconsider what the ‘social bases of self-respect’ mean in societies in which most people work in large, hierarchical organizations. Her field visits revealed that employees of all ranks cared deeply about and reflected frequently on ONEBANK’s broader strategies. These strategies determined what kind of organization they were working for, which they saw as an important aspect of their own identity. It mattered greatly to them whether ONEBANK was a small grass-roots organization or a mid-size multinational enterprise, whether it served mainly small family businesses or larger companies, and whether it focused first and foremost on economic development, or whether it also pursued environmental goals. They had a specific vision of what the organization should look like, which was tied to their broader conception of a good society.
Admittedly, it is not very surprising that the employees of a self-professed ethical organization would care about its wider strategies. It has long been recognized that organizations can derive economic advantages, for example lower monitoring costs, from having employees who share their values.Footnote 54 But the question has seldom been asked from the perspective of employees: if they identify in a profound way with the organization they work for, what normative implications does this have?Footnote 55 Rawls has famously included ‘the social bases of self-respect’ in his list of ‘basic goods’. But what if these are tied up with one’s identity as an employee? What do people actually aspire to when they seek to do ‘good’ work? How can we spell out what the ‘social bases of self-respect’ mean in the context of wage labor in large organizations?
Most employees have no say about the broader strategies of the organizations that employ them, and have few opportunities to look for jobs elsewhere. While questions about ‘meaningful work’ are sometimes discussed in political theory, the emphasis is usually placed on the nature of the tasks that workers perform – for example, whether they allow individuals to develop their capacities – or on the question of workplace democracy, with a focus on the distribution of power and income within companies.Footnote 56 But these debates rarely analyze the relationship between the character and mission of an organization and its employees’ personal identities.Footnote 57 And yet, such a relationship may prove to be crucial for securing the ‘social bases of self-respect’ in the labor relations of a just society.
The ontological argument
We have focused so far on the experience of moral agents in ordinary circumstances. But an ethnographic sensibility can also help us make the most of extraordinary situations, which are characterized by a rupture in the routines of everyday moral life. Such situations can be unsettling and estranging, but if we examine them carefully, they can lead to insights about the ‘social ontologies’ that underlie our normative commitments.Footnote 58 Ethnographic methods can unearth taken-for-granted assumptions about human nature, the nature of the social realm or the nature of specific social institutions.
Such ontologies matter for positive social science: they have implications for what we (think we) know about social and political processes, and hence for the methodologies we use to explore them.Footnote 59 But social ontologies are also important for normative theory because they form the basis on which our institutions and values are built. If they shift, some of our institutions and practices may lose their legitimacy or purpose, and the very architecture of our system of values may be affected.Footnote 60
The idea of getting access to such underlying assumptions by creating ruptures in the ordinary course of events is at the heart of ethnomethodology. In a set of classic studies, Harold Garfinkel and his associates manufactured social situations that deviated from people’s normal expectations, for example with regard to how a game would be played.Footnote 61 These incongruities highlighted the background assumptions held by participants, who typically tried to make these incongruities cohere with their background assumptions by ‘normalizing’ or ‘demonizing’ them, or by ‘reconstituting’ the environment to make them disappear. This brought out some of the underlying reasoning practices that individuals draw on when making sense of social experiences.
But such experiments can also occur naturally, in moments of historical rupture or in situations that involve a radical interruption of normal practices. Lisa Guenther’s study of solitary confinement, for instance, uses numerous first- and third-person testimonies by prisoners in order to understand what it is like for a human being to be deprived of almost all forms of human contact, often for many years.Footnote 62 Guenther reports that when sensual stimulation is reduced to a minimum, inmates feel ‘unhinged’, start to hallucinate, and lose their sense of spatial orientation. Many prisoners experience solitary confinement as a form of ‘living death’: while their bodies are alive, they no longer share a common world with fellow human beings.Footnote 63
The analysis of these observations leads Guenther to question the Cartesian picture of the human mind, with its emphasis on the self-sufficiency of individual consciousness. Against this powerful legacy, Guenther articulates the ways in which human consciousness is embodied and stands in relation to other human beings. As she puts it:
The world is not just the ‘environment’ of an organism that responds to stimulation; rather, it is the ultimate horizon of meaningful experience. The sense of the world is coconstituted with others, even if its ultimate condition of possibility is first-person consciousness.Footnote 64
This shift in our understanding of human experience – ‘from transcendental subjectivity to transcendental inter-subjectivity, and to a more holistic account of the embodied, intercorporeal institution of meaning in a shared world’Footnote 65 – has important implications for how we think about solitary confinement and its justifiability. For if Guenther is right, solitary confinement does not merely sanction individuals by depriving them of the company of others; it also takes away from them the very possibility of living a life that is recognizably human.
