I noted in my last post that many twentieth-century artists aspired to an “innocent” perception of the world; they wanted to see (and sense) the world’s furniture outside of the “concepts” by which we categorize things. We don’t know if babies enjoy such innocence in the first few months of life—or if they only perceive an undifferentiated chaos. It is certainly true that, by six months at the latest, infants have attached names to things. Asked to reach for the cup, the six month old will grasp the cup, not the plate.
If the modernist artist (I have no idea what 21st century artists are trying to do) wants to sever the tight bond between percept and concept, it has been the scientists who want to disentangle fact from value. The locus classicus of the fact/value divide is Hume’s insistence that we cannot derive an “ought” from an “is.” For humanists, that argument appears to doom morality to irreality, to merely being something that humans make up. So the humanists strive to reconnect fact and value. But, for many scientists, the firewall between fact and value is exactly what underlies science’s ability to get at the “truth” of the way things are. Only observations and propositions (assertions) shorn of value have any chance of being “objective.” Values introduce a “bias” into accounts of what is the case, of what pertains in the world.
Thus, it has been that artists, the humanists, and philosophers friendly to aesthetics and qualia that have argued that fact and value cannot be disentangled. Pragmatism offers the most aggressive of these philosophical assaults on the fact/value divide. The tack pragmatism takes in these debates is not to argue against Hume’s logic, his “demonstration” that you can’t deduce an “ought” from an “is.”
Instead, pragmatism offers a thoroughly Darwinian account of human (and not just human) being in the world. Every living creature is always and everywhere “evaluating” its environment. There are no passive perceivers. Pragmatism denies what James and Dewey both labeled “the spectator view of knowledge.” Humans (and other animals) are not distanced from the world, looking at it from afar, and making statements about it from that position of non-involvement. Rather, all organisms are immersed in an environment, acting upon it even as they are being acted upon by it. The organism is, from the start, engaged in evaluating what in that environment might be of use to it and what might be a threat. The pursuit of knowledge (“inquiry” in the pragmatist jargon) is 1) driven by this need to evaluate the environment in terms of resource/threat and 2) an active process of doing things (experiments; trial and error) that will better show if what the environment offers will serve or should be avoided.
If, in this Darwinian/pragmatist view, an organism was to encounter anything that was neutral, that had no impact one way or the other on the organism’s purposes, that thing would most likely not be noticed at all, or would quickly disappear as a subject of interest or attention. As I mentioned in the last post, this seems a flaw in pragmatist psychology. Humans and other animals display considerable curiosity, prodding at things to learn about them even in the absence of any obvious or direct utility. There are, I would argue, instances of “pure” research, where the pay-off is not any discernible improvement in an organism’s ability to navigate the world. Sometimes we just want to know something to satisfy that particular kind of itch.
So maybe the idea is that scientists aspire to that kind of purity, just as so many 20th century artists aspired to the purity of a non-referential, non-thought-laden art. And that scientific version of the desire for purity gets connected to an epistemological claim that only such purity can guarantee the non-biased truth of the conclusions the scientist reaches. The pragmatist will respond: 1) there is still the desire for knowledge driving your inquiry, so you have not achieved a purity that removes the human agent and her interests; and 2) the very process of inquiry, which is interactive, means that the human observer has influenced what the world displays to her observations (which is why Heisenberg’s work was so crucial to Dewey—and seemed to Dewey a confirmation of what pragmatism had been saying for thirty years before Heisenberg articulated his axioms about observation and uncertainty.) The larger point: since action (on the part of humans and for other organisms) is motivated, and because knowledge can only be achieved through action (not passively), there is no grasping of “fact” that has not been driven by some “value” being attached to gaining (seeking out) that knowledge.
Even if we accept this pragmatist assault on the fact/value divide, we are left with multiple problems. One is linguistic. Hilary Putnam, in The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays (Harvard UP, 2002), basically argues that there are no neutral words, at least no neutral nouns or verbs. (I have written about Kenneth Burke’s similar argument in my book, Pragmatist Politics (University of Minnesota P, 2012). Every statement about the world establishes the relation of the speaker to that world (and to the people to whom the statement is addressed.) In other words, every speech act is a way of adjusting the speaker’s relation to the content and the audience of that utterance. Speech acts, like all actions, are motivated—and thus can be linked back to what the speaker values, what the speaker strives to accomplish. Our words are always shot through and through with values—from the start. And those values cannot be drained from our words (or from our observations) to leave only a residue of “pure” fact. Fact and value are intertwined from the get go—and cannot be disentangled.
