On urgency, reciprocity, and complicity as ethical justifications for a ‘critical’, ‘activist’, or ‘engaged’ social science

‘Critical’, ‘activist’, or ‘engaged’ forms of social research are influential in many fields today. They insist that researchers ‘critique’ the phenomena being investigated, and they demand that research should be designed to bring about ‘social change’. A variety of political arguments have been used to support this commitment. Among the main ones is that ‘uncritical’ research detached from practical progressive action is either trivial or reinforces the status quo – that any claim to objectivity is inevitably ideological. However, there are three other arguments, of an ethical character, that have also been employed to justify social research being ‘critical’, ‘activist’, or ‘engaged’. These appeal to: urgency of the social issue being investigated; the reciprocity that ought always to operate between researcher and researched; and researchers’ complicity in the status quo, especially where they are taken to be a member of a privileged group. In this paper, I will critically examine these arguments.