Objectivity and Its Politics

Abstract

According to Marx, revolutions do not bring about justice; they redefine it. A society sets out the possibilities for identifying and redressing injustice, and thus for imagining the scope and requirements of justice. In bourgeois society, the extraction of surplus value, whether at two or two thousand percent of the wages paid to the worker, is entirely just, as is making profit off of life-saving drugs and care for the elderly. Those who criticize such practices are called “utopian,” which is simply a way of saying that their demands lay outside the realm of the possible as it is structured by current law. Revolutionaries strive to expand the realm of the possible and, in this way, create the conditions for new values and new forms of justice. It is relatively easy to see how the Foucauldian critique of objective values could follow from this. Since there is no concept of justice that remains constant across revolutionary alterations in either what Marx called modes of production or what Foucault called “discursive regimes,” it makes no sense to appeal to an objective account of justice: every “justice” is internal to a discourse. 1 Although this conclusion is plausible, it is not a deductive argument: an absolute relativism on value does not follow necessarily from a historicist account about how values are either generated or justified. Neither their source nor their manner of justification determine whether value claims can refer; nor do they proscribe what value claims can refer to. Still, it is a complex project to show this, and Satya Mohanty has taken on the unenviable task of trying to spell out how an alternative, objective account of value is consistent with the view that historical context and political conditions are constitutive of moral and even aesthetic values. It is his substantial agreement with the historicist tradition, of which Marx is arguably the ablest theorist, that makes Mohanty’s chore all the more difficult. My own work has been more in epistemology and metaphysics than in moral philosophy, and so this paper will explore the epistemological dimensions of Mohanty’s claims as well as the plausibility of his metaphysics. The concept of objectivity, which is the focus of his arguments here, concerns both: it is a thesis about how we can know as well as what can be known. Although Mohanty at times makes use of pragmatic