Social Science and Value Judgments

Social Science and Value JudgmentsAuthor(s): Scott GordonSource: The Canadian Journal of Economics / Revue canadienne d'Economique, Vol. 10, No. 4(Nov., 1977), pp. 529-546Published by: Wiley on behalf of the Canadian Economics AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/134289 .

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Social science and value judgments S C O T T G O R D O N / Queen's University and Indiana University

Social science and value judgments. The central section of the paper examines the question whether a value-free social science is possible, mainly by considering Ernest Nagel's defence of objectivity. Nagel's arguments are found to be insufficient to sustain the claim, and the author concludes that empirical social science, even in its most technical branches, contains value-loadings. The paper goes on to consider the consequences of this view and concludes that scientific progress is best served by an environment of intellectual freedom.

Sciences sociales et jugements de valeur. Est-ce qu'une science sociale degagee de tout jugement de valeur est possible? Voila la question qu'examine la portion cen- trale de ce memoire via une discussion critique de la defense de l'objectivite pre- sentee par Ernest Nagel. L'auteur montre que l'argumentation de Nagel se revele insuffisante pour etayer sa position et conclut qu'une science sociale empirique, meme dans ses sections les plus techniques, ne peut s'6vader de certaines references aux valeurs. L'auteur developpe les implications de cette position et tire la conclusion que le progres scientifique s'accomplit le mieux dans un climat de liberte intellectuelle.

A very popular error: having the courage of one's convictions; rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one's convictions. Nietzsche

I

My predecessor in office noted in his Presidential Address last year that it is not easy to find a suitable topic for this occasion. One of the reasons for this is surely the lack of constraints that are imposed. One may talk about anything or everything, and, as Professor Weldon also pointed out, one speaks 'from sanctuary,' In choosing my own topic I have been influenced by the fact that I was nominated as your President-Elect shortly after giving a paper to this

Presidential address to the annual meeting of the Canadian Economics Association, June 1977. I wish to acknowledge, with gratitude, critical comments on earlier versions of this paper by R.G. Lipsey, R.N. Giere, members of the Philosophy Colloquium at Queen's University, the Economics Faculty Seminar at Indiana University, and the Fourth Interlaken Conference on Analysis and Ideology.

Canadian Journal of Economics/Revue canadienne d'Economique, X, no. 4 November/novembre 1977. Printed in Canada/Imprime au Canada.



530/ Scott Gordon

association on 'The Political Economy of Big Questions and Small Ones.'" As the Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner has demonstrated, 'positive reinforce- ment' induces an organism to do more of the same, and professors are perhaps not much different from pigeons in this respect.

I hope you will not feel that I abuse the privileges of sanctuary too much by beginning in a somewhat personal way. I was an undergraduate at Dalhousie in those ancient days when professors were confident that they knew better than students what constitutes a good education, and so the curriculum had many Requirements, one of which was an obligatory course in English literature, which in my day dealt with the works of Shakespeare and Milton and was taught by the senior member of the English Department who doubled as the university registrar. (Dalhousie then had less than a thousand students.) The main work of the course was the writing of a weekly essay, called a 'theme,' and since at the beginning of the year we did not yet know who Shakespeare and Milton were the assigned topic for the first essay was 'Why study English?' The honest answer to this was obvious, but, alas, too brief for a 'theme.' Some inventiveness, not to say dissimulation, was called for. Yet I am confident that the essay assignment served a function, since the students who did the task with ease might thereby have discovered a natural talent for a career in jour- nalism or public affairs which required no further preparation, while the others had no recourse but to accumulate some 'human capital.'

Off and on since then I have been studying economics. I have no reliable memory of what I might have said, thirty-five years ago, in answer to the question 'Why study Economics?' if it had been posed, and I have no confident answer yet; but economics is the study of human behaviour, and in recent years it has turned its light on the behaviour of politicians, drug addicts, criminals, lovers, altruists, and bigots (most of whom seem to be behaving like England and Portugal exchanging cloth and wine); so why should we not turn our light a full one hundred and eighty degrees and study ourselves? Why do economists behave the way they do? I offer the following sketch for a model: the economist maximizes utility subject to a constraint, which is time, according to the following function:

Uij = UiJ(M, P, C, LJH, St, S, wc, ...)

Ui1 is the utility a particular economist i derives from the study of a particular branch of the subject j. The function contains the following arguments.

Our economist may be the simplest kind of economic man, responding to the fact that there is demand for the services of economists for which others are prepared to pay. I call this the 'moolah factor,' or M. For any particular i working on any particular j, M may not be equal to opportunity income, for some economists are talented, and some talents are scarce. It is a wise man who knows where his rent is, and some economists undoubtedly go into the

1 Canadian Public Policy/Analyse de Politiques, Winter 1975



Social science and value judgments / 531

trade because they are, unaccountably, good at it, like being able to play the oboe.

For some economists, economics is a pleasurable intellectual activity and offers high non-monetary rewards of this nature. I label this P for the 'play factor.' It seems to have an exceptionally large weight for mathematical economists. Frank Knight used to make the point that play has the characteristic of inverting means and ends; goals are set up to provide a focus for activity rather than activity being directed towards goals. Economists for whom P is a very strong factor find the existence of a real economy and its problems to be a fortunate fact of nature, just as mountain climbers are glad that there are hills.

There are some economists who derive pleasure from knowing how the world works, independently of what might be done with that knowledge. This is C, the 'curiosity factor.' As you know, it kills cats everywhere, but economists only in some countries.