Putnam, however, (like James, Dewey, and Kenneth Burke) is a realist. Even if, as James memorably puts it, “the trail of the human serpent is over all,” the entanglement of human aspirations with observations about the world and others does not mean the non-self must forego its innings. There is feedback. Reality does make itself known in the ways that it offers resistance to attempts to manipulate it. James insists that we don’t know how plastic “reality” is until we have tried to push the boundaries of what we deem possible. But limits will be reached, will be revealed, at certain points. Pragmatism’s techno-optimism means that James and Dewey thought that today’s limits might be overcome tomorrow. That’s what generates the controversial pragmatist “theory of truth.” Truth is what the experiments, the inquiries, of today have revealed. But those truths can only be reached as a result of a process of experimentation, not passively observed, and those truths are not “final,” because future experiments may reveal new possibilities in the objects that we currently describe in some particular way. Science is constantly upending received notions of the way things are. If the history of science tells us anything, it should be that “certainties” continually yield to new and different accounts. Truth is “made” through the process of inquiry—and truth is provisional. Truth is always, in Popper’s formulation, always open to disconfirmation.
In short, pragmatism destabilizes “fact” even as it proclaims “value” is ineliminable.
I have suggested that “fact” is best understood as what in the external world frustrates (or, at least, must be navigated by) desire. Wishes are not horses. Work must be done to accomplish some approximation of what one desires. The point is simply that facts are not stable and that our account of facts will be the product of our interaction with them, an interaction that is driven by the desires that motivate that engagement.
What about “value”? I have been using the term incredibly loosely. If we desire something, then we value it. But we usually want to distinguish between different types of value—and morality usually wants to gain a position from which it can endorse some desires and condemn others. In short, value is a battleground, where there are constant attempts to identify what is “truly” valuable alongside attempts to banish imposters from the field. There is economic value, eudemonic value, moral value, and health value. So, for example, one can desire to smoke tobacco, but in terms of “value for health,” that desire will be deemed destructive.
Any attempt to put some flesh on the bare bones term “value” will immediately run into the problem of “value for” and “pure” (or intrinsic) value. Some values are instrumental; they are means toward a specific end. If you want to be healthy, it is valuable not to smoke. If you want to become a concert pianist, it is valuable to practice.
The search for “intrinsic” values can quickly become circular—or lead to infinite regress. Is the desire to become a concert pianist “intrinsic”? It certainly seems to function as an end point, as something desired that motivates and organizes a whole set of actions. But it is easy to ask “why” do I value becoming a concert pianist so highly? For fame, for love of music, to develop what I seem to have talent for (since, given my inborn talents, I couldn’t become a professional baseball player)? Do we—could we ever—reach rock bottom here?
The Darwinians, of course, think they have hit rock bottom. Survival to the point of being able to reproduce. That’s the fundamental value that drives life. The preservation of life across multiple generations. When organisms are, from the get go, involved in “evaluation,” in assessing what in the environment is of value to them, that evaluation is in terms of what avails life. (The phrase “wealth is what avails life” comes from a very different source: John Ruskin’s Unto this Last, his screed against classical liberalism’s utilitarian economics.)
One problem for the Darwinians is that humans (at least, among animals) so often value things, and act in ways, that thwart or even contradict the Darwinian imperatives. Daniel Dennett argues that such non-Darwinian desires are “parasites”; they hitch a ride on the capacities that the human organism has developed through natural selection’s overriding goal of making a creature well suited to passing on its genes. Some parasites, Dennett writes, “surely enhance our fitness, making us more likely to have lots of descendants (e.g. methods of hygiene, child-rearing, food preparation); others are neutral—but may be good for us in other, more important regards (e.g., literacy, music, and art), and some are surely deleterious to our genetic future, but even they may be good for us in other ways that matter more to us (the techniques of birth control are an obvious example)” (Freedom Evolves, p. 177).
Whoa! I love that Dennett is not a Darwinian fundamentalist. (In particular, it’s good to see him avoid the somersaults other Darwinians perform in their effort to reduce music and art to servants of the need to reproduce.) The Darwinian imperative does not drive all before it. But surely it is surprising that Dennett would talk of things that “matter more to us” than the need to insure our “genetic future.” He has introduced a pluralism of values into a Darwinian picture that is more usually deployed to identify an overriding fundamental value.
Other candidates for a bedrock intrinsic value run into similar difficulties. Too much human behavior simply negates each candidate. For example, we might, with Kant, want to declare that each individual human life is sacred, an end in itself, not to be used or violated. But every society has articulated conditions under which the killing of another human being is acceptable. And if we attempt to find “the” value that underwrites this acceptance of killing nothing emerges. So it does seem that we are left with a pluralism of values. Different humans value different things. And that is true within a single society as well as across cultures. Values, like facts, are in process—continually being made and re-made. And, as with facts, there is feedback—in terms of the praise/blame provided by others, but also in terms of the self-satisfaction achieved by acting in accordance with one’s values. Does becoming a concert pianist satisfy me? Does it make me happy? Does it make me respect myself? Am I full of regrets about the missed opportunities that came with practicing five hours a day? Would I do it all over again (that ultimate Nietzschean test)?
