Grounding the Ought: A Critical Review o...

Grounding the Ought: The Axiological Turn in Social Theory and the Future of Liberation

Episode Description: Can social science ever truly be "value-free"—or has social thought always judged, performing better when its normative standards are explicitly owned? In this episode, we dive into the comprehensive academic review paper, "Grounding the Ought: A Critical Review of the Axiological Turn in Social Theory, from Classical Prohibitions to Multispecies Futures", authored by sociologist and political theorist S. A. Hamed Hosseini.Hosseini explores the core paradox structuring modern social science: while Max Weber’s founding methodological doctrine mandated "value-freedom" (Wertfreiheit), the most consequential achievements of social theory—from Karl Marx and Émile Durkheim to W. E. B. Du Bois—are unintelligible without an answer to how human and more-than-human life ought to be arranged. Hosseini maps the "axiological turn"—the cumulative, multidisciplinary movement that moves past hidden partiality to explicitly ground social critique in articulated positions on liberation, flourishing, and justice.In this episode, we unpack:

• The Dissolution of the Fact–Value Dichotomy: How philosophers and sociologists (such as Hilary Putnam, Helen Longino, Amartya Sen, and Sandra Harding) dismantled the illusion of value-neutral inquiry, demonstrating that description itself is an evaluative choice.
• Seven Ideal-Typical Modes of Grounding: A comparative tour across major traditions that attempt to ground the "ought"—from Habermasian procedural justification and Axel Honneth's recognition to Marxist immanent critique, Adorno's negative dialectics, standpoint epistemology, pragmatist meliorism, and relational more-than-human ontologies.
• Five Genealogical Waves: Tracing how explicit normative grounding evolved through classical value philosophy, Frankfurt School critical theory, reflexive/standpoint movements (including Black feminist thought, critical race theory, and decolonial critiques), explicit welfare axiologies (capabilities, degrowth, and Erik Olin Wright's "real utopias"), and modern multispecies horizons.
• Widening the Circle Beyond the Human: How ecofeminism, Indigenous place-thought (Robin Wall Kimmerer, Vanessa Watts, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson), and relational ontologies expand moral community to soils, waters, nonhuman animals, and future generations.
• A Seven-Point Future Agenda: Exploring Hosseini's practical blueprint for the field—including institutionalizing explicit "ground statements" in research designs, developing diatopical translation across global concepts of the good (such as buen vivir, ubuntu, and mino-bimaadiziwin), building a political economy of hope, and constructing middle-range institutional designs.

Whether you are a researcher navigating the ethics of inquiry, a student of social theory, or a political economist seeking firmer ethical foundations for post-capitalist futures, this episode provides an essential map for a social science that explicitly knows what goods it serves.Hashtagged Keywords: #GroundingTheOught #AxiologicalTurn #HamedHosseini #SocialTheory #CriticalTheory #ValueTheory #MultispeciesJustice #DecolonialTheory #CapabilityApproach #RealUtopias #MoreThanHuman #StandpointEpistemology #PublicSocialScience