Then there are some economists who derive pleasure from relative knowledge, i.e. knowing things about which others are ignorant. This yields high utility when the ignorant are persons of distinction like businessmen and politicians and perhops especially other economists, the more eminent the better. I label this LJH for the 'Little Jack Horner factor.' It has an especially strong coefficient among the young, and is a powerful impetus in that battle between the generations through which old theories are replaced by new ones.

There are some economists who believe that economics should be socially useful and who derive pleasure from doing good. This is labelled St for the 'sainthood factor.' Serious problems for public policy arise when there are a number of economists with strong sainthood factors, each one urging that good be done his way, but on the whole this is a desirable thing since it assures that no one else will view the economist with reverence, how ever much he may so regard himself.

But in order to do good it seems necessary to have some idea of what is good, and many economists have devoted themselves to this goal. This is welfare economics, and I label it S for the 'smoke factor,' after the most famous illustration in that branch of our discipline. The label can do double duty if one applies the utility function to those who do not derive pleasure from the work of trying to discover what is good, but from confidently knowing what is good. In this case, read S as indicating 'smugness factor.'

Finally, my equation takes note of the fact that some economists derive pleasure from devoting their craft and talents to the work of ripping away the veil which conceals, not the laws which govern economic processes, but the evil manipulators who have got hold of the levers of control. This kind of economics is like the writing of detective novels in that the author knows from the start who is hidden behind the veil, and his real effort consists of disclosing this to those who are not gifted with such penetrating vision. I label this wc



532 / Scott Gordon

after Wilkie Collins, the first detective novelist; but that label too can do double duty, as anyone who is familiar with European signs will appreciate.

I leave the utility function open, indicating that one could go on adding factors, but I have perhaps gone quite far enough already in this direction, so I will pass on presently to more serious business. I am not altogether unserious about this though. The only other theories that are offered to explain why economists do what they do are the Freudian, which directs one to study the groinal histories of economists, and the Marxian, which directs one to their class 'allegiances,' which are rigidly determined for everyone except Marxists, so I am prepared to offer this equation as a comparatively superior formulation.

In my earlier paper, I did not mean to suggest that what were called Big Questions are not worth talking about; that would have been a denial of my own utility function to the point of being suicidal. What I wanted to say is that there can be no science of Big Questions, whose object is to arrive at firm conclusions. These are issues that remain permanently evanescent, but in a civilized society they are not disregarded on that account, for while they cannot be settled they can be discussed, and the discussion can be rational, informative, and progressive. So, having been appropriately reinforced by the honour you have conferred upon me, I will attempt, on this occasion, to discuss a Very Big Question: the relation between science and value judgments in the work that economists do.

I I

There are really two questions that may be examined here which, although they intersect, are quite distinct. First, there is the question whether it is possible to construct a science of value judgments: that is, a theory of ethics which has the same sort of scientific credentials that one finds in the empirical sciences; the second is whether it is possible to construct a science of real world phenomena which is 'objective' in the sense of being independent of value judgments. It is the second of these that I wish to discuss.

This question has been much argued, pro and con, by economists, other social scientists, and philosophers. The best modern examination of the issue that I know is by the distinguished philosopher Ernest Nagel in his The Struc- ture of Science (1961 ) .2 Nagel defends the proposition that a purely objective study of social phenomena is possible by showing that the arguments advanced to the contrary are not tenable. This is not a compelling defense, since, as I am sure Nagel would admit, one does not prove that a proposition is true by demonstrating that all arguments so far advanced against it are false. More- over, I am not convinced that Nagel's criticisms of the thesis that social science necessarily carries value-loading are sound, and as you will see I am prepared, albeit reluctantly, to accept that thesis myself.

2 The relevant section (pp. 485-502) is reprinted in May Brodbeck (ed.), Readings in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, New York: Macmillan, 1968, pp. 98-113.



Social science and value judgments /533

Nagel's defense of objectivity, as I have indicated, consists mainly of specific critiques of the contrary arguments, but he makes one point that is more general, being epistemological, and I want to note it first. If one asserts that all propositions about social phenomena are infused with value judgments, what is the status of that assertion itself? Is it infused with value judgments, or is it in some fashion exempt, possessing the quality of objective meaning and truth? Nagel argues that if this assertion is objectively valid, there is no clear warrant for believing it to be unique in this respect; there may be other, similarly objective, statements that may be made, and so an objective science of social phenomena is possible. But why should we not take the other track and claim that all assertions contain value-loadings, without exception? One has the uncomfortable feeling that to do so would amount to intellectual nihilism, but this is not necessarily so. If it were true that a person's value judgments are fully determined by objective circumstances, such as his class status, then indeed we would find ourselves in an impossible situation, in which people of different circumstances talk totally different moral languages which cannot be translated into one another, and even those who talk the same language cannot transmit any new content to one another. But if one believes that people have some freedom to choose their values, and to change their choices, then a meaningful and fruitful discussion of values is possible, including a discussion of the value elements that may be present in the human study of world phenomena. I will return to this point later; but now I want to go on to examine Nagel's criticisms of the specific arguments that have been advanced against the proposition that an objective social science is possible.

