Evaluating Interests in Social Science: Beyond Objectivist Evaluation and the Non-judgemental Stance

From ‘Real’ Interests to Competing Interest Accounts

The first of these is to do with the justification and connotations of the terms ‘real’ and ‘objective’ interests. For Lukes, real interests are invoked when there is a divergence between the understandings of social scientists and lay actors about what is best for those actors. The ‘real’ is associated with the account of interests that social scientists put forward. As we have seen, Lukes acknowledges that there are different and competing theories of ‘real interests’. However, he doesn’t draw what seems to me to be an important inference from this, which is that if there are multiple and contradictory theories of interests on offer, it does not make sense to refer to all of them as getting in touch with the ‘real’. The continued invocation of ‘reality’ for these accounts is also questionable in light of the revolution in the philosophy of science that took place in the 1960s and 1970s. This threw into question the idea that theories get directly in touch with reality and emphasized, instead, that reality comes to us through specific conceptual frameworks (Kuhn, 1970). To point out that all accounts, including interest accounts, are mediated interpretations is not to argue that all are equally convincing or valid (Holmwood, 1996; Lakatos, 1978). However, it is to suggest that attributing ‘reality’ to social scientific interest accounts gives them an unjustified seal of approval, implying that they are in touch with reality whereas other accounts, such as those put forward by actors themselves, are not.

This problem is reinforced by Lukes’ use of a questionable notion of ‘objective’ interests, taken to refer to social scientific judgements about agents’ interests which draw on factors not dependent on agents’ preferences and judgements. The problem is not the idea that the social scientist may differ from agents in their evaluation of what is in their best interests. It is that the term ‘objective’ contains within it an implicitly positive epistemic evaluation of the social scientific account whatever its content. In the history of the use of this term, the ‘objective’ is neutral, distanced, and scientifically justified (see Harding, 1991). And accounts that are not objective are understood to be ‘subjective’ and limited by the agent’s narrow perspectives. There is, thus, is an implicit hierarchy which assumes, rather than demonstrates, the limitations of agents’ accounts of their best interests and the superiority of the social scientific account. The claim here is not that Lukes intended to invoke this hierarchy, but rather that we must avoid unintentionally swallowing the assumptions implicit in the terminology. Indeed, I would recommend abandoning the idea that social scientific accounts identify ‘real interests’ and the idea that they can be ‘objective’ in orientation. I would suggest that it is preferable instead to refer to understandings or accounts of agents’ interests, which may be social scientific or agentially derived. This would avoid presuming a hierarchy by allowing that both the agent and the social scientist are trying to come up with the best account presently possible of what it is in the interests of the agent to do. Of course, as social scientists we are hoping to improve on agents’ accounts; but this does not mean we can assume that we have done so, and the terminology of ‘real’ and ‘objective’ interests implies this, whether Lukes intended it to or not.

From Contradictory Interests to Contradictory Theories

The second issue relates to Lukes’ argument that an agent’s interests may not be unitary but that there may be conflicts between his/her interests (2005: 109). The only analytical elaboration of this notion that I am aware of is Lukes’ discussion, cited above, of the different accounts of interests that exist – subjectively oriented accounts, welfare-based accounts, and so on. The sense that Lukes is deriving his view of the potentially multiple and conflicting interests of actors from this idea of different accounts of interests is reinforced by the following passage:

But how can we speak of ‘real’ interests, given that, as I have argued, people’s interests are many, conflicting and of different kinds? For example, where is one’s ‘real’ interest if one’s ‘well-being interest’ (or ‘strong evaluation’ or ‘meta-preference’) conflicts with one’s ‘welfare interest’ in meeting a basic need – as when fundamentalist Christian believers refuse life-saving medical interventions on the grounds that they violate God’s will and will damn them eternally? (2005: 147)

Although this is posed as a question about the reality of interests, there is a clear implication that Lukes believes: (i) that agents can have conflicting interests; and (ii) that an example of such conflicting interests is the clash between the welfare interest and the well-being interest of a fundamentalist Christian.

Without arguing here against the possibility that agents may have multiple and conflicting interests, I do want to say that we need to be very careful when making such an attribution. In particular, we need to be sure that we are not taking the existence of multiple and conflicting theories as a sign that there must be multiple and conflicting interests. It should be acknowledged that defenders of some positions, such as relativist philosophies of science and post-structuralism, do defend the idea of multiple and incompatible truths (cf. Hekman, 1997; Kuhn, 1970), implying that there could be incompatible truths about the interests of a group or individual. Proponents of this view might argue, for example, that if two theories are incompatible it need not be the case that at least one is wrong if each theory can explain some aspects of the subject-matter that the other cannot. I cannot seriously question the idea of multiple truths here, but the key issue is the role that the identification of incompatibility has in pushing knowledge forward. Whereas proponents of multiple truths see contradiction between theories as unproblematic as long as each theory has some successes, I would argue instead that incompatibility is always an issue that needs to be addressed (Holmwood, 1996; Popper, 1972). This is not to deny that two incompatible theories can both contain insights, but it is to deny that this renders each of them ‘true’. Rather, their incompatibility points to the need for theoretical reconstruction that will be able to incorporate the insights of both in a non-contradictory manner.

