Values, objectivity and moral realism

Ethics and ontology Fundamental contributions to the interpretation of Amartya Sen’s work have been made by Vivian Walsh (2000, 2003, 2008) and Hilary Putnam (2002). Walsh and Putnam identify Sen’s approach as one where values and facts cannot be separated. Our assessment of a given fact, Walsh and Putnam argue, always implies some valuation of facts. But this need not lead to a relativist approach where our assessment of facts is always completely determined by our preexisting values, because our values can also be changed by facts. Effectively, if facts could not lead to changes in values, reasoned scrutiny of values, and objectivity (which is central to Sen) would not be possible. This complex relation between facts and values is essential to Putnam’s view of the entanglement between facts and values. Nevertheless, the entanglement of facts and values raises central questions for the achievement of objectivity in moral and political philosophy. An important question is whether objectivity requires that we should take the ethical values we attribute to objects to be ethical objects. As Sen argues: Since objectivity is itself a rather difficult issue in moral and political philosophy, the subject demands some discussion here. Does the pursuit of ethical objectivity take the form of the search of some ethical objects? While a good deal of complex discussion on the objectivity of ethics has tended to proceed in terms of ontology (in particular, the metaphysics of ‘what ethical objects exist’), it is difficult to understand what these ethical objects might be like. Instead, I would rather go along with Hilary Putnam’s argument that this line of investigation is largely unhelpful and misguided. When we debate the demands of ethical objectivity, we are not crossing swords on the nature and content of some alleged ‘ethical objects’. There are, of course, ethical statements that presume the existence of some identifiable objects that can be observed (this would be part of the exercise, for example, in looking for observable evidence to decide whether a person is courageous or compassionate), whereas the subject matter of other ethical statements may not have that association (for example, a judgment that a person is altogether immoral or unjust). But despite some overlap between description and evaluation, ethics cannot be simply a matter of truthful description of specific objects. Rather, as Putnam argues, ‘real ethical questions are a species of practical question, and practical questions don’t only involve valuing, they involve a complex mixture of philosophical beliefs, religious beliefs and factual beliefs as well’.