In Radical Hope, Jonathan Lear offers another example of how an ethnographic sensibility can shed light on social ontologies. Lear attempts to elucidate a puzzling utterance by Plenty Coups, the last great chief of the Crow Nation: ‘When the buffalo went away, the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened.’Footnote 66 What could it mean for Plenty Coups to say that there was an event after which nothing happened?
By drawing on anthropological and historical research as well as oral histories, Lear shows that when the Crow were forced to abruptly abandon their nomadic-hunting way of life, the cultural framework that gave tribal events their significance disappeared as well. Tribal life had revolved primarily around hunting and fighting, social practices in which one could display virtues of character. With those practices gone, the very setting in which one could perform acts of valor collapsed. If young men were to steal horses from a neighboring tribe, as they used to do in the past, they would no longer be honored for their bravery; their behavior would now be met with incomprehension. A range of acts that used to be highly significant had lost their intelligibility.
For Lear, Plenty Coups’ experience reveals a vulnerability that we all share. It shows the extent to which our value systems are tied to a given way of life and its set of practices. The ‘end of events’ that Plenty Coups witnessed meant not just that nothing happened, but that nothing of significance could happen anymore. This insight into the foundation of our values may have normative implications for how we think about cultural dislocation and reparation. If Lear is correct, then in addition to the material and psychological difficulties that individuals encounter when their way of life changes drastically, the very setting within which they can lead a meaningful existence may also collapse, and may have to be rebuilt on new grounds.
THE DANGERS OF PERSPECTIVAL ABSORPTION, BIAS AND PARTICULARISM
The contribution of an ethnographic sensibility to normative theory is contingent upon the theorist being able to retain a certain openness – a readiness to be surprised by ruptures and to abandon one’s tacit assumptions and pre-conceived ideas. Practically, cultivating such a studied naiveté may require theorists to revise the types of questions they use to approach the field. Rather than starting out with the aim of offering, say, a ‘liberal egalitarian take’ on development agencies, and with a charged understanding of what liberal egalitarianism might mean in this context, they might be better advised to temporarily suspend such theoretical commitments, in the hope of re-examining them once they have a better understanding of how practitioners perceive the relevant issues themselves.
But even if one were able to cultivate the required openness, adopting an ethnographic sensibility raises a host of additional challenges. Some of these haunt all users of ethnographic methods; others are particularly salient when such methods are used for normative theorizing. While we cannot engage here in a full discussion of ethnography as a methodology, with its ontological and epistemological presuppositions,Footnote 67 we want to briefly address a few worries that are particularly salient, while acknowledging that these are not exclusive to ethnography, but also beset other empirical methods, albeit in different ways.
Like other ethnographers, theorists who adopt an ethnographic sensibility must come to grips with the twin dangers of reactivity and reliability.Footnote 68 Reactivity is the worry that by being present in the field, researchers may disturb the very phenomena they are supposed to observe. Probing participants about the moral questions they encounter, for instance, may induce them to think of these as moral questions when they otherwise would not. People in the field may also alter their ordinary moral behavior depending on how they perceive the ethnographer.
Reliability pertains to the trustworthiness of research findings. How can we be sure that researchers adequately perceive what they see or hear, and that they arrive at plausible interpretations? Ethnographers, after all, do not merely record social reality: their own theories and categories also play a role in shaping what they see and how they interpret it.Footnote 69 The dangers of reactivity and reliability call into question ethnography’s promise to yield imaginative participation in the lives of others. If researchers influence the field, and remain entangled in their own mental constructs, they may be telling us more about themselves than about the communities, practices or cultures they study.
