Ethics as Objectivity: A Necessary Oxymoron?

Long long ago, during the heyday of the so-called new criticism, I came across a contrarian article on Thoreau's Walden that contended that the book could not be understood only in terms of its structural arrangements, as a kind of prose poem in which experiential narrative and descriptive detail were woven into a unified symbolic design: that its facticality, its intractably documentary character, defies such abstraction. As proof positive, the author seized upon Thoreau's instruction on when and how to plant the white bush bean. ("Plant the common small white bush bean about the first of June, in rows three feet by eighteen inches apart," and so forth.) Yes, this passage is about bean culture, not about beans as a symbol of something. Yes, a Walden woodchuck really is a mimesis of a literal woodchuck; it's not a metaphor--not just a metaphor, anyhow.

With far greater elegance, Satya Mohanty's "Can Our Values Be Objective?" argues for what ought to seem self-evident and someday may be, although as yet assuredly it is not. This is no stolid Johnsonian kick-the-rock-and-refute-Bishop-Berkeley argument in the manner of the aforesaid Thoreauvian exegesis. Nor is Mohanty interested in objectivity conceived as documentary thickness. But here too the argument is striking for its aversion to critical holism, and for the conviction that the way we have been taught to think and say we think is not how a thinking person should think, indeed not how such a person in practice very likely does think.

Mohanty's target is not formal holism, but the discursive holism of ethical antinormativity: more specifically, the view that an objective ethical judgment about a text is impossible because discourse of whatever sort is always prisoner to ideology. To this the essay replies that jettisoning the objectivity project because zero bias is unobtainable is itself a bias that entraps one within interpretative community tribalism on the one hand and, on the other hand, an evasive agnosticism about the views of those whom we take to be "others." This insulates the critic-pedagogue even when she or he seems to disclaim authority and distances cultural others in spite (or rather because) of the acknowledgment of difference. We thereby deprive ourselves of the ability to generate a robust account of error, which is indispensable to a critical multiculturalism, to attaining a critical perspective in which the contributions of others play a role more intimate and substantive than the role of the other.

Can these claims themselves be resisted? Well, one might object to the essay's vagueness in defining what is to count as "objectivity." If values are in any way positional, as Mohanty insists they must be, can "objective" mean much more than "persuasive" to the judges? The point is not "conclusively" worked out, indeed likely cannot be (if only because "conclusive" also tends to be one of those words that are widely taken to presuppose 100 percent purity); and Mohanty buffers himself further by not for the most part descending to hard cases. Yet the arguments that it is specious to insist that objectivity be 100 percent pure in order to count as such (compare Hilary Putnam's "realism with a human face"), and that error is the baby that gets thrown out with the bath water of objectivity, are forcefully put and much harder to dismiss.

One might conceivably also object to the severity and lumping involved in the essay's account of antinormative "epistemological holism." Has Mohanty understated Foucault's range and capacity for self-revision by casting him here as Chomsky's antipode, as one whom the reader is asked to see mainly through Chomskian eyes? Perhaps somewhat. In which case Mohanty is by no means alone: many others are beating that once-sacred cow these days. But the bent of thinking to which he takes exception here, and its durability notwithstanding the decline of Foucault's direct influence on critical...