"A recent volume by Vivian Walsh and Hilary Putnam, The End of Value-Free Economics, brings to a fine point a line of argument that has been brewing for fifteen years: is the logical positivist insistence on separating “fact-based” science from “value-based” ethics any longer a tenable one? Most particularly, are there now compelling reasons for declaring that mainstream economics needs to recognize that the distinction is wholly untenable? Is the zeal for insisting on “positive” economics now unsupportable? Should economists at last recognize that Lionel Robbins’ strong exclusion of normative language from the science of economics both unjustified and unwise? Walsh and Putnam argue that the answers to each of these questions is definitive: the strict dichotomy between fact and value in economics can no longer be supported. "The issue of facts and values has a number of sources within the empiricist tradition. There is Hume’s view that we can’t derive “ought” from “is”; or in other words, that moral judgments are logically independent from empirical beliefs. There is the positivists’ criterion of significance, according to which the meaning of an utterance reduces to the empirical experiences that would demonstrate its truth or falsity. (The two propositions together imply that moral sentences are meaningless or “non-cognitive”, since the first proposition concedes that no empirical experience can demonstrate the truth or falsity of a normative statement.) And there is the positivists’ idea that science is exclusively concerned with “facts”; but the first two propositions consign moral statements to the category of “value” rather than “fact”, so science cannot contain normative vocabulary. Another source was internal to debates within neoclassical economics itself: Lionel Robbins’s arguments against interpersonal comparisons of utilities, based on the idea that making such comparisons unavoidably involves taking an evaluative stance towards the individuals in question. "The key idea advanced in The End of Value-Free Economics is that none of these philosophical ideas have survived the critique of positivism that was offered within philosophy of science and philosophy of language over the past fifty years. The attempt to draw a sharp line between “fact” and “value” turns out to be impossible. And this is equally so in economics."
Posted on: Mon, 02 Sep 2013 15:55:36 +0000
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