These worries were at the heart of the ‘reflexive turn’ in anthropology in the 1970s and 1980s. Several studies that are now considered seminal encouraged ethnographers to turn a mirror to themselves, and to acknowledge the extent to which their work reflects their own particular embodiment and positionality within the field.Footnote 70 This reflexive turn contributed to placing the interaction between the researcher and the field at the center of interpretive inquiry, and underscored the extent to which ethnographic knowledge is co-constituted. Ethnographers do not stand outside of structures of power or discourse, nor do they have access to an ‘invisibility potion’ that allows them to collect data ‘uncontaminated by observer–observed’ interactions.Footnote 71 Instead, they make sense of the social world through their personal, embodied and situated experience, and in dialogue with people in the field. Researchers can neither ignore these interactive effects nor neutralize them altogether; they must remain attuned to them and learn to mitigate them by reflecting on how their intersecting social identities (in terms of race, class, gender, nationality, religion or politics), theoretical outlooks and institutional roles affect how they see (and how they are seen). Because such reflexivity is difficult to practice, and because there is no external standard that guarantees trustworthiness, it is important for ethnographic research to be conducted among a community of scholars who can probe and assess each other’s interpretations, and who can revisit the field independently with their own set of sensibilities.Footnote 72
Those who wish to adopt an ethnographic sensibility in normative theory must contend with three additional challenges, which stem from the fact that normative theorists are not just concerned with understanding people, institutions, practices and discourses, but also seek to evaluate them in light of certain normative values or principles, and to draw lessons from them regarding what one ought to do or value. As such, they must worry not only about the possibility that they may misrepresent or distort what they see in the field, but also about the risk that their experiences in the field may affect their capacity to remain detached and impartial enough to engage in normative reflection.
We identify three such dangers – perspectival absorption, bias and particularism. To take an ethnographic stance is to attempt to experience the world as some other person does, emotionally and cognitively – that is, to empathize with them. From the standpoint of normative theory, however, empathy must be handled with care because it may lead to perspectival absorption – that is, to a fixation on the subject’s point of view and to a surrendering of the neutral and detached stance that one may need to evaluate conduct even-handedly. As we saw earlier, various obstacles may blind individuals to a range of moral considerations. If we traded our perspective entirely for theirs, these considerations would elude us too.
Another reason to be cautious with empathy is that it may bleed into sympathy – a positive inclination toward another’s feelings – and from there, into bias. When conducting ethnographic research, one enters a terrain composed of various individuals and groups. As a newcomer to an organization, one will have to decide whether to enter the field as a guest of management or as a frontline worker. This decision will affect what activities the researcher will participate in, and who they will have access to. Far from being omniscient observers, ethnographers typically rely on members of a specific sub-group for information; they experience unfolding events through their eyes, and hear about the hardships they face and their rationales for action. These experiences are likely to generate some measure of sympathy with members of the sub-group, if only because those who belong to other sub-groups will not have as many opportunities to share their side of the story.
Much like empathy, sympathy can be necessary to develop an insider perspective as a participant and not simply as an observer.Footnote 73 As philosophers have increasingly recognized, emotions play an important epistemological role in the production of moral knowledge.Footnote 74 But when it comes to evaluating conduct, there can be such a thing as too much understanding. The danger with sympathy, if not properly calibrated, is that it may bias our judgement and turn us into apologists rather than critics. The risk, in other words, is that we may start taking people’s rationalizations at face value, and privilege their point of view and grievances over those of others.
Another related danger is particularism.Footnote 75 One aspiration of normative theory is to develop principles of a certain generality. The concern is that ethnography, with the close attention it pays to context, may be ill adapted to abstracting away from local specificities to underlying principles that apply across settings and situations. The worry about particularism manifests itself in two ways. The first is a familiar worry about lack of portability: what can a study of particular individuals working in a specific institutional context tell us more generally about the values and principles that we – participants in the same occupational group, members of the polity or human beings – have reason to hold?.
