ABSTRACT
A history of social science traditions is also a history of their associated ethical theories, and the scientific disagreement between different traditions is an ethical disagreement. For the neoclassicists the topic was called "science and values," or the relation between positive and normative economics. The neoclassicists were value-relativists, believing that each person's value preferences are his own business. The ethical theory implicit in the early functionalist conception of the self-maintaining society is the right-Hegelian ethics of community. The right-Hegelian ethics of community is often called self-realization ethics. Through action, develop our human creative potentialities, become more fully human, and enrich our experiences and capacity for experience. Present social science is fragmented by the demands morality: the moral responsibility of social scientists to combat the totalitarians, or to shun the war criminals and servants of the imperialist war system, or to shun the mad worshippers of Kali, the goddess of death.
