Redeeming the Value(s) of the Social World

Abstract

This article discusses some of the central theses proposed by Nathalie Heinich in her book Des Valeurs (Values). After focusing on the distinction between norms and values, and the inductive approach favoured by an axiological sociology, we will address how public values might emotionally engage actors, the specificity of moral values and of people as ‘objects of valuation’ and, finally, the ambiguities inherent in the ‘axiologically neutral’ reconstruction of an ‘axiological grammar’. Somewhat countering the ‘descriptive relativism’ that Nathalie Heinich advocates, we will argue, from a pragmatist stance, in favour of a minimal moral realism based on axiological affordances. Finally, we will show that such a stance helps to account for the normative functioning of the public sphere.