Nagel examines four such arguments. The first of these is that value judgments are involved in the selection process by which a social scientist determines what he will study and what he will not. Nagel points out that no science studies everything; selectivity is not a unique characteristic of social science. Nagel is clearly correct in this, but it is not a defense of the objectivity of social science unless one defines objectivity to mean doing what other (presumably the natural) sciences do, and I can see no logical warrant for that. The natural sciences have performed admirable feats in advancing our knowledge of empirical phenomena. Moreover they have led the way in rescuing the human intellect from the perversion of scholasticism and in prying loose the stultifying hand of religion. Social scientists could take justifiable pleasure in being able to do what physicists and biologists can do in their fields, in part because of the high level of scientific objectivity they have been able to attain. But good natural scientists aim at objectivity in their work; it is a guiding criterion that is independent of what they do and what they achieve. One cannot define objectivity as being what natural scientists do, for then it would be a conventional criterion and would rule whatever they happen to do. So Nagel's argument that social science does not differ from the natural sciences in that both involve selection of problems is not a testament for objectivity as such.

Even if we were prepared to accept natural science as our ideal, and instead



534/ Scott Gordon

of defending our objectivity we merely claimed that social scientists can be as objective as natural scientists can be, difficulties arise from two sources. a/ The social sciences are unavoidably oriented to social problems to a much greater degree than the natural sciences are. The allocation of research resources is much more guided by direct consideration of usefulness. Or, to put the matter differently, the utility function of a good natural scientist can be dominated by the 'play' and 'curiosity' factors, with 'sainthood,' 'smoke,' and 'Wilkie Collins' carrying negligible weight. But one or more of these latter factors are powerful in the utility functions of social scientists and, unless we all become pure mathematical economists, necessarily so. Such factors involve value judgments. b/ Furthermore, the selection of problems for investigation depends critically on one's prior conception of what the world is like. Marxists select class relationships for study; neoclassical economists do not. Neoclassical economists attempt to investigate the micro-foundations of macro-phenomena, while Marxists attempt to investigate the macro-foundations of micro-phenomena. One could argue that this is a matter of metaphysics rather than value judgments but that would merely amount to turning one's back on what is often the central issue. The accusations and counter-accusations which punc- tuate the debate over value judgments in social science often hinge on the matter of alternative metaphysical preconceptions. It is true, of course, that natural scientists too must work with some prior metaphysical or ontological conceptions, but the illustrations I have just given indicate that the value loadings of a social scientist's 'paradigm,' as Kuhn has called this, are likely to be much heavier than a natural scientist's.

The second argument against objectivity considered by Nagel is the proposition that value judgments influence (and may even control) the conclusions that a social scientist reaches. If by 'conclusions' one means policy conclusions, there is little dispute, since hardly anyone, perhaps no one, argues that prescription does not involve value judgments in any field. Nagel does not deny this; his focus here is upon the argument that the values held by a social scientist may be imported into the analysis itself. Nagel grants that this may be so and even that it may be commonly so in social science, but he argues that this poses a practical, not a philosophical, problem. It is not impossible, in principle, to distinguish what is objective and what is biased by value-loading in empirical research and therefore it is possible to identify, minimize, and perhaps even eliminate such biases. I have no quarrel with Nagel's discussion of this second argument, but only because he goes on to consider, as the third and fourth arguments, the important issues which it poses: whether it is possible to make objective identifications of empirical facts, and whether it is possible to make objective assessments of empirical evidence.

The third argument against the possibility of an objective social science has a philosophic lineage which goes back to the great debates of the seven- teenth and eighteenth centuries over the nature and foundations of our knowledge of the external world. George Berkeley succeeded in proving that one cannot know that there is an external world, and that would seem to be the end




of that. It is not wise to worry much about this, but even if one is prepared to start from the assumption that an external world exists, knowledge of it involves that it be perceived by the human mind. Some critics of the idea of an objective social science argue, in effect, that since all perceptions of empirical facts are human perceptions and all humans have values it is not possible to make a separation of facts and values. Nagel points out that, as on the issue of selection, this problem is not unique to social science, and while it is perhaps true that facts and values do often become intertwined, and perhaps also true that this is more of a problem for social than for natural scientists, the separation is not, in principle, impossible. The important issue, in Nagel's view, is whether, in the treatment of empirical phenomena, the social scientist employs classifications of facts which are, in themselves, value judgments of an ethical nature. A bomb is dropped from an airplane; a business firm estab- lishes a plant in a foreign country; a tariff is imposed - these are phenomena that can be objectiviely described, but what is the warrant for grouping them (and others) together under a classificatory designation like, say, 'imperialism?' Nagel argues that such 'characterizing judgments' are not judgments of an ethical nature - one can determine whether the dropping of the bomb properly belongs to the classification 'imperialism' without committing oneself on the issue whether imperialism is good or bad. The only value that is involved here, says Nagel, is that of 'scientific probity' - insistence on getting the classification correct.

Nagel's defence works much better for the natural than the social sciences. A biologist can operate with a clear definition of the characteristics which determine whether an activity falls into the classification 'respiration' or 'reproduction' which is quite independent of any decision whether to approve it or not. Is it really possible to define 'imperialism' in such a way that it is only a matter of 'scientific probity' whether this or that activity, such as the dropping of a bomb, can be properly classed under that heading? Some would say that this only demonstrates that 'imperialism' is a useless term and should be dropped from the scientist's vocabulary and though, in this particular case, I am inclined to agree, the work of social scientists would become very lean and skimpy if we could only employ generic terms that are as definable as 'respiration.' Try defining terms like 'unemployment,' 'economic development,' 'monopoly,' 'competition,' 'income,' 'savings,' 'labour,' and 'capital' for example. I do not intend to suggest that the definitions of such terms cannot be sharpened; on the contrary, we learn a great deal by doing just that; but I think that social scientists have to operate with many terms that can be made neither descriptively precise nor free of value loadings. This is perhaps due to the fact that social scientists use common-language terms rather than creating technical neologisms as natural scientists freely do, but I think not. Even when we invent technical terms they quickly acquire value loadings. The term 'imperialism,' for example, did not acquire its contemporary derogatory meaning until the early twentieth century.