The example cited above from Lukes is a case in point. Here Lukes is clearly making reference to two (potentially) clashing theories of interests – a welfare theory and a well-being theory – but identifying the clash as representing a real clash in the interests of the individual in question. If, instead, we treat this as a clash of theories this gives us a chance to reflect on these theories and consider whether one or both need to be reconstructed in light of the clash. In the medical-intervention example that Lukes gives, one way forward would be to propose that the clash helps us to see certain limitations of the welfare theory as Lukes presents it. If a fundamentalist Christian believes that medical interventions promoted by the welfare theory are going to damn them eternally it could be argued to be ethnocentric to insist that those medical interventions were actually in their interests. Proponents of such a view could therefore challenge defenders of the Lukesian welfare theory to consider that the framework within which many actors think of their lives is not bounded by the birth and death of the biological human body, and contend that the conception of interests in the welfare theory may need to be modified. Of course this argument is contestable, and the welfare theorist might argue back that religious beliefs are incorrect, and thus actors who base their actions upon them, rather than on a secular conception, are not actually promoting their interests. This argument could go on. But the key point about such an argument is that it is a dispute between theories about the interests of the actor. Such a dispute does not demonstrate that there are multiple and conflicting interests but that there are multiple and conflicting theories of what it is in the interests of actors to do. Because contradictory theories cannot both be correct, we shouldn’t, in such a situation, attribute multiple and conflicting interests to the actor, but instead consider how to resolve the clash between theories.

Ian Shapiro (2006) recently declared himself in favour of Lukes’ conception of multiple and competing real interests, and we can briefly consider whether Shapiro’s article bolsters Lukes’ argument. Shapiro states:

Class, gender, status, religion, race and countless other bases of human identification can generate interests that can plausibly be ascribed to people … (2006: 147)

As well as this postulated range of interests, Shapiro implies that promoting one interest may damage another:

Indeed, once we acknowledge that domination can occur along multiple metrics of real interest, we have to take seriously the possibility that reducing domination on one such dimension will increase it on another. Getting rid of debilitating inequities that are rooted in race or gender might reinforce equally or more debilitating class-based inequities. (2006: 152)

Thus, Shapiro connects the idea of multiple competing real interests to the familiar social scientific idea that society has cross-cutting divisions and inequalities. Does this provide a plausible way of defending Lukes’ contention about the existence of non-unitary and potentially conflicting real interests? As Lukes pluralizes the notion of real interests to particular theories of these, we would have to consider Shapiro’s conception of interests before we can answer this question. Shapiro is somewhat unclear about this in his article; the clearest steer being that we might associate at least one type of real interest with an interest in the removal of ‘debilitating inequities’ (2006: 152). Does such a conception give rise to multiple and competing real interests for individuals? The case in favour rests on Shapiro’s observation that policies may simultaneously decrease inequities along one axis of domination whilst increasing them along another. For example, it is possible that a governmental policy would remove gender inequities in financial resources, but also increase the overall level of ‘class’ inequity in society by increasing the disparity between the richest and poorest. This might encourage us to think that a working-class woman could have conflicting real interests in Shapiro’s sense – her real interest as a woman in having inequities removed might be thought to clash with her real interest as a working-class individual.

As with Lukes’ work, I would suggest that Shapiro’s emphasis on the ‘real’ status of interests distracts him from the point that the interests he discusses are theoretical attributions. ‘Gendered’ interests and ‘working-class’ interests might seem potentially incompatible with one another and equally real, but they need to be recognized as described and analysed within theories which must have some relation to one another. One possibility is that the theories contradict each other, in which case the argument directed at Lukes’ analysis above applies. But, in this case, it seems more plausible that Shapiro’s analyses of gendered interests and working-class interests are actually commensurable within his wider social scientific (not ‘real’) claim that both working-class people and women have an interest in removing inequities from their lives. As such, social scientists can claim that an agent doesn’t have a separate interest in the removal of these as a member of each particular social category. They just have an interest in getting rid of inequities as a disadvantaged person. The sum total of these inequities may be visited on a person by virtue of their membership of various social categories. But membership of these categories doesn’t give them a variety of interests. Their interest in removing inequities that they face is singular. In relation to the example of the working-class woman, when assessing whether the policy supports her interests, as specified in this social scientific theory, we can do so by working out whether the outcome results in a position that is more or less disadvantaged in relation to the population as a whole, than her position previously. The policy doesn’t relate to two separate and potentially contradictory interests; it produces mixed effects, the final result of which can be assessed in relation to one social scientific interest account.

