5 - Perverse Justice and Perverse Norms: Another Turn of the Screw

Summary

Introduction

What kind of ethical impact can be claimed for social psychology? For a European, this question is important. The ancestors of European social scientists were nineteenth-century thinkers such as Comte, Marx, Spencer, St. Simon, and Fourier – those brilliant and creative scholars who proposed new models of society designed to overcome human suffering and injustice. Following this first generation came a second wave that included men such as Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, theorists who were more skeptical, even pessimistic, with respect to the founders' schemes for changing the fate of humankind. Max Weber's Wissenschaft as Beruf is, from this point of view, more than an argument for social scientists' political neutrality: It is a manifesto about the end of an era replete with promises of scientific redemption for humankind. Subsequently, academic social science migrated to America, where the emphasis on scientific respectability came to predominate over concerns about ethical accountability. But Europeans have always felt a certain nostalgia for that golden age in which social scientists were – sometimes literally – the high priests of a new doctrine, capable of increasing the ethical intelligence of the common people and providing a historical direction for their fellow citizens. This nostalgia is probably less intense among social psychologists than among other European scholars. For decades, European social psychologists have focused on acquiring the scientific respectability of their American colleagues, either by imitating them or by criticizing them.