The second is a worry about unruly entanglement. Normative political theorists recognize that ordinary moral life is messy and complex. The point of theorizing, as it is usually practiced within the discipline, is to sort out this messiness by identifying principles that are sufficiently general to inform our conduct in a wide range of situations and settings. Ethnography may appear to be out of step with this theoretical impulse: by forcing us to grapple intimately with context, it overwhelms us with a mass of unruly data. Ethnographers can probe people’s moral intuitions and observe them making moral judgements. But how can they know, in the thick of everyday life, what these intuitions and judgements are really about? There are too many parameters at play, and they vary together. One of the rationales for the highly stylized manner in which thought experiments are constructed is that they control for situational variation, and allow us to pinpoint with some degree of precision the factors that drive moral intuitions and judgements. Of course, as we pointed out earlier, thought experiments achieve this clarity at the risk of distorting the kind of moral challenges we face in real life. Ethnography shows us people at grips with the complexity of real-world difficulties. But the point remains: if we cannot control for variation in context, how can we know which moral lessons to draw from our experience in the field?
These three dangers – of perspectival absorption, bias and particularism – are endemic to ethnographic inquiry. While they may also mar other types of empirical research, the long-term physical presence of the researcher in the field, and the heavily interpretive nature of ethnography (which contrast, for example, with the more removed stance of statistical analysis) make them particularly severe. These dangers are the flip side of ethnography’s virtues. To build an emotional shield and adopt a detached standpoint is to cut oneself off from the insights one can gather in the field; to open oneself up and strive to put oneself in the shoes of participants is to risk losing one’s critical edge; to be attentive to the importance of context is to be wary about making generalizations that reach much further than one’s research site. As with reactivity and reliability, there is no way to overcome these concerns entirely: one must keep grappling with them through reflective practice.
One way to alleviate the dangers of perspectival absorption is to remain attuned to the plurality of voices that arise from the field. These voices rarely speak in unison: they typically express a discordant array of role conceptions, self-understandings and normative commitments. Attention to this diversity can help us avoid being myopically tied to a single perspective. As already mentioned, one can attenuate the risk of bias by sharing one’s findings with a community of scholars who can assess their verisimilitude, challenge one’s interpretations and complement one’s work with ethnographies written from the standpoint of other sub-groups within the field. One can mitigate the dangers of particularism, finally, through research design, by conducting multi-sited ethnographies, or devoting different phases of one’s ethnographic fieldwork to different roles within the field. And last but not least, one can also try to triangulate one’s findings with data generated by other methods, for example statistical analyses or opinion surveys.
While all of these measures can be useful, none will eliminate the risks entirely. But rather than take this as an admission of failure, it is worth reminding ourselves that the same dangers – narrow perspective, biased attitude and particularistic myopia – can also affect theorists who do not go out into the field. For all our aspirations to be independent, impartial and ecumenical, we too occupy specific institutional roles and socio-economic positions that shape our moral outlooks. While a turn to ethnography may not free us from our positionality and situatedness, it can serve to counterbalance our own parochialisms.
CONCLUSION
Moral philosophers and political theorists are not alone in grappling with normative questions. Ordinary people too think seriously about what we have reason to value, what we owe to each other and what kind of person we should aspire to be.Footnote 76 To adopt an ethnographic sensibility is to open ourselves up to the possibility that we, as theorists, may have something to learn from observing how these normative issues are raised, discussed and addressed in the thick of everyday life.
While this stance expresses some measure of humility, it does not entail abandoning our more principled normative commitments. What people value is not necessarily what is valuable. Normative arguments are not settled with thick descriptions anymore than they are with statistical distributions. But we need to start our reflection somewhere. If normative theory is to proceed along the lines of the reflective equilibrium, as Rawls proposed, it must be both reconstructive and aspirational: it must attempt to make sense of our moral values as they are, and to provide guidance for what they ought to be.
We believe that a serious encounter with ethnography can be a productive tool for examining, unsettling and revising our normative commitments. We have argued, based on our own research and that of others, that an ethnographic sensibility can help us (1) understand the situated normative demands that individuals face, (2) diagnose the obstacles they encounter in responding to these demands, (3) evaluate the practices they engage in, (4) reconsider the values we hold and (5) shed light on the social ontologies that underlie our normative commitments. The method comes with its own endemic dangers – of perspectival absorption, bias and particularism – against which one must guard through reflective practice.
With ethnographic methods regaining currency in political science, and with sociologists and anthropologists increasingly turning their attention to questions of ethics, an exciting field of inquiry is shaping up. Normative political theorists can add a distinctive voice to it. If we are to fully seize this opportunity, however, it may be time for us too to venture out more frequently and confidently into the field – either on our own, or in the company of others.