Thus I would argue that Shapiro’s analysis does not strengthen the case that agents should be best understood to have multiple conflicting interests. ⁴ And when contradictory interests are attributed by social scientists we need to look very carefully at the theoretical bases of these attributions.

Evaluating Competing Accounts of Interests

Now I want to move on to consider the last issue to be addressed in this section: how social scientists can tell whether or not their interest attributions are justified in cases where these clash with the accounts of agents. Unfortunately, Lukes doesn’t offer any guidance on this in his second edition. And yet it is clearly a crucial question because critics of Lukes, such as Colin Hay, have argued that it is intrinsically an elitist move for social scientists to claim to have understood the interests of actors better than actors themselves (Hay, 1997: 47–8). The implication of Hay’s argument is that where there is a clash between social scientists’ and actors’ views of their interests, we should always accept the latter. Contrary to this, I want to suggest that it is possible, in certain circumstances, for social scientists to justify the preferable character of their accounts of interests.

Here I want to support John Holmwood’s important argument that social scientists should attempt to demonstrate the value of social scientific understandings by identifying difficulties and problems that lay actors have been experiencing as a result of acting on their own problematic understandings, and showing how social scientific understandings can resolve these (Holmwood, 1996). Let me tease out three aspects of this claim in order to consider them further, and defend the overall plausibility of the idea. First, we can see that the validity of this mode of demonstration relies on the acceptance of a particular theoretical idea: that actors’ understandings are not fully adequate on their own terms, and that their construction of the world can have limitations and problems. Holmwood thus challenges the constructivist and interpretivist view that constructions of the world are ‘valid on their own terms’ (see Barnes, 1983; Winch, 1958), a view that provides one key rationale for taking a non-judgemental stance on actors’ understandings of their interests. Following Holmwood, I would argue that when beliefs are put to use, whether in theoretical or practical applications, their limitations and contradictions can become apparent. Such problems can emerge in scientifically developed belief systems, such as the anomalies which helped to bring down the Newtonian theory of gravity (Lakatos, 1978). Or they can emerge in wider social life, such as the anomalies which present a challenge to the contentions that ‘all gay men are effeminate’ and ‘all women are poor map readers’.

The second element of Holmwood’s claim that needs to be defended is the idea that actors’ lives and experiences are shaped by problems within their understandings. This is based on the claim, supported by interpretive arguments, that actors make decisions and take actions based on their understandings of the world (see for example Winch, 1958). But it goes further than interpretive arguments by contending that if actors draw on problematic understandings in their decisions about what to do, there will be problematic consequences for them (Holmwood, 1996; Kemp, 2003). Let’s take, for example, a case where lay actors believe that expanding their consumption is the way to achieve happiness (for critical work in this area see O’Neill, 2008). Actors who believe that consumption brings them happiness will pursue the latter by attempting to purchase goods. But, if this belief is a problematic understanding of the benefits excessive consumption can bring, they will live the consequences. For instance, the actors may find that each peak of consumption is followed by an emotional trough in which the purchased items seem to become insignificant. And they may experience, instead of satisfaction, a renewed and uncomfortable sense of restless desire. Putting this in a more general way, the way the actor understands their interests may give rise to the experience of problems in their lives.

This brings us to the third element of Holmwood’s claim, which is that social scientists can attempt to justify their accounts of interests, where they diverge from those of lay actors, by picking up on problems that actors experience and trying to show how these could be resolved by adopting an alternative understanding. Thus, in the example mentioned before, if social scientists can identify the dissatisfaction and restoration of restless desire just mentioned, they can argue that this is an intrinsic consequence of the superficial relation between the consumer and the consumed object. And social scientists can also suggest that this would be greatly decreased by pursuing activities which engage the skill and creativity of the agent more fully, whether these be the production of artworks or the mending of motorbikes. Thus, where problems of understanding and troubled experiences can be identified by social scientists, the latter can also propose their alternatives to show how to avoid these problems. One way to put this would be to say that the normative content of sociologists’ arguments is interrelated with that of actors and works on the problems and limitations of actors’ understandings rather than imposing a framework from the outside. Thus, Holmwood’s argument provides us with a basis for understanding how social scientists may justify attributing interests to actors which are distinct from those the actors currently express.

