Realism, values and critique

This is a lightly edited transcript of a plenary talk given at the Beyond Positivism conference, Montreal, August 8-10 2017. The talk followed others by Christopher Winship and Frédéric Vandenberghe, which are mentioned in the text. The paper argues that critical social science needs an ontology of values, and that a coherent ontology must recognise that values are created by human beings in social settings, rather than being objectively true. Recognising this, however, need not expose us to the moral nihilism of extreme relativism. Drawing on the work of Habermas and the capabilities approach, I argue that we can reason about what sorts of basic values we should be committed to, without invoking the concept of objective values. The provides us with material that we can build on to construct more complex constructive critical arguments