Social Problems and the Mores

Abstract

The article discusses social problem and different limitations of its' study. It highlights that various attempts to treat social problems in a scientific manner have proved useless because sociologists have dealt only with the objective side of social problems and have failed to include the attitude that constituted these problems. The attitude, the value judgment, is the subjective side of the social problem and its existence renders meaningless any purely objective account of social problems. In spite of all attempts to define social problems objectively and denotatively, value judgments inevitably intrude themselves into the discussion. The article asserts that value judgments must be brought in somehow, for there is no other way of identifying a condition as a social problem than by passing a value judgment upon it. The article says that social scientists have failed to define clearly their object of study, which is properly the condition called a social problem in relation to the attitude of the person who considers it a problem.