When it comes to entrenched values, things get even trickier. Here’s the dilemma: we usually condemn actions that are “interested.” We don’t trust the word of someone who is trying to sell us something. We want independent information from that which the seller provides. The seller has an “interest” in distorting the facts. Now we are back to the urge to find an “objective” viewpoint. In cases of lying, the issue is straightforward. The interested party knows all the relevant information, but withholds some of it in order to deceive.
But what if one’s “interest” distorts one’s view of things? What if the flaw is epistemological more than it is moral? I see what I want to see. Confirmation bias. My “values” dictate how I understand the circumstances within which I dwell. My very assessment of my environment is to a large extent a product of my predilections. Feedback is of very limited use here. Humans seem extraordinarily impervious to feedback, able to doggedly pursue counterproductive actions for long periods of time. In this scenario, “interest” can look a lot like what some theorists call “ideology.” The question is how to correct for the distortions that are introduced by the interested viewer. Isn’t there some “fact” of the matter that can settle disputes?
The despairing conclusion is that, in many instances, there is no settling of such disputes. What would it take to convince Trumpian partisans that the 2020 election was not stolen? Or that Covid vaccines do not cause cancer? All the usual forms of “proof” have been unavailing. Instead of having “fact” drive “value” out of the world as the humanists feared (that feat motivated Kant’s whole philosophy), here we have “value” driving “fact” to the wall. A world of pluralistic values creates, it now appears, a world of pluralistic facts. No wonder that we get a call for bolstering the bulwark of “fact.”
As I have already made clear, I don’t think we can get back to (or even that we were ever really there) a world of unsullied facts. Our understandings of the world have always been “interested” in the ways that pragmatism identifies. The only safeguard against untrammeled fantasy is feedback—and the 2020 stolen election narrative shows how successfully feedback can be avoided. We have the various rhetorical moves in our toolbox—the presentation of evidence, the making of arguments, the outlining of consequences, emotional appeals to loyalties, sympathies, and indignation—for getting people to change their minds. These techniques are the social forms of feedback that go along with the impersonal feedback provided by the world at large. But that’s it. There is no definitive clincher, no knock-down argument or proof that will get everyone to agree. It’s pluralism all the way down.
Here’s something else that is deeply troubling—and that I don’t know exactly where I stand. Is there any difference between “interest” and moral value? Usually the two are portrayed as opposed. Morality tries to get individuals to view things from a non-personal point of view (Thomas Nagel’s famous “view from nowhere” or Rawls’ “veil of ignorance”). “Interest” is linked to what would personally benefit me—with nary a care for how it might harm you. Some philosophers try to bridge this gap with the concept of “enlightened self-interest.” The idea is that social interactions are an iterative game; I am in a long-term relation with you, so cheating you now may pay off in the short-term, but actually screws up the possibility of a sustained, and mutually beneficial, relationship over the long haul. So it is not really in my interest to harm you in this moment. Morality, then, becomes prudential; it is the wisest thing to do given that we must live together. Humans are social animals and the basic rules of morality (which encode various forms of consideration of the other) make social relations much better for all involved.
In this scenario, then, “interest” and “moral value” are the same if (and only if) the individual takes a sufficiently “long view” of his interest. The individual’s “interests” are what he values—and among the things he values is acting in ways his society deems “moral.” There will remain a tension between what seems desirable in the moment and the longer term interest served by adhering to morality’s attempt to instill the “long view,” but that tension does not negate the idea that the individual is acting in his “interest.”
A more stringent view, one that would drive a deeper wedge between morality and interest, would hold that morality always calls for some degree of self-abnegation. Morality requires altruism or sacrifice, the voluntary surrender of things I desire to others. I must act against selfishness, against self-interest, in order to become truly moral. This is the view of morality that says it entails the curbing of desire. I must renounce some of my desires to be moral. Thus, morality is not merely prudential, not just the most winning strategy for self-interest in the long run. Morality introduces a set of values that are in contradiction with the values that characterize self-interest. Morality brings along with it prohibitions, not just recommendations of the more prudent way to handle relations with one’s fellows. It’s not simply practice justice if you want peace. It’s practice justice even if there is no pay-off, even if you are only met with ingratitude and resentment.
To go back to the Darwinian/pragmatist basic scenario. We have an organism embedded in an environment. That organism is always involved in evaluating that environment in terms of its own needs and interests. Thus values are there from the very start and inextricably involved in the perception of facts. The question is whether we can derive the existence of morality in human societies from the needs that arise from the fact of human sociality. That’s the Darwinian account of morality offered by Philip Kitcher among others, which understands morality in terms of its beneficial consequences for the preservation and reproduction of human life. Morality in that account aligns with the fundamental interest identified in Darwinian theory.
Or is morality a Dennett-like parasite? An intervention into the Darwinian scheme that moves away from a strict pursuit of interest, of what enhances the individual’s survival and ability to reproduce.
To repeat: I don’t know which alternative I believe. And am going to leave it there for now.
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