LÉVY-BRUHL, POSITIVIST SOCIOLOGISM AND NORMATIVE ETHICS

Paul Gerard Horrigan, Ph.D., 2012.

Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (born 1857, Paris, died 1939, Paris), professor of philosophy at the
Sorbonne from 1899-1927, inspired by the positivism of August Comte and his school and
known for his numerous anthropological and sociological studies on the primitive mentality,
promoted a positivist sociologism regarding normative ethics in his work, La Morale et la
Science des Moeurs (1903). A detailed Thomistic critique of this work is contained in a book
written by Simon Deploige entitled Le Conflit de la Morale et de la Sociologie (1912, the 1923
third edition containing a Preface by Jacques Maritain).

Positivist sociologism maintains that a normative, practical philosophical science of

ethics in the traditional sense (e.g., Aristotelian, Thomistic, with objective moral absolutes,
intrinsic evils, binding moral norms, etc.) is not possible and that, instead, we should substitute
the traditional normative, practical philosophical science of ethics with a sociological description
and analysis of the constantly changing moral customs and moral views within a particular
society or among various societies, a sociological description and analysis of what is,
prescinding from what ought to be. Describing Lévy-Bruhl’s positivist sociologism, Joseph De
Finance writes: “…in place of the former ‘theoretical’ and ‘normative’ ethics which, they
maintain, can provide no ‘scientific’ certainty, they would wish to substitute a ‘science of
mores,’ which would treat the moral factor as simply one of the many factors that are operative
in society: the purpose of such a science would be to describe the customs, the moral judgments
and sentiments that are prevalent in different societies: to determine the laws which govern their
origin, their development, their evolution, their disappearance, in the way that ‘science’
investigates physical phenomena. This is the view of L. Lévy-Bruhl, for example, in La Morale
et la Science des Moeurs, Paris, 1903.

“According to this author, a ‘normative science’ is a contradiction in terms. It is the task

of science to pronounce on what is, not on what ought to be. Science, he insists, has by its very
definition no other function than to know what is. It is, and cannot but be, the resultant of the
methodological study, by the human mind, of a portion or an aspect of the given reality. It tends
towards, and issues in, the discovery of the laws which govern phenomena. Examples are
provided by mathematics, astronomy, physics, biology, philology etc. The goal which is aimed at
in moral theorizing is, on the contrary, essentially different; the purpose here is to lay down the
law. While science simply aims at knowing what is, ethics, on the contrary, wishes to prescribe
what should be. Since this is the function of ethics, it cannot, Lévy-Bruhl insists, be called a
science.”1

However, Lévy-Bruhl’s rejection of a normative, practical philosophical science of ethics

stems from his reductionistic positivist conception of science. Contrary to the reductionism of
positivism, science is an analogical notion that is predicated not only of the physical and
experimental sciences, but also of many other sciences, like the philosophical sciences (e.g.,
cosmology or philosophy of nature, philosophical anthropology, epistemology, metaphysics,
1
J. DE FINANCE, An Ethical Inquiry, Gregorian University Press, Rome, 1991, p. 9.

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philosophy of God, moral philosophy or ethics), and also of the science of Sacred Theology.2
Paul J. Glenn writes: “Ethics is a science. A science is a relatively complete and systematically
arranged body of connected data together with the causes or reasons by which these data are
known to be true. Ethics squares with this definition, for it is a complete and systematically
arranged body of data which relate to the morality of human conduct; and it presents the reasons
which show these data to be true. Ethics is therefore a science.”3 Against the reductionism of
positivism which rejects ethics (moral philosophy) as a true science, Austin Fagothey writes:
“The view has been expressed that ethics may be an interesting study but can never be a science.
The scientific world is still largely under the spell of that nineteenth century mode of thinking
originated by Auguste Comte and known as positivism, which eliminates all metaphysics from
philosophy and restricts scientific knowledge to facts and relations between facts. They say that
the scientific method is one of exact mathematical measurement, but virtue and vice can never be
measured in this way; that science proceeds by prediction based on hypothesis and followed by
experimental verification, but human conduct, especially if regarded as free, is too unpredictable;
that science deals with facts and the laws governing them, but ethics only with opinions on what
ought to be and never wholly is; that science engages in the hardheaded pursuit of wresting from
nature her secrets, but ethics is lost in a nebulous quest for ever-beckoning yet ever-escaping
ideals and aspirations.