Importantly, Holmwood’s approach to comparing accounts doesn’t provide a foundational guarantee of the superiority of social scientific accounts. It thus avoids Hay’s accusation to Lukes that the latter’s approach sets up the analyst as the ‘supreme arbiter’ of the genuine interests of social actors (Hay, 1997: 47). It doesn’t encourage us to think of social scientific accounts as automatically fastening on to ‘real’ or ‘objective’ interests. Rather, it suggests a way in which social scientists can attempt to justify to actors the validity of social scientific interest accounts. Of course, there may be many complexities to the attribution of interests, arising from the interrelations between interested parties and from the forms of uncertainty faced by social actors. However, actors themselves face these conditions but still make judgements about what is in their interest, so it is not clear that these conditions should deter social scientists. Undeniably, it is a standing possibility that actors will be unconvinced, and might, reciprocally, identify problems and limitations with social scientific accounts. But this is a part of the dialogic character of social life discussed below.

When we consider debates around interest attributions, we can see that aspects of Benton’s account of interests, developed in a critical evaluation of Lukes, are close to the approach recommended here. On the subject of interest claims Benton states:

To be persuasive, oppositional uses of the concept of interests must be rooted in at least some aspect of the life-experience of those for whose identifications they are in competition. Otherwise they have no purchase, no relevance to their ‘target’ actors … (Benton, 1981: 182, original emphasis)

What is appealing about Benton’s analysis is that it emphasizes the need for social scientific accounts of actors’ interests to have some purchase on their life-experience. If we understand this life-experience as conceptually mediated in character, we can combine Benton’s point with Holmwood’s emphasis on the significance of problems within lay actors’ understandings to argue that social science needs to be able to identify and resolve problems within lay actors’ experience and understanding in order to provide a convincing alternative to lay actors’ understandings of their interests.

Given that the approach described here has some affinity with pragmatist and problem-solving approaches, it is reasonable to reflect briefly on the similarities and differences to Amit Ron’s pragmatist account of interests, which was also developed in dialogue with Lukes’ approach (Ron, 2008). In his most general characterization, Ron argues that ‘real interests’ should be conceptualized as an ‘intersubjective web of meaning’ which is drawn on by a community in understanding problems that they face (2008: 276, 278). For Ron, real interest accounts are understood to be developed and defended in a dialogue between social scientists and members of civil society, rather than their validity being established by social scientific experts alone. Central to such dialogues will be questions about the character of civil society decision-making itself, and debates about real interest will often discuss the operation of power in the process of dialogue; for example, the influence of multimedia corporations on the way social and economic debates are framed (2008: 282–3).

Insofar as Ron emphasizes the meaningful constitution of interest accounts, his ideas are consistent with (and prior to!) the approach adopted here. Furthermore, his argument that social scientific interest claims should be developed and defended in the context of a dialogue with the various differentiated groups that make up the public is a useful one that successfully avoids giving a foundational privilege to social scientific claims, whilst acknowledging that there may still be problems in social life which social scientists can address. However, Ron’s approach has two limitations. First, it is not clear why Ron retains the term ‘real interests’, as it seems at odds with his explicitly pragmatic perspective to retain this usage. Once we acknowledge that social scientific accounts are theoretically mediated, we should not use the term ‘real interests’ to refer to social scientific accounts.

Second, and more importantly, Ron is, at some points, overly restrictive in the subjects that he sees social scientific ‘real interest’ accounts as permissibly addressing. Thus, Ron states the following about real interest arguments:

Those who make such arguments do not exhort the public to rethink their conception of the good, but instead to rethink the social conditions in which they deliberate. (2008: 276)

Ron also contends that:

… the positing of real interests does not require political scientists to make the unacceptable contention that they know what is good for the subjects they study better than the subjects themselves. Rather, the claim is that a community understands its own problem through frameworks that are in fact inadequate to address its own goals. (2008: 274–5)

A key feature of both of these quotations is that Ron is excluding the public’s conception of ‘the good’ from the scope of real interest debates. Rather, conceptions of the good and ‘goals’ are treated as matters which the social scientist does not contribute to in debates about ‘real interests’. To my mind, such an approach is unnecessarily restrictive, and delimits too narrowly the scope of legitimate interest attributions by social scientists. There is no principled reason why conceptions of the good shouldn’t be up for grabs in debates about agents’ interests. One possible way to construe an example I discussed above is to consider agents and social scientists as disagreeing about what a good life involves – a dispute between consumption and praxis-oriented conceptions. To exclude conceptions of the good life from interest debates would restrict social science to a technical reflection on the ability of agents to realize their goals, rather than allowing that it might have a part to play in richer reflections on what are beneficial goals for agents to pursue.