Political Objectivity

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

U.S. Declaration of Independence

We believe that it is the inalienable right of the Indian people, as of any other people, to have freedom and to enjoy the fruits of their toil and have the necessities of life, so that they may have full opportunities of growth. . . . We hold it to be a crime against man and God to submit any longer to a rule that has caused this fourfold disaster to our country.

Pledge taken on India's Independence Day, January 26, 1930

Political constructivism doesn't use this idea of truth, adding that to assert or to deny a doctrine of this kind goes beyond the bounds of a political conception of justice framed so far as possible to be acceptable to all reasonable comprehensive doctrines.

John Rawls, Political Liberalism, 1993

I

The search for objectivity is pursued in many different con- texts and can mean many different things. Often it is difficult to know what question is being asked, and with what the "objective" is being contrasted.

Sometimes it is thought that what we are looking for when we look for "objectivity" or "objective truth" is a standpoint on the world from which we have access to the world as it is in itself, in no way mediated by either our human interests or even our mental structure. Like Plato's souls in the Phaedrus, we march out to the rim of heaven and see being as it really is, with no interference from our faculties, bodily or even mental. The mind is a pure receiver of the world. In other words, objectivity requires the complete absence of subjectivity, the complete bracketing of anything our minds themselves contribute.

The search for such an unmediated access to the world of nature has a venerable history in Western philosophy. ¹ The view that we can have such access, at least in principle, still has its strong defenders--for example, in Thomas Nagel, who, in The Last Word, mounts an ingenious defense of a type of Platonism in both ethics and science. ² But many philosophers follow Kant in holding that unmediated access to reality is unavailable, that all our apprehension of the world is shaped by the structure of our cognitive apparatus. Some take this insight in a skeptical or idealistic direction, saying that we therefore cannot have knowledge, or that we have knowledge only of the constructs of our own minds. Others, again following Kant, hold that truth and objectivity are fully available within a world of things articulated and presented by mind. The contrast between objectivity and subjectivity ³ remains, but becomes more subtle: it is the contrast, for example, between a merely personal or local take on the world and that which can be defended as valid for all. And that contrast, the followers of Kant hold, is fully available even to one who denies that the given is available as such. Some philosophers follow Kant in the area of scientific inquiry but deny that objectivity of this sort is available in ethics. Some, however, hold that a similar type of objectivity is available in both domains.

In more recent times, two further complications have disrupted the Kantian consensus (if such there ever was). First, it has been recognized that the ways in which human minds conceptualize and apprehend reality are plural and not single, and that culture and language appear to play a major role in shaping the categories we recognize. Therefore both ethical thinkers and philosophers of science focus increasingly on the relativity of all judgments to a conceptual scheme, and on the human and cultural-historical character of conceptual schemes. The rich inquiries of Nelson Goodman and W. V. O. Quine, the two giants of philosophy to whom I dedicate this essay, made it impossible simply...