Scientism and Values.pdf - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Objectivity and Social Science 29
the physical world with nothing whatever in it that could even
remotely be imagined as a correlate for fairness and impartiality,
justice or injustice, good or evil, nothing that even suggests value.
The point here for our purposes is that if all moral questions
are illusory, if the feelings that people have about such matters as
justice and good and evil and right and wrong have no correlates,
if the nature of things is such that there cannot be any moral correlates
either in states of affairs or states of mind, it is obvious
that the pretension of the social scientist to objectivity as fairness
or impartiality or justice is merely testimony concerning the state
of his feelings, and, so far as the states beyond his feelings are
concerned, his claim is wholly illusory. The social scientist lives
in a world in which conflicts of world-wide proportions are occurring
over what people imagine to be justice. He has made important
contributions to the idea that these conflicts are really about
justice. But when he is asked what this justice is, he is unable to
say anything that is distinguishable from the appeal of the demagogue
to the mob. And this is not all.
One of the chief accomplishments of the social scientist during
the last century or so has been to help undermine the notion that
ideas of good and evil, better and worse are more than mere vagrant
feelings. The charge that the social scientist wants to have a
piece of moral objectivity, and that he has been preaching that
there is no moral objectivity to have a piece of and that there
cannot be any, is serious, and I now turn to evidence bearing on
this charge.
II
The discussion that follows will seem to the reader petty unless
he remembers that we are concerned here with problems of
more than ordinary importance and that one of the first questions
we have to ask of a piece of writing that is presented to the world
as a contribution to knowledge is: Does the author know what he
is talking about? Has he succeeded in understanding what he says?
Has he solved the problem of reasoning, of communicating with
himself?