Vandenberghe, F. (2017). Sociology as moral philosophy (and vice versa). The Canadian Review of Sociology, 54(4), 405-422. doi:10.1111/cars.12168

This transition from the normative to the empirical is only possible if one does not oppose philosophy to sociology, but rather integrates them into something like a “descriptive ethics” (along the lines perhaps of “descriptive metaphysics”). 

 Sociologists should study those philosophical systems as moral repertories that are part of Western culture.11 Varying a well‐known phrase of Paul Ricoeur—“to explain more to understand better” (Ricoeur 1986:22)—we could say that the point of this detour via philosophy is to prescribe more in order to describe better, and also, conversely, to describe more in order to prescribe better and ground one's judgments in the critical sense of the actors.

this doesn't seem like it'd work for me though

maybe he is saying, we need to understand morality so that we can properly judge these people?

 no cognition (Erkennung) without recognition (Anerkennung) of principles, norms, and values.

we do not first describe and then judge, but it is by judging them that we describe and identify them as actions of a certain sort, namely as “performances,” that is as “actions that can only be identified as appropriate, felicitous, or successful” (Louch 1966:233). These are value‐judgments, to be sure, but they are also descriptive.

Parsons for his part rejected utilitarian consequentialism and sought, through a synthesis of Kant and Christian ethics, to restore a common system of ultimate ends.

To develop a moral sociology worthy of its name, one has, however, first to break down the disciplinary barrier between sociology and philosophy and overcome the reticence and resistance of professional, critical, and public sociologists to engage in some constructive “border thinking.”4 While most would probably agree that sociology entails a normative project, grounded in a slightly nostalgic liberal‐communitarian worldview, few would actually be willing to spell out that project and launch a philosophical inquiry into its normative foundations.5