“The answer to such complaints is to give a definition of science. If science is so defined

as to apply to the physical or experimental sciences only, then ethics will not be a science. But
this is too narrow a definition. The word science in the sense of any body of systematized
knowledge is still in current use, and ethics is surely this. The definition of science as the certain
knowledge of things in their causes is traditional among philosophers; ethics pre-eminently
fulfills this definition, for it studies the purpose or final cause of human life, the principles and
laws governing the use of means to this end, and establishes its conclusions with demonstrative
thoroughness. Like every other science, including the physical, ethics will have its disputed
points, but these will be shown to revolve around a solid core of established truth. Nor is it right
for one group of scientists to rule out of court the legitimate subject matter of another science;
there is need of a science of the ought, for the ought itself is a fact demanding explanation quite
as insistently as the physical universe.”4

Also, against positivist sociologism, we affirm that ethics (moral philosophy) is a

normative science. “Ethics is a normative science because it studies the norms of right conduct.
It investigates the moral principles according to which a person ought to live. In this inquiry one
is not indulging in wishful thinking about an ideal world of what ought to be, a Utopia in the
realm of the possible. Ethics is concerned with the human person existentially. It studies what the
human person ought to be precisely as a human person.”5

Ángel Rodríguez Luño describes Lévy-Bruhl’s positivist sociologism regarding the

normative, practical science of ethics as follows: “Lévy-Bruhl sostiene che parlare di una scienza
normativa è assurdo. La scienza, per definizione, conosce ciò che è, non ciò che deve essere: è

2
Cf. Summa Theologiae, I, q. 1, a. 2.
3
P. J. GLENN, Ethics, B. Herder, St. Louis, 1930, p. ix.
4
A. FAGOTHEY, Right and Reason, Tan Books, Rockford, IL, 2000, pp. 23-24.
5
K. F. DOUGHERTY, General Ethics, Graymoor Press, Peekskill, NY, 1959, p. 12.

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un’applicazione metodica dello spirito umano ad una parte della realtà data, al fine di scoprire le
leggi che governano i fenomeni. La morale non può essere altra cosa che una scienza dei
costumi, il cui compito consiste nel descrivere gli usi e le valutazioni morali delle diverse
società, e nel conoscere le leggi che ne determinano la nascita, lo sviluppo e la scomparsa. In
nessun modo l’etica potrebbe arrogarsi il compito di prescrivere delle leggi agli uomini e ai
gruppi sociali.”6 Rodríguez Luño goes on to write regarding the deleterious effects of positivist
sociologism on ethics: “…la conseguenza più negativa del sociologismo positivista sta, come
segnala Millán Puelles, nel relativismo etico parallelo alla negazione positivista della metafisica.
Così come nega l’esistenza di una conoscenza metafisica, riducendo l’ambito del sapere umano
ai soli fenomeni, il positivismo tenta anche di sopprimere ogni nozione di un bene assoluto delle
azioni umane. È questa la conseguenza logica del non ammettere nell’uomo una natura o essenza
soggiacente alle sue manifestazioni storiche fenomeniche, «poiché se il bene assoluto delle
nostre azioni è quello che esse possiedono in quanto umane, e l’umano non è niente di
permanente e di sostanziale, non si può parlare di una moralità assoluta, ma di tante moralità
quanti ambienti sociali e mezzi o circostanze storiche si danno in concreto. In ultimo termine, si
tratta quindi di una applicazione della teoria fenomenista».7”8

Jacques Maritain critiques positivist sociologism regarding normative ethics in his Neuf
leçons sur les notions premières de la philosophie morale (Tequi, Paris, 1950) as follows: “The
positivist or sociological school is in agreement with Kant regarding the presumed powerlessness
of speculative metaphysics and the futility of any attempt to ground an ethical system on a
philosophical knowledge of the world – metaphysics or a philosophy of nature – a knowledge
which finds truth in extra-mental reality beyond the reach of the sciences of phenomena.

“But these thinkers react against Kant in refusing to accept the theory of the Categorical
Imperative; they are dissatisfied with the arbitrary nature of the Kantian ‘thou shalt,’ dissatisfied
with the purely formal and a priori requirements of the Kantian ethic, and dissatisfied with the
absolutist nature of Kantian theory: they maintain, not without reason, that this theory has
secularized the Commandments of Mount Sinai by transferring their origin to Pure Practical
Reason or man’s noumenal Will. Finally, the fundamental cause of the positivist reaction is the
fact that the Kantian doctrine of morality, considered at the beginning of the 19th century as the
only conceivable philosophy of obligation and of absolute norms, is entirely cut off from nature
and from any consideration of the universe, of what things are. This break, this separation
between the world of morality and the world of nature is the most profound cause of the
positivist reaction against Kant. Moral rules appear like despotic norms imposed on life and on
human nature in the name of a supra-temporal will hidden in the intelligible world, and of who
knows what supra-temporal law which is, moreover, totally without content, since the Kantian
‘thou shalt’ is no more than the empty form of the universality of pure practical reason.