So far I have not said anything that would much disturb an econometrician.



536 / Scott Gordon

He would be well justified in saying: 'I know that I select problems, and that I classify phenomena into categories; moreover I use theories which, if you like, are preconceptions about how the real world works; but I am an objective scientist because I deal only in hypotheses or, as Karl Popper would say, "conjectures" about reality, and my procedures are designed to let that reality speak for itself concerning the validity of those hypotheses.' The fourth argument against scientific objectivity consists of the assertion that reality does not in fact speak for itself; empirical data must be assessed, and that assessment involves value judgments.

Nagel defends the objectivity of social science against this argument as he does against the other three. Again, I think there are critical weaknesses in his defence. These are of two sorts: first, it seems to me that it is not possible to apply the methodology of empirical investigation that is exemplified by modern econometrics to all the issues that social scientists wish to study; secondly, there is at least one point in that methodology where value judgments enter into the technical procedure itself.

Nagel is correct in rejecting the extreme version of this argument against objectivity, which consists of the proposition that a strictly logical connection exists between the social background, class status, etc. of the scientist and the standards which he applies in the assessment of evidence. This amounts to saying that if one knew these sociological facts about the scientist one could predict, or even deduce, the procedures he will employ in assessing evidence, and the conclusions he will arrive at. If that proposition is itself an empirical one, it must be supported by evidence, which must itself be assessed, and one is locked into an infinite regress unless one is prepared to assert that this statement is uniquely exempt from the generalization that it applies to all others.

The less extreme version of the argument asserts only that the socioeco- nomic background or status of the scientist may influence, but not strictly determine, his assessment of evidence. Nagel regards this as a problem of recognizing such biases and correcting for them. I agree with this but am not convinced that this renders the argument toothless. It may be easy to locate any biases which may have entered an econometrician's regression model, but not all empirical research in social science works with such explicit procedures. There has been a long-standing debate, particularly among historians, sociologists, and anthropologists, which focuses on this issue. An historian might argue, for example, that the proper procedure of research consists of a kind of total immersion process: the historian buries himself in the documents and other records bearing upon his period and problem until he has achieved an intimate understanding or verstehen; then he emerges, washes the archival dust from his hands, and commits his understanding to paper. The history he writes is, however, ineluctably his story, and another historian might tell a quite different one. If there were a limited set of possible value judgments, one could at least look forward to exhausting the subject with a limited number of histories, but each age generates new values, the histories have to be rewritten, and rewritten again, world without end.




The writing of history is not a fruitless occupation; I have even tried to do the thing myself, and in a verstehen mode. On the other hand, I am not in the least opposed to the efforts of the 'new economic historians' to replace verstehen by empirical methods which employ the explicit procedures of econometrics. Those methods are exceptionally penetrating, and their explicitness enables one to trace for oneself the route by which the historian arrived at his conclusions and to test their sensitivity to alternative assumptions. It has taken only a few years to discover the errors and weaknesses in Fogel and Engerman's Time on the Cross; it often takes a generation before one finds out what is wrong with a verstehen history. But it is not possible to cliometrize all historical research, and there are many other areas of social science which will remain little touched by modern statistical methods. In these areas, value judgments will be embedded in the procedures employed by the social scientist to assess evidence, and it will not serve the aims of scholarship to claim that what we know about such matters is value-free or even that it can be made so.

The econometrician might still be undisturbed. He inight grant all that I have said but point out that if the issue is whether it is possible to do research that is free of value judgments the proponent of this is not required to demonstrate that it can be done everywhere across the field of social phenomena; only that it can be done somewhere. The econometrician might thus save the day for the wertfreiheit party by demonstrating that within the limited area that is amenable to his methods, the assessment of empirical evidence does not involve value judgments. If the objective area is a very small part of social science, this would provide little comfort unless it were demonstrably capable of significant expansion, which an econometrician might indeed hope will prove to be so. However, even this area of claimed objectivity is not immune from attack. There is an important argument, noted by Nagel but not seriously considered by him, which undermines even the limited claim which the econometrician makes for his own special field. The issue is a technical one so you will have to bear with me for a few moments.

The problem was noted by Jerzy Neyman in the early papers which devel- oped the Neyman-Pearson model of statistical inference in the 1930s and emerges clearly in Abraham Wald's formulation of statistical inference as a theory of decision-making under uncertainty. Under this formulation, testing a hypothesis, as Neyman observed, is really a matter of choosing a course of action. The technical debate is too complicated for a non-expert like myself to enter but the aspect of it that is germane to my argument has been stated simply by a philosopher of science, Richard Rudner, in a paper unambiguously entitled 'The scientist qua scientist makes value judgments'3 which, incidentally, is not restricted to social science.

Rudner points out that the procedures of science consist of the forming of hypotheses which are then submitted to empirical tests. The data are never absolutely consistent or inconsistent with the hypotheses however, so in the assessment of evidence one eniploys probability theory, that is, one determines

3 Philosophy of Science, January 1953



538 / Scott Gordon

(speaking rather roughly) the probability that the hypothesis is right or wrong. The probability calculation itself may be objective, but there is no objective rule which governs how it must be used in testing the hypothesis. Do we reject the hypothesis if the relationship it suggests could occur 'by chance' up to ten times in a hundred? Five times? Once? The rules we employ in econometrics are conventional; they do not carry a warrant that is rooted in the external world, and, more important, it does not appear possible to obtain such a warrant for them.

