Legal science, social science, and the problem of competing values

This essay examines a particular intersection between legal and social sciences. It concerns the way both disciplines encounter competing moral values. There are several potential ways in which such competing values are understood. One is anchored in a participant centred approach, focusing on the internal point of view; while the other avoids this strategy, seeing it as too narrow, not providing the tools for understanding fundamental conflicts of value within one and the same system. If we can understand the structure of different types of conflict among values in society, which the essay explores, we will, it is argued, see the merits of the latter approach. Pluralist social science can thereby inform a pluralist legal science, but it is pluralism with special features.