social sciences and humanism

Few of the social science theories we employ in our disciplines model human beings in ways that justify for account for ... humanistic moral and political beliefs. Few representations of the human in social science theories make it at all clear why such objects should be bearers of rights, equality, or self-determination. If anything, much theory portrays humans as essentially governed by external social influences, competing socially for material resources, strategically manipulating public presentations of self, struggling with rivals for power and status, cobbling identities through fluid assemblies of scripted roles, rationalizing actions with post hoc discursive justifications, and otherwise behaving, thinking, and feeling in ways that are commonly predictable by variable attributes and categories according to which their lives can be broken down, measured, and statistically modeled. Perhaps all this is true. But that picture does not obviously justify belief in human rights, social justice, equality, tolerance, and emancipation.

Christian Smith talks  in What is a Person? about the tension between the ideal of objectivity in social sciences and the moral appeal they should contain.