“The tragedy of modern thought in this respect has been the confusion which arose
between any ‘normative’ or, better, any ‘practical’ morality (that is, a morality aiming to guide
human action and to justify a code of rules which the conscience must accept unconditionally)
and that very particular type of moral philosophy which is the Kantian normative ethic. Thus a

6
Á. RODRÍGUEZ LUÑO, Etica, Le Monnier, Florence, 1992, p. 15.
7
A. MILLÁN PUELLES, Fundamentos de filosofía, Rialp, Madrid, 1969, p. 615.
8
Á. RODRÍGUEZ LUÑO, op. cit., p. 16.

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rejection of the Kantian ethic led to a rejection of any normative ethic, any ethic which attributed
an absolute meaning to values of conduct, or in other words, any moral or practical philosophy
properly so called.

“The notion of a normative ethic was rejected along with the typically Kantian form of
moral philosophy, in which the normative character of morality was not only placed in a
particularly strong light, but was completely warped and monstrously enlarged, since in Kant this
normative character depends on the sheer a priori requirements of reason, cut off from any
rational or empirical knowledge of nature.

“In the positivist conception, any authentically normative morality (that is a morality
which justifies reflexively the absolute values and rules of conscience) is thought of as an
arbitrary code of laws which does not correspond to any deep-rooted requirement of man’s
nature and is imposed from without, a priori, on human life, in the name of the requirements of a
philosophical system which claims to legislate for itself. This is how the sociological reaction
developed fifty years ago, especially in France. Since all normative morality had been rejected
(in the authentic sense implied in practical philosophy as well as in the apocryphal sense of the
Kantian Categorical Imperative), and since the knowledge of moral matters no longer depended
on a practical philosophy grounded on a speculative philosophical science (philosophy of nature
and metaphysics), what remained for thought when it turned to the subject of human conduct?
All that remained was science in the modern sense of the word, the science of phenomena,
corresponding more or less to the positivist model, either the old model of Auguste Comte or the
neo-positivism of the Vienna Circle.

“Now it is clear that science, with its statistical and experimental methods, can analyze
human life and conduct, can tell us how men and women behave, but is incapable of telling us
how they should behave – purely and simply, what they should or should not do. It is clear that
science is concerned, by its very nature, only with facts, or with moral values considered as facts,
as material for observation. The task of science is to describe moral values, to observe and
classify the various value systems which human beings have devised, but it cannot deal, owing to
its noetic structure, with values as values. The value judgments which affirm that such or such an
action is good or evil, in a way which binds me, in conscience, to do it or to refrain from doing it
– in other words, unconditional value judgments – are not the affair of science.

“And now what science would be appropriate if we are to study human conduct? Above
all, the science of human groups, of social phenomena, that is to say sociology. Here it is
possible to study laws, rules, and values objectively, as they are embodied in the social customs,
the beliefs and the sanctions of society. Sociology makes an invaluable contribution by studying
human conduct in this way. And this is true not only of sociology, but also of all the sciences of
human phenomena – psychology, for example, and to an even greater degree, anthropology.
Anthropology and sociology are extremely precious auxiliary sciences of moral philosophy.
They give us precise knowledge of facts which provide indispensable material for moral
philosophy.

“But the school I am speaking of went much further and thought that sociology should be
a substitute for ethics; ethics should be replaced by what Lévy-Bruhl called the ‘science of

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mores,’ that is to say the analytical description of the customs of different human groups, without
any absolute value judgment. Or, if we consider another way of looking at things, not that of
philosophers but of people eager to draw general conclusions from popularized philosophical
ideas, sociology should not be a substitute for ethics, but should constitute the true ethics, the
authentic scientific ethics. In both cases, we are dealing with what can be called not sociology,
but sociologism.

“As a result, it was thought possible to establish a conception of the knowledge of moral
matters which would be free of any value judgment set forth as true, of any rule of conduct
proposed as objectively required, in a word free of any normative character; and in our
universities we haven’t yet been liberated from this conception.

“The great concern of philosophers who want to stay in the modern current, even though
they recognize the inadequacy of sociology alone, is to explain why and how there can be an
ethics which is not normative, because if it were normative, it would lose all the scientific
character they are trying to ascribe to it. Willy-nilly, and making use of whatever intellectual
subtleties, there is nothing for it but to try to reduce ethics to sociology. They must try to explain
the moral life of man and the realities of conscience from the outside, especially the sense of
moral obligation, which is regarded simply as a transferring of social constraints, social bonds
and social taboos into the individual mind, where these taboos are sublimated. Thus moral values
and moral rules are valid only with respect to a given society, whose structural laws and
‘biological’ necessities they express.

