2 - Facts and Values (1986)

Summary

The fact/value distinction, in league with such equally grand and obscure distinctions as those between objectivity and subjectivity and between reason and emotion, has been vastly influential. Yet it appears on inspection to rest upon surprisingly insecure foundations. Thus I believe we should feel a certain unease about the weight it is asked to bear when we use it to support claims of the utmost importance about the nature of knowledge and the limits of inquiry. Perhaps it is time to consider what might happen were we to stop viewing these two realms as categorically distinct. A pair of alternatives immediately suggests itself: we might soften up facts, or harden up values. I propose to follow the latter course, but only after questioning an assumption about what the hardness of facts is supposed to consist in.

The sort of value I will be concerned with here is generic or non-moral goodness, often simply called intrinsic value. This is the sort of value that ordinarily is at issue when disputes occur about what an individual's or group's good consists in, about what kinds of lives are good to lead, or about what is desirable as an end in itself. Other species of value – such as moral or aesthetic value – I propose to leave aside for now.

No doubt the fact/value distinction owes its prevalence to a great diversity of causes. However, it seems to me that among the arguments that have been most important to the philosophical defense of the fact/value distinction are these three: the argument from rational determinability, the argument from internalism, and the argument from ontological “queerness.” Let us take them up in turn.