Since we cannot know, with certainty, whether a hypothesis is right or wrong, acting upon it exposes one to some chance of error, and since we have no rule which tells us what magnitude of error it is 'scientifically correct' to risk, the problem of evidence assessment cannot be separated from consideration of the consequences of being wrong. We can calculate what statisticians call Type i and Type ii errors, but which of these one should expose oneself to depends not only upon their magnitudes but also upon the consequences which might ensue if we accept a false hypothesis or reject a true one. If the consequences are mild we might accept the hypothesis and act on it at the 10 per cent or 5 per cent level, but if they are severe we might require a 1 per cent probability, and if they are catastrophic we might insist on less than one in a million or even smaller risks. It would perhaps be desirable to build a coal- fired generating station if the chances of its getting out of control are one in a hundred, but to insist on a much lower probability for a nuclear generator and still lower yet for a fusion generator, should that technology ever become feasible.

The defender of objectivity might argue that this illustration deals with the practical application of science, which he has never claimed to be free of value judgments. Does this problem of evidence assessment by error probability criteria raise difficulties for the claim of objectivity in pure science? If pure and applied science were consistently to employ different criteria of evidence assessment one might well find a gap progressively widening between what scientists think they know to be true and what they recommend in practical cases. I do not believe that this can be accepted with equanimity. But, even if this were not so, it still remains that there is no objectively proper decision rule for pure science within its own orbit. Considerations must enter which, here too, have to do with the differential consequences of Type i and Type ii errors for the course of development of scientific research. Take the case of para- psychology for example. One can easily imagine scientists accepting parapsy- chological hypotheses on the same probability basis as they use for other matters when they concern matters such as 'thought transference,' but 'psychokinesis' and 'pre-cognition' pose much more difficult problems. To accept such hypotheses would involve a radical transformation in scientific thought at its core, with momentous consequences for the direction of future scientific research. The consequences of accepting a false hypothesis in such cases are so great that a scientist is unlikely to do so unless the evidence in its favor is much more




compelling than he normally insists on. The same is true in biology with respect to Lamarckian-type evolutionary mechanisms, for which, in fact, there is apparently some evidence at the microbiological level. The judgments involved in such cases are not ethical ones, but they are nonetheless value judgments in the sense that the assessment of evidence is affected by the consequences that are perceived to ensue therefrom. I may be a bit out of date in advancing this argument since it is possible, by using Bayesian analysis, as Zellner has done in econometrics, to avoid strict accept-reject decisions and instead evaluate the comparative probability of competing hypotheses. Perhaps this preserves a hard, albeit small, core of objectivity after all. I suspect not, but I am here getting beyond my depth, so will say no more.

Nagel rejects this attack on objectivity on two grounds: that it is not unique to social science, and that it does not commit the scientist to the adoption of any specific values. I have already indicated my unwillingness to accept sim- ilarity to the natural sciences as a proof of objectivity. Nagel's second defense here is harder to understand, but if I understand it, it seems to me to be a weak one. The recognition that one may be wrong, and that being wrong has consequences, seems to me to lead one ineluctably to the adoption of a rule of prudence in the assessment of evidence that is similar to the Neumann-Morgen- stern minimax rule in the theory of games. I am not sure what a rule of prudence would involve for pure science, but in the area of social policy it seems to have the clear implication that one should make use of policies which are small in scope and reversible, rather than ones that are comprehensive and irrevo- cable, even if the latter are more likely to be correct than the former (which, incidentally, I would not grant). Now it is true that an advocate of revolution- ary policies of social change could assert that the adverse consequences of his being wrong are less serious than those which would ensue if a more mod- erate policy turned out to be wrong. Perhaps Nagel would argue that since both revolutionaries and moderates are able, without formal self-contradiction, to accept the minimax rule of prudence as a value judgment it is therefore not a judgment that commits one to the adoption of any specific values. This argument is too vague for one to attack frontally, but I think I have said enough to indicate that, at best, it is an exceedingly weak defence of the objectivity of social science.

I have discussed the issue of value judgments in social science by focusing on Nagel, but only because his delineation of the attack on objectivity is the clearest, and his defence the most powerful, that I am acquainted with. Before I leave this issue, however, I want to make some brief reference to two routes by which one may seek to avoid the conclusion that value judgments are embedded in social sciences which lie outside the scope of the kind of defence of objectivity which Nagel mounts.

The first has an intellectual lineage going back to Plato and his famous parable of the cave. The observer of empirical phenomena, according to Plato, perceives only reflections of the true reality. These reflections are as transitory



540 / Scott Gordon

and insubstantial as the shadows cast upon a wall lit by a flickering fire. Plato's theory that the true reality is abstract, consisting of pure 'forms or ideas,' need not concern us here. What is important is his further assertion that some persons have a rare gift which enables them to grasp the reality that is hidden from others. Firm objective knowledge is therefore not impossible, but it is vouchsafed only to the special few. Engels and Lenin argued that all knowledge has the quality of Plato's shadows except for a small number of absolutely true propositions, including formal logic and Marxian theory. The claim of some modern Marxists that it is impossible for a non-Marxist to appreciate what they are saying is not merely a statement to the effect that there may be non-intersecting frames of perception and understanding, but that one of these is true and objective while all others are vitiated by such things as 'class bias' and 'false consciousness.' I see no way of disproving propositions of this sort, but I am unwilling to take this route out of the difficulty, unless, perhaps, we could all agree that is is Scott Gordon who is uniquely endowed with special sight. Intellectual history is replete with conceits of this sort, and the history of religion is a history of little else. They are fairly harmless - but only so long as one of them does not acquire the ability to employ coercive power.

