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of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays by Hilary Putnam Harvard Univ. Press, 2002 190 pp. $16.95, paper 
A Modern Interpretation of Aristotelian Ethics by Henry B. Veatch Liberty Fund, reprint, 2003 172 pp. $10, paper |
Over the past 35 years I've sat in countless church services in which the pastor (often a youth pastor) has held up his Bible and referred to it as "the owner's manual" for operating God's creation. A little over five years ago, I was sitting in a lecture hall at the University of Santa Clara with more than 500 people. The occasion was the celebration of the 25th anniversary of the publication of John Rawls' A Theory of Justice. Rawls himself was present for the celebration, as were five other world-class political philosophers.
During his public address, Michael Sandel, himself from Harvard University, compared current abortion practices in the United States to our treatment of slaves in the 19th century—neither, he suggested, was sustainable over the long haul. Last year, another Harvard professor of philosophy, Hilary Putnam, published The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy. Though the pastors I listened to all these years might be surprised, it appears that leading philosophers are now endorsing their contention that the care of humans involves rules that are just as "factual" as the proper grade of motor oil to put in one's car or the amount of fertilizer to put on one's lawn.
In Putnam's account, the difficulty for the objective, factual nature of morality began in the 18th century with David Hume. Hume famously argued that it is impossible to derive an "ought" from an "is." Statements of fact tell us what is the case. Statements of value tell us what we ought to do, say, or approve. According to Hume, "facts" and "values" are related in the same way as apples and architects. No matter how long people study apples, they will never learn anything about architects. Thus, "fact is fact and value is value and never the twain shall meet."
But wait a minute. While it's true that "silver melts at 533.6 degrees Celsius" and "Thou shall not commit adultery" are different kinds of statements, that doesn't mean that facts and values constitute a hard-and-fast dichotomy. Hume tried to justify the dichotomy by arguing that factual statements are always based on a corresponding mental picture or "idea," whereas value statements are only based on "sentiments" according to "the particular structure and fabric" of our minds. But Hume's "pictorial semantics" is universally rejected by contemporary philosophers.
Beginning in the 1920s, logical positivists made another attempt to draw a hard-and-fast dichotomy between facts and values. They reverted to Kant's distinction between analytic statements, which are true by definition—"All bachelors are unmarried"—and synthetic statements of fact—"Some bachelors are celibate." Analytic statements, it was said, were tautological and did nothing to increase our understanding of the world. The truthfulness of synthetic statements, on the other hand, could only be established by some sort of observation (the more "scientific" the better).
Once again, values got the short stick. Having sexual relations outside marriage is not wrong by definition (and even if it were, definitions are social constructs and these are always changing). Nor is their "wrongness" scientifically observable. Therefore, the claim that adultery is wrong can be nothing more than a disguised statement of taste or preference, perhaps with an implicit imperative attached—"we wish you wouldn't do that sort of thing."
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