“Sociology and Sociologism. It is essential to make a distinction between sociology, as

the science of social phenomena, and sociologism, as an extrapolation of sociology, which
confuses it with a philosophy of moral life and makes it a substitute for ethics.

“We should have the greatest respect for sociology, as well as for anthropology, which
provide ethics with vital data, but we should consider sociologism to be nonsensical.

“From a methodological point of view, the doctrine is inherently inconsistent and futile.
On the one hand it purports to explain a certain universe of thought and belief which plays an
essential role in human life and in the evolution of mankind: moral values, moral rules, precepts
which are binding in conscience, moral obligation, etc. And, in fact, it does not explain this
ensemble of notions, thoughts and beliefs, but simply eliminates them. For if these things are
what sociologism says they are, that is a simple transposition into the individual consciousness of
social-biological or social-physical phenomena, assumed to be devoid of any moral meaning
properly so called, then all these things are nothing but illusions. There are no moral values, no
moral laws which are binding in conscience, no moral obligation, except in an illusory way, so
that the very problem which sociologism was trying to resolve is not solved but spirited away. It
simply disappears. The fact is that sociologism never troubled to examine the objective field it
was trying to explain, namely, the moral life of man; it simply undertook to study and analyze
the field of social phenomena, without analyzing and studying the other term of the comparison,
namely, the field of the moral life. Once he has collected a sufficient number of sociological
facts or sociological laws, the sociologist automatically reduces the field of ethics to these facts

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and these laws, while the ethical field itself remains unknown to him, since he has never set out
to analyze and investigate it for itself. This is why he can be accused of methodological futility.

“Sociology is right to affirm that often the root of such or such a value judgment or
accepted rule of behavior is to be found in beliefs which have now been forgotten, but which
persist in the form of a compelling tradition or powerful collective consciousness. Sociology is
right to say that often such or such a condemnation pronounced by the moral conscience of men
is no more than the result of social pressures or customary rules of society which have become a
part of our mental habits. In a general way, we can say that the most important result of
sociological research in the moral field was to demonstrate the immense part played by social
taboos in the moral behavior of man, in other words, to demonstrate the existence and
importance of a vast area of socialized morality.

“But sociologism is mistaken when it affirms that this is always the case: that socialized
morality is the whole of human morality. Such an affirmation is contrary to the facts. If we look
at things honestly, we see that socialized morality is a characteristic of the most superficial,
sclerotic, barely moral strata of moral life. As we penetrate further into the density of moral life,
we find ourselves faced with behavior which is more and more irreducible to the sociologist’s
model. In everyday life, every time that for reasons of conscience – to have a clean conscience –
we give up something we really love, every time we raise ourselves above everything the world
does and thinks, to make a decision we consider truly good, moral experience confronts us with a
reality which is essentially our own, which is rooted in my personal freedom, in such a way that
external pressure has power over me only to the degree that I want to give it that power. The
experience of my own universe of decision and responsibility is like a rock on which the
sociologist’s theory founders: primary fact, irreducible datum of moral experience, without
which no moral philosophy can be built.

“Furthermore, sociologism contradicts itself in claiming that the fundamental sense of

moral obligation can be explained by social pressure and collective perceptions. I say that this is
an internal contradiction because, in fact, all the data brought forth by sociology presuppose the
existence of a sense of moral obligation, which exists in the conscience of individuals before any
social pressure or collective perception. This is precisely why social pressure and collective
perceptions can penetrate into the inner reaches of morality; they can take the form of an
obligation in the individual conscience because social pressure and collective perceptions are so
to speak caught up, seized by this pre-existing dynamism of moral obligation; then they can enter
into the individual moral conscience, they can fortify or contaminate this moral conscience and
this sense of moral obligation, confirm them, inflame them or cause them to deviate to a greater
or lesser degree, but they cannot create this sense of moral obligation because they presuppose it.

“Finally, sociologism destroys itself, since no society can live without a certain common
base of moral convictions. Now sociologism explains that the absolute validity of these moral
convictions is no more than a mirage, a reflection in the individual conscience of the structures
and historical necessities of the social groups. When the members of human society have been
sufficiently enlightened to grasp these ‘scientific truths,’ at that moment they will perceive the
total relativity, the total lack of rational objectivity of every moral conviction, and at that

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moment one of the indispensable conditions required by social life will vanish. In other words,
sociologism will have destroyed its own subject.”9

9
J. MARITAIN, An Introduction to the Basic Problems of Moral Philosophy, Magi Books, Albany, NY, 1990, pp.
7-15.