The Putnam Twist: The End of Value

[The End of Value-Free Economics edited by Hilary Putnam and Vivian Walsh (Routledge, 2012; ix + 229 pp.)]

Hilary Putnam was one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century, but he had horrible judgment about politics and economics. The book under review is a collection of essays, mostly by Putnam and the economist Vivian Walsh, that calls for a revival of “classical” economics, by which is meant neo-Ricardian economics in the style of the Piero Sraffa, combined with a host of welfare-state measures, derived from the “capabilities” approach of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, the latter of whom contributes an essay to the book. This part of the book is mostly nonsense, and I do not propose spending time on it.

What is of great value in the book, though, is the discussion of value, for which Putnam is responsible. People often draw a sharp distinction between facts and values. Only statements about facts, it is often claimed, are scientific, and statements about values are not. Another way to draw this distinction is between descriptive and normative judgments, with only the former counting as scientific.

Putnam opposes this way of looking at things. He says that,

…what I would stress is the idea of entanglement of fact and value. . .value judgment and factual judgment are entangled in many ways, not just one. But one of the most important ways is this: there are facts (using the term as we ordinarily do, which only come into view through the lens of an evaluative outlook). “Virtue terms”, for example—terms such as “brave”, “wise”, “compassionate”, “resourceful”, and their opposites—have, indeed, figured in philosophical discussion for millennia precisely for this reason. If we define a “brave” person merely as one who does not feel fear (or does not succumb to fear), then as Socrates already pointed out, we shall miss the crucial distinction between bravery and foolhardiness.

You probably are asking yourself, “That may be so, but what has it got to do with economics?” Putnam’s answer is that Lionel Robbins brought the distinction between fact and value into economic theory and, by doing so, he arbitrarily limited what economists can say about welfare. Robbins said that economists cannot make judgments about what is good or bad as an ultimate end. They can address only the scientific question of the most efficient way to attain a given end. He quotes Robbins on this issue:

If we disagree about ends it is a case of thy blood or mine—or live and let live according to the importance of the difference, or the relative strength of our opponents. But if we disagree about means, then scientific analysis can often help us resolve our differences. If we disagree about the morality of the taking of interest (and we understand what we are talking about) then there is no room for argument.

Putnam suggests that Robbins got this argument from the logical positivists, but it is more likely that he got it from Ludwig von Mises, who—over and over again—made the same argument, and who greatly influenced Robbins’s views in the early 1930s, and who was of course a sharp critic of the logical positivists.

Here an obvious objection needs to be addressed. It may well be that it is hard to “disentangle,” as Putnam puts it, the descriptive from the evaluative meaning of words like “courage.” But still, if we are dealing with science—and praxeology certainly counts as a science—don’t we need to make an effort to do so? And, if we can’t disentangle the terms, maybe we shouldn’t use them at all.

This is exactly the position taken by Mises himself on this issue. In Theory and History, he discusses some of the “entangled” words, and says this about them:

Now, it is true that many people employ such terms as “pressure group” and almost everyone uses the term “prostitution” in a way that implies a judgment of value. But this does not mean that the phenomena to which these terms refer are constituted by value judgments. Prostitution is defined by Geoffrey May as “the practice of habitual or intermittent sexual union, more or less promiscuous, for mercenary inducement.” A pressure group is a group aiming to attain legislation thought favorable to the interests of the group members. There is no valuation whatsoever implied in the mere use of such terms or in the reference to such phenomena.

I will leave it to readers to decide who has the better of this argument, but Putnam has certainly given us something worth thinking