The fact-value distinction

Steve Sailer, or rather Sailer’s intellectual style and what it means, especially in the context of conservatism, is a subject to which VFR readers keep returning. Here a reader’s observations about Sailer lead into a discussion of the fact-value distinction, a phrase which I had mistakenly thought was too abstract and technical to be useful in ordinary speech but which, it turns out, has an entirely understandable and useful meaning.

Reader to LA:

First, I don’t know Steve Sailer, though I have read many of his writings at his site. I generally agree with the comments made by your correspondent.

But more generally, Sailer is a type produced by our civilization and educational system, which is generally positivist.

Let’s remember the “fact-value” distinction, inculcated from first grade in our civilization, as well as the internalization of the “subject-object” distinction and the fantasy of the scientific/rationalistic disembodied “I” (I think, therefore I am).

These are deeply embedded strains in the West, and produce a type of man deeply suspicious of anything that cannot be quantified, measured, controlled, manipulated, and written down and reduced to a data set. These strains are reinforced by, and help produce, an administrative, bureaucratic social organization and government, and a certain type of man. Their motto might be, “The numbers are the truth, and there is no truth outside the numbers.”

This is nothing new, at least in Europe. Much of Europe’s philosophy and literature during the 20th century has been a reaction to these developments. These men are quite literally “valueless,” just empty shells of men (as depicted so well in Camus’ “The Stranger”) and create a society that is both frivolous and baffling (Kafka). They have no explicit ideology (other than their ideology of “objectivity” and numbers and “method”), and distrust all ideologies and the men who hold them (perhaps this explains Sailer’s dislike of the highly ideological neoconservatives), because the passion underlying ideologies makes them extremely uncomfortable.

I don’t say Sailer personally is a fascist, or a tool, or valueless. I merely suggest that he represents a civilizational type, and that accounts for the reader’s frustration with his presentation of issues, a presentational style and mode of thought that Sailer has been taught, a teaching he has yet to escape or transcend, or even to see and relativize. He assumes viscerally its comprehensive validity as a coherent explanation of reality.

LA to reader:

This is very interesting. But is it the case that Sailer doesn’t make value judgments? True, in certain areas he seems very detached, but it seems to me that he does express strong opinions and so on, likes and dislikes, in at least some areas…

Also, I understand generally that the fact-value distinction means you look at facts without making value judgments about them. But I don’t think I really understand the concept. Would you define and explain the fact-value distinction as you understand it and give an example or two?

Reader to LA:

The fact/value distinction is usually traced to David Hume, who contended that an “is” has no connection to an “ought.” Philosophers also call it the “naturalistic fallacy.”

From Wikipedia:

“The fact-value distinction is a concept used to distinguish between arguments which can be claimed through reason alone, and those where rationality is limited to describing a collective opinion. In another formulation, it is the distinction between what is (can be discovered by science, philosophy or reason) and what ought to be (a judgment which can be agreed upon by consensus). The terms positive and normative represent another manner of expressing this. Positive statements make the implicit claim to facts (i.e. water is made up of two hydrogen and one oxygen atoms), whereas normative statements make a claim to values (i.e. water ought to be protected from environmental pollution).

The fact-value distinction emerged in philosophy during the Enlightenment; in particular, David Hume (1711-1776) argued that human beings are unable to ground normative arguments in positive arguments, that is, to derive ’ought’ from ‘is’. Hume was a skeptic, and although he was a complex and dedicated philosopher, he shared a political viewpoint with previous Enlightenment philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and John Locke (1632-1704). Specifically, Hume, at least to some extent, argued that religious and national hostilities that divided European society were based on unfounded beliefs; in effect, he argued they were not found in nature, but a creation of a particular time and place, and thus unworthy of mortal conflict. Thus Hume is often cited as being the philosopher who finally snuffed out nature as a standard for political existence. For instance, without Hume, Jean Jacques Rousseau’s (1712-1778) ‘return’ to nature, would have not been so revolutionary, inventive and fascinating.”

Today, the fact/value distinction is generally taken as gospel within the social sciences: economics, political science, sociology, psychology, etc., and within some schools of philosophy, although there are heretics here and there (like Eric Voegelin). Thus, within the social sciences, all facts are “created equal,” and thus “method” becomes determinative. We thus have a proliferation of irrelevant facts in the modern world, unconstrained by any meaningful theory or order of existence, that are subjected to countless manipulations and analyses by “method,” the method usually being statistics or probability theory.

I take it you yourself do not subscribe to this theory, as you ascribe certain natural attributes to certain phenomena, such as the European Judeo-Christian tradition, or to ethnicity, or to a common history, etc. Note that the neoconservatives implicitly adopt the fact/value distinction by claiming that certain natural phenomena like race, heritage, common history, ethnicity, and religion are irrelevant to political order and existence.

LA replies:

This is helpful. While I have thought and written a lot about the problem of objective value and of transcendence, and modernity’s denial of them, I had never focused specifically on the concept of the fact-value distinction as such. Something about the abstract, compressed quality of the phrase had put me off.

But now that I have read this, I see how it fits with other understandings. Of course, traditionalists do not accept the fact-value distinction. We look at the nature or essence of something, its “is,” and out of that we derive an “ought.” For example, man has a certain nature (his “is”), which implies that certain kinds of activity are proper to him and that certain kinds of things should not be done by him, or to him (his “ought”). Or we look at the “Is” of something, which reveals the objective value of that thing, which in turn determines how we ought to feel about that thing and what we ought to do about that thing. Something which is beautiful calls forth (or SHOULD call forth) a certain response in us. Something which is noble or ignoble calls forth (or SHOULD call forth) a certain response in us. And as you mentioned, a particular culture or race has a particular “is,” which leads to insights into its particular value, which also OUGHT to call for a certain response in us.

I guess Locke who preceded Hume was not affected by the fact-value distinction, because he derived certain natural rights (“oughts”) from man’s nature (“is”). I guess Hume would not have been able to do that.

Certainly the term, fact-value distinction, is a useful way to describe modernity’s denial of objective value and objective morality. Modernists believe in positive facts but not moral facts. However the term is so specialized and abstract that I’m not sure it is the best way to convey this idea to most people. Other terms, such as relativism, the denial of objective moral truth, the denial of transcendence, may do a better job of conveying this idea.

Reader replies:

I agree, there is better terminology to describe contemporary phenomena and understandings. I associated the term with Sailer because he comes across as a modernist social scientist.

But, your description in your second paragraph couldn’t be better; a traditionalist certainly doesn’t abide by the distinction, and therefore is at odds with modernity and much of modern social science (at a most fundamental level).

LA:

Again, I feel happy that this is no longer an abstract phrase to me, and that it’s added something to my understanding that wasn’t there before:

Traditionalist: sees the nature of things, and their objective value.

Modernist: sees the nature of things, sees no objective value in them.

However, I’m not sure it’s correct that the modernist sees the nature of things. I think the “nature” of a thing, its intelligible structure, is something that a modernist already rejects as too metaphysical. To speak of the nature of a thing is to imply a telos or moral end of that thing, which the modernist would deny. So I’ll amend what I said to this:

Traditionalist: sees facts about a thing, and its nature, and its objective value.

Modernist: sees facts about a thing, not its nature or its objective value.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 22, 2006 05:22 PM | Send