The second route of defence for objectivity is to construe the science in question as a set of purely logical propositions. This is what is implied in describing economics as 'the logic of rational choice.' The same objectivity may then be claimed for economic theory as for mathematics or Aristotelian logic. Admittedly, a structure of if-then propositions does not contain any value judgments of an ethical nature, but it does not contain any empirical content either. If we view economics as a study of real world phenomena and not as a self-contained a priori intellectual system, then it is plain that it is exposed to the kinds of intrusion of value judgments which I considered above in discussing Nagel's arguments.

Some economists, particularly mathematical theorists, find it difficult to acknowledge the existence of a real world, but that is their deficiency, not mine. The construction of a priori models can be very useful, but only if one remem- bers that their purpose is to be used, not admired for their own elegance. They may have a pernicious influence, however, when some of the early ifs in the structure are value judgments, and this feature of them is lost sight of in the subsequent refinement of the model. Paretian welfare economics is a con- spicuous offender in this regard. It begins with some quite clear value assumptions, and then goes on to construct an elaborate logical system, emerging at the end with specific prescriptions for policy which are treated as if they were as undeniable as the rules of arithmetic. I have the impression that welfare economists do this, at least partly, because they regard the value assumptions that are necessary to get them started as rather innocuous. But this will not wash: whether an assumption is innocuous or not depends largely on what is deduced from it. The history of scholastic philosophy teaches that one should never embrace an assumption until one sees what a clever logician can do




with it. A prudent man will want to examine the conclusions before giving his assent to premises, and especially so when the premises are value judgments.

This ends my examination of the arguments on behalf of objectivity. I have not proved that an objective social science is impossible, since such a proof is itself a logical impossibility. But I find all the extant arguments on behalf of objectivity unconvincing, so I am inclined, even though not compelled, to conclude that value judgments are indeed embedded in social science, and are not confined to particular aspects such as the selection of problems and the determination of policy. I did not expect to arrive at this conclusion when I began reading and thinking about the issue, and my initial reaction was to regard it as rather unsavoury. But there are some bitter mouthfuls which become more palatable when chewed, so I want to go on to examine the more important implications of the position I have taken and the lessons that can be drawn from it. My paper is becoming long, so the discussion of these points must be shorter than they deserve.

III

The first point that should be made is that the involvement of value judgments does not mean that the work of social scientists is thereby vitiated, nor does it mean that objectivity, as a criterion of performance for that work, should be abandoned. An ideal can serve as a guiding criterion even though it has never been attained, and even though it may be demonstrably unattainable. If this were not so we would have few, if any, criteria to operate by in human life. The demonstration that a discipline cannot be made perfectly objective is not a proof that it has no objectivity at all, or that it is worthless to attempt to increase the objectivity of the procedures that it employs. Nor, as some writers seem to think, does it grant one a licence to assert whatever pleases one's intuition or ideology about the nature of social phenomena. The impossibility of absolute cleanliness, R.H. Tawney once observed, is no excuse for rolling in a manure pile. What is called for is some modesty in the claims we make, both for our procedures and our results, and, more important, a willing- ness to identify and discuss the value judgments we adopt. The reluctance of social scientists to admit the involvement of values springs in part from the view that such judgments are primitive preferences about which nothing can be said beyond mere assertion, and disputes concerning them can be settled only by force. It would be foolish to deny that history records many such trials by combat, or to assert that this barbaric process has been eliminated from the modern world. But that does not demonstrate that force alone can resolve such disputes. Values can be critically debated and their merits and weaknesses rationally investigated. It is not true that any one set of values is as good as any other. They cannot be subjected to the kind of tests which are employed in the empirical sciences, but ethical philosophers have been at their task for a long time and the literature they have produced is not all 'hot air' as Karl



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Popper once maintained in, I hope, a querulous moment. Now that philosophers have become intrigued by the possibility of using economic theory to shed light on values (vide Rawls, Nozick, and others), it would be especially unfor- tunate if economists took the view that value judgments are no concern of theirs, or even that this is of only peripheral interest.

I now come to a point of crucial importance: the sociology of value judgments is not the same thing as the philosophy of value judgments; the former is a study of the values people do hold and why they hold them; the latter is a study of what values people ought to hold and why they ought to hold them. Confusion of these two types of questions is responsible for much nonsense and, worse, much mischief in the debate over value judgments in social science.

The empirical study of values is, clearly, a legitimate pursuit. Values, after all, are human phenomena in themselves, and there can be little doubt that they act as motivational forces, constraints, and conditioning elements of other human phenomena. Such a study of values, however, is not capable of being purely objective any more than any other branch of social science can. This does not necessarily involve the student of values in an infinite regress or a vicious circle, but neglect of it leads to two errors of great importance. The first error consists of the belief that values or value systems carry natural classificatory labels, and if one can read the labels one knows immediately whether the values are good ones or bad ones, without the aid of any analysis of the sort that ethical philosophers engage in. The second error is the proposition that all value judgments are fully determined in a way which does not permit the entry of anything that could be described as 'choice.' I want to make some brief comments on these errors.

