Social Science, Objectivity, and Moral Life

Abstract

Within American society, the fact-value dichotomy is firmlyensconced, and for a paradoxical reason. The dichotomy, partofaclusterofrelateddualismsseparatingobjective(value-free)and subjective (value-laden), meets a powerful need in liberalsociety.Theneedistoregulatebehavior,aninescapablefeatureof social order, but to do so without any appearance of moralauthority. In the liberal order, authority in moral matters isgiven, for moral reasons, to individuals. Each person ’s goodis a question of his or her own convictions or preferences,inhibited by only the barest necessity of social interferenceand a reciprocal responsibility to respect the rights and dignityofothers.Therefore,regulationbysociety,bothintheenforcingof norms and the spurring of effort to conform to norms, mustbe carried out in technical terms such that it appears to beagnostic with respect to conceptions of the good. The ever-expandinguseofmedicine,withitsostensiblyobjective,value-free modes of discourse, to manage issues of difference anddeviance, is a prime example (see Davis forthcoming). Themoral imperative to treat the good as a matter of personalchoice, to treat values as inherently subjective,requiresa strong fact-value dualism.Withintheacademy,thesituationissomewhatdifferent.Atleast in some parts of philosophy, the “is/ought” or fact/valuedichotomy—the“lastdogmaofpositivism”—isunderseriousstrain (Zammito 2012). Philosophers, especially in ethics andthe philosophy of science, have issued powerful challenges,showing how facts and values, descriptive and prescriptivestatements, are inextricably “entangled” (Putnam 2002;Brewer 2009;Longino1990). Social scientists, notablyfeminists and those in the hermeneutic tradition, and morerecently, scholars working from some form of“realist”perspective, have also weighed in, drawing on the philosoph-ical critiques in support of new ways of thinking about therelationof ethics and science and the rationality ofvalues (forexample, Gorski 2013;Sayer2011;Smith2010).Thesechallengestothedichotomyareclearingsomespaceto bring ethics back into social science. How we do that,however,iscriticallyimportant.Historically,thedrivetoseverfacts and values has sprung from two motivations (Zammito2012,307–308). One was to protect the purity of scientificknowledge from corruption by subjective values. This, forexample, was the defining concern of the early twentiethcentury logical positivists, the school of philosophers whoformulated the version of the fact-value dichotomy knownas the “naturalistic fallacy”—what is good or right cannot bederived from natural “facts”. The other motivation was toprotect the ethical domain from the deterministic materialismand epistemological imperialism of the natural sciences. Aconcern with the (relative) autonomy of ethics, for instance,has been important for those in the Kantian tradition, includ-ingevenMaxWeber.One motivation, then, was to protect“facts,” while the other was to protect “values.” Both ofthese concerns, with objectivity and with materialist reduc-tionism respectively, are valuable, and any retheorizing of therelationofsocialscienceandmoralitymustkeepbothinview.Iwanttochieflyfocushereontheconcernwithobjectivity.Positivism remains strong in the social sciences, and in manywaysthecontinuedembraceofthe“last dogma”hangsonthequestion of objectivity. Value freeness is held out as the goalfor any science worthy of the name, and is typically assumedtobeguidinginquiryinsuchamannerthatethicalreflectionisneedless or inappropriate. Beginning with a specific case andthenmovingtoalargerbodyofresearchsuggestingthatsocialscientific categories, and the images they embed, are inescap-ably value-laden, I want to argue that value-freeness is achimera and that objectivity does not require it. What objec-tivity does require is openness to critical scrutiny, including