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Can Our Values Be Objective? On Ethics, Aesthetics, and Progressive Politics
- New Literary History
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 32, Number 4, Autumn 2001
- pp. 803-833
- 10.1353/nlh.2001.0055
- Article
- Additional Information
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New Literary History 32.4 (2001) 803-833
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Can Our Values Be Objective?
On Ethics, Aesthetics, and Progressive Politics*
Satya P. Mohanty
Are evaluations always political? Are our efforts to make objective value judgments always thwarted by our own political interests or our cultural and social perspectives? I am interested in this question because I am interested in progressive politics and would like to believe that my values and commitments are not rigidly determined by my social background or my narrow personal interests. In this paper I would like to defend the view that objectivity is attainable in the realm of values, in such areas as ethics and even aesthetics. For the purposes of the present discussion, I shall pose the question about value in epistemological terms: Can we human beings be objective in our views and judgments about such properties as goodness, justice, or beauty?
In order to outline my position and present my argument, however, I need to first explain what I mean by objectivity, for it is clear that we live in a postempiricist intellectual world where the term has undergone substantial redefinition. Whether we work in literary studies or in philosophy, in anthropology or any of the social sciences, we have to acknowledge the deep critique of empiricist and positivist epistemologies which has emerged from related developments in the philosophies of science and language, in ethics and cultural studies. Specifically, what has been shown to be inadequate is a particular conception of observation and objective knowledge. Thus, philosophers like Quine and Putnam, Nietzsche or Heidegger, all argue that everything that science relies on--its methodology, its understanding of what "facts" are, its practices of confirmation and even observation--is always necessarily theory-dependent rather than innocent, filtered through our values, presuppositions, and ideologies, rather than unmediated and self-evident. [End Page 803]
Where contemporary philosophers and most literary theorists disagree, however, is in their account of the implications of this antipositivist insight about the unavoidability of theory. A natural question to ask the antipositivist is this: Does the necessary ubiquity of theories and presuppositions, of biases and ideologies, lead to the conclusion that "objectivity" as such is never possible, not in values and not even in science? That conclusion, that objectivity is never possible, is endorsed by postmodernist thinkers who are influential especially in the fields of literary and cultural studies. A very different conclusion, endorsed by postpositivist thinkers in a variety of fields from philosophy of science to some new forms of literary theory, is that what is outmoded is specifically the positivist conception of objectivity, a conception based on a denial of the role of theory. This positivist view defines objective knowledge as something we achieve when we have freed ourselves from all bias and all interest; in this conception objectivity is seen as absolute neutrality, a complete divestiture of the thinker's subjectivity and her socially situated values, ideologies, and theoretical presuppositions. Defenders of a postpositivist conception of objectivity claim that this image of complete divestiture is profoundly flawed because such divestiture is never possible for humans. Objectivity is not neutrality. What we need to develop, such thinkers insist, is a more nuanced conception of objectivity which goes beyond the specifically positivist view of it; it is argued that this new conception can be built on an analysis of the differences between different kinds of subjective or theoretical bias or interest, an analysis that distinguishes those biases that are limiting or counterproductive from those that are in fact necessary for knowledge, that are epistemically productive and useful.
Arguing against postmodernist literary and cultural critics, I said in Literary Theory and the Claims of History that such an analysis of different kinds of bias and prejudice needs to focus on the role error plays in human inquiry. 1 Our elaboration of a new, nuanced conception of objectivity in literary and cultural inquiry, I suggested, depends on the richness of our understanding of error--its sources and causes, as well as the variety of forms it takes in various contexts...