Some critics of market-organized economies (and of the orthodox economic analysis of such economies) say that it is based upon 'bourgeois' values or 'liberal' values and make such statements as if the classification were a con- demnation, without reference to what specific values are so classified, or any comparison of their merits or defects with those of, say, 'socialist' values or 'proletarian' values. Any such comparison, however, clearly discloses that a great deal of what is viewed as constituting antithetical value systems is in fact common to both, and consequently fruitful debate about values is stulti- fied if one insists on talking only about such labels and never unpacks the boxes to which they are said to be affixed. Labels are very useful, but sometimes they are used merely for name-calling or for heresy-hunting, which serves the purposes of debate only if one thinks that the object of it is to beat an opponent rather than to learn something. I have no objection to classifying groups of values as, say, liberal or socialist so long as one does not regard such terms as constituting, in themselves, definitive rulings on the merits of the values that are supposed to be inside the boxes; but it is much better to discuss the ethical merits of the specific values than the merits of the labels as such.

The second error consists of the proposition that all value judgments are fully determined, the sociology of values being interpreted as showing that




the values one holds are wholly derivative from one's social status. Thus it would be argued, for example, that a person holds 'bourgeois' values because he is a member of the 'bourgeois class' and that, being a member of that class, he can hold no others. If this is an empirical proposition and not a tautology, it is falsifiable, and indeed it has often been falsified, since a large number of class crossovers in this respect can be instanced. My main concern, however, is not the empirical validity of this strong form of the sociological theory of values, but the issue of determinism which it raises. Needless to say, this is no place to embark on a discussion of that ancient problem, but there is one point I want to make.

No practitioner of anything called a 'science' would wish to argue that the phenomena he investigates are not subject to 'laws.' The discovery of general laws is indeed the main object of every science. The important methodological questions concern the level at which these laws are conceived to operate and whether, at that level, the system is closed. If social laws are conceived to operate at the level of social wholes, such as classes, nations, etc., then it follows that the phenomena identified with this level, such as for example, wars and revolutions, have laws of their own; that is to say, these phenomena are not explainable by 'reduction' - by examining the behaviour of entities which are 'micro' relative to this 'macro' level, such as individuals, business firms, and so on. It is the interaction of these macro entities, as such, which are viewed as producing the phenomena in question. If the system can be closed at this level into a general equilibrium model composed only of endogenous macro variables, then it is 'deterministic' so far as phenomena at a more micro level are concerned. The behaviour of more micro entities, such as individuals, need not necessarily be regarded as determined in this case, but it can play no role, as such, in determining the macro phenomena.

However, there is nothing in nature itself which decrees the level at which laws 'truly' operate; if one has a predilection for reduction one may reduce nations, say, to classes, classes to persons, persons to organs, organs to cells, and so on; whereas, if one has a predilection for aggregation, one may be drawn in one's search for laws in the opposite direction. We could adopt a pragmatic attitude as a way out of this problem, locating the laws at whatever level seems to work best for purposes of prediction and control. But such an approach seems less than satisfactory if the phenomena we are examining are value judgments, for here there is a strong argument that can be made for the existence of a proper level, all others being improper; the proper level being that of the individual person. One can of course argue, as Durkheim notoriously did, that social groups have consciousness and therefore can make value judgments of their own, so to speak. Or one could go even further and embrace a theory of the 'cosmic mind.' But I for one would reject such postulates as mystical. It seems to me clear that the concept of a value judgment and the idea of approving or disapproving of something, in the ethical sense of these terms, only have meaning at the level of the individual person. If we were to



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carry reduction below this level and find the laws of phenomena at, say, the physico-chemical level, we might have explanations of behaviour which work, but there would be no room for the application of any valuing terms, for the phenomenon would be completely determined at a level where the very idea of value judgments is meaningless. Similarly, if one locates the laws at a level which is above that of the individual, the idea of value judgments would also be meaningless since, even if the individual were construed to be 'free,' in some sense of that term, he would not be free to alter the phenomena in question. Karl Marx noted in his Theses on Feuerbach that it is the task of philosophy not only to understand the world but to change it. If he meant, as he undoubtedly did, change it for the better, then value judgments are crucial, and it is also crucial that the world is conceived to be in fact changeable by the behaviour of entities which can make such judgments. If all social phenomena are subject to laws which lie at a level that is more macro than that of the individual, and if the system is closed at this level, then no valuing quality can be said to apply to individual behaviour, whether it is the behaviour of a poli- tician, a consumer, a businessman, a scientist, or a philosopher.

The doctrine of methodological individualism therefore is involved with value judgments in a special sense - it, and it alone, can supply meaning to the idea of value judgments. The sociology of values, if it could explain completely why people hold the values they do in terms, say, of their religious training or their class status, would do so only by emptying values of all value content.

