Between Facts and
Norms
Part I
of this essay is found here
[Summary: Geist, our intrepid explorer, plunges headfirst
into the “fact-value” debate. What fate awaits him? Who will he not piss off? Will he make it out alive?
To find out, keep reading!]
Most political scientists either
buy into the Weberian “fact-value” distinction wholesale or they simply assume
it.[1]
Either way, it’s the dominant organizing principle of modern social science.
What the “fact-value” distinction says is that inquiries into the facts of the
world and the values that we should hold are two separate enterprises. It’s one
thing to describe how the world works and it’s another thing entirely to judge
how human actors should act in this
world. We know the mechanics behind how a gun shoots bullets. And we know that
in most cases we shouldn’t use that gun to shoot people. The descriptive fact
informs the normative fact,[2]
but not vice-versa. Independent of the ethical question of whether or not we
should shoot a person, we know that the gun shoots bullets.[3]
This is
certainly how we treat scientific inquiry, but there is still a bit of a
wrinkle to this. Scientists operate within a social web and therefore their
motivations and their discoveries will always assume a social dimension. So
while it is true that my thoughts about the morality of killing have nothing to
do with the operations of the gun itself, particular social conditions are what
led scientists and inventors to reconfigure the material world and produce the gun
in the first place.
Furthermore,
how scientists categorize the world will differ depending upon the problem at
hand. A geneticist will lump dolphins with other animals owing to their genetic
lineage, though an ecologist interested in patterns of predatory behavior will
group dolphins with sharks (a fish) and speak of them both as “marine predators”.[4]
No set of categories is more right than the other outside of the particular
problem the researcher is trying to solve. Now these problems most often derive
proximately from issues in the particular scientific subfield. But the overall
source of these scientific problems is found in society and the values that its
members share.[5]
A
similar dynamic is seen in the social sciences. Today, government form is
evaluated on a continuous scale from democracy on one end to autocracy on the
other. But this has historically not been the only way that governments have
been categorized. The classical republican tradition studied monarchy, tyranny,
aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, mass rule, and mixed constitutions.[6]
There’s no reason why a political scientist couldn’t study and advocate for
monarchies beyond the fact that it’s considered by Western societies to be
illegitimate. Furthermore, oligarchies, simply defined as the rule of the
wealthy, certainly exist today. But to speak of oligarchies would be to also
speak of class conflict[7],
something that American political scientists are resistant to acknowledge, let
alone study. And the reason’s because inequality isn’t treated as much of a problem
by contemporary political scientists—and even if it is, class categories do not
factor into their analyses. This owes to contemporary Western societies holding
a different understanding of what individual freedom is than was held by
classical republican thinkers.[8]
The amelioration of class conflict was at the heart of republican social
science because its understanding of what freedom involved demanded that it privilege
class categories. Different problems necessitate different categorizations of
the same material.
What I’m
arguing, then, is that all forms of science smuggle values into their
descriptive categories. Therefore, political scientists shouldn’t be able to “bracket”
normative considerations from their work because they frame the researcher’s
categories of analysis. The normative justification of our categories requires
the same amount of attention as do the justification of our categories on
predictive and explanatory grounds.
Political
scientists should grapple with where their currently implicit normative commitments
arise from: a reasoned social consensus? Or perhaps social conflict? Maybe
blind deference to authority? Or quite possibly even structural power
relations? Class domination? All political scientists should therefore ask
themselves the following three questions when conducting their research:
(1)
Why do we categorize differences in the way that
we do?
(2)
Are our purposes cited for these categories
legitimate?
(3)
Once demarcated, who benefits from privileging
certain categories over others?
This synthetic approach, matching
empirical research with normative evaluation, was the dominant understanding of
political science up through Marx. Today, only certain Habermasians continue in
this tradition. Not reviving it risks naturalizing what are in fact
historically contingent and socially mediated facts. If we fail to recognize
that our social scientific problems ultimately originate in the normative
commitments of the researcher’s society, then we risk evaluating our categories
in purely explanatory and predictive terms. That is, a category is good solely because it explains our data
well. We’re then able to “trojan horse” our values in under the guise of
supposedly neutral scientific findings (i.e. the explanatory criterion). And
because these social scientific findings are placed under the halo of “scientific
inquiry” the normative predispositions informing category formation are enshrined
as something beyond debate because science has now supposedly settled the
matter. The power relations that ground
a culture’s normative commitments are thus more resistant to revision.[9]
[1]
It’s mostly the latter
[2] If
you don’t want to kill people don’t fire that gun, cuz it, like, shoots
bullets.
[3] It
don’t matter if it’s right or wrong to kill people, guns are still gonna do it
[4]
Michael Neblo, “Philosophical Psychology and Political Intent”, The Affect Effect, 29-30
[5]
Because Wittgenstein.
[6]
See Aristotle’s Politics
[7]
Not in the Marxist sense. The classical republicans treated oligarchies as “rule
by the rich” and democracies as “rule by the poor”. Simple as that. No
teleology required. And no Hegel.
[8]
See MacGilvray’s The Invention of Market
Freedom
[9]
This is Marx’s point in “On the Jewish Question”
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