If my main thesis is sound, that is, that there can be no purely positive, objective, social science, this is mainly because our knowledge of what we call empirical 'facts' is influenced by 'values.' There can be even less doubt that our values are influenced by knowledge about facts. But to say that they influence one another is not to prove that they are the same things; that they have the same ontological status. Such an identification of facts and values is, as I have tried to indicate, a serious error. But even more serious is any effort to interchange their ontological status: to treat values as if they were 'hard' facts, and empirical facts as if they were 'merely' values. Such an attempt is bizarre, but it seems to me that one sometimes encounters it in the literature, especially, but not exclusively, on the part of some Marxist critics of orthodox social science. Such a critic may be scornful of the positivistic pretensions of modern empirical economics, arguing that it is infused with value judgments to a degree which vitiates it altogether, and then go on to claim that such things as the 'exploitation of the working class,' the labour theory of value and the associated doctrine of 'surplus value,' 'alienation,' the 'class struggle,' and 'imperialism' as a system of international robbery, are hard facts which must be accepted as the foundation stones of any 'scientific' analysis of society. Facts and values are separated only by a permeable membrane and so influence one another, but I think it is a degradation of the intellect to award hard ontological status to value judgments (one's own of course) and soft status to empirical




evidence. This tendency to invert facts and values stems from Plato; it was turned into a fine art by the medieval Church; and it lives on today, most notably in Marxism. The chief professor of philosophy of the University of Padua refused to look through Galileo's telescope at the moons of Jupiter on the ground that they could not exist, since there could only be seven heavenly bodies, corresponding to the seven openings in the human head. I suppose that there will always be those who use prejudice to attack facts instead of using facts to attack prejudice, but it would be better by far if the latter prevailed over the former. I make that statement, unabashedly, as a value judgment, partly in order to demonstrate that some values are better than others.

I come now to my final point. If you are persuaded by the argument in the first part of my paper that value judgments are irremediably embedded in science (and perhaps especially in social science) then you must be asking yourselves how one can prevent that permeation from contaminating utterly the whole body of empirical knowledge. One might be tempted to meet this problem by seeking to establish a 'scientific ethic' which would direct each scientist to be as objective as he can in his own work and to make his values as explicit as possible. I see no harm in this, but I would not expect it to have much more effect than requiring all automobile salesmen to take a course in 'commercial ethics.' The promotion of scientific objectivity can be more securely assured by another approach, which has to do with the institutional organization of science. On this point, I agree altogether with Ernest Nagel (whose excellent discussion I used only as a foil for criticism in the early part of my paper) in his emphasis upon what he calls 'the self-corrective mechanisms of science as a social enterprise.' In order to make the argument vivid, let me refer to two contrasting cases of extreme lack of scientific objectivity: the out- right falsification of empirical evidence.

The best known recent instance is the case of Summerlin, at the Sloan- Kettering Institute in New York, who claimed to have succeeded in making successful skin and corneal transplants in mice. His evidence was fabricated. But this did negligible harm to the progress of scientific research or the practical problem of cancer control which was the object of the Institute's pro- gramme. Other scientists tried to reproduce Summerlin's results in vain; the fraud was quickly discovered, and the direction of biological research and cancer therapy was not misdirected. By contrast, there is the case of Lysenko who similarly fabricated evidence on genetic transmission in plants in the Soviet Union in the 1940s. This had disastrous consequences for Russian genetic research and a deleterious effect on Russian agriculture so serious that it has not fully recovered even yet. The difference between the two cases is clear. Other scientists were free to test Summerlin's results and to make known their failure to reproduce them. But Lysenko possessed political power that was strong enough to silence any Russian critics and to insulate himself from the effects of criticism by foreigners. Protection of science against fakery does not depend on the inculcation of standards of perfect probity; after all, even



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people like Isaac Newton, the founder of modern physics, and Gregor Mendel, the founder of modern genetics, were not unwilling to engage in a bit of data massage. The reliability of scientific knowledge, indeed all knowledge, depends vitally upon freedom of inquiry and freedom of speech, which requires an environment which fosters decentralization of scientific and scholarly work and, dare I use that much-maligned word, competition. I should add, lest I be misunderstood, that political power is not the only threat to the competition of ideas. Any form of authoritarianism will serve, including intellectual authoritarianism. The influence of Cyril Burt on educational psychology in Britain is a striking case in point. Since none of us should be trusted to take Nietzsche's advice (after all, Nietzsche himself didn't) the 'Little Jack Horner' factor is especially important in intellectually progressive societies.

I am not claiming that freedom of inquiry and speech will inevitably lead to scientific progress. There is no law of nature, so far as I know, which guarantees that truth is always more powerful than error in the struggle for men's allegiances. But I would argue that where freedom flourishes errors are likely to be less durable and less pervasive, and hence less damaging. I cannot prove even this claim, either empirically or logically, so I will have to rest content with giving it only the status of a value judgment. If someone wants to call it by harsher terms such as 'bias' or 'ideology' or 'bourgeois- liberal dogma' I won't debate the intrinsic merits of labels with him. None- theless, I have to admit that I speak as an interested party in this matter. Pro- fessors have a vested interest in intellectual freedom, just as farmers do in food, and doctors in health care. It is wise to be sceptical when anyone claims that his industry has a special value in the scheme of things. In the absolute, it is difficult to claim that the pursuit of knowledge is more important than food or health, but as every good economist knows the crucial issue is the value of marginal increments, not the total supply. Food and health and most other good things obey the law of diminishing utility, but knowledge does not, for in this we approach no limit of satiety. Everything we learn opens up new vistas of ignorance; every answer generates a score of new questions; the thirst grows with the drinking. The demand for knowledge has the formal characteristics of a drug addiction, but it is an addiction that enlarges the best qualities in our human nature, or can do so if we take the view that our most precious knowledge does not consist of what we regard as indisputably true but in that which is open to dispute and is actively disputed. On this point I am merely repeating what John Stuart Mill, Frank Knight, and many others have said. Andre Gide once remarked that everything has already been said, but since no one listens it is necessary to say it again.



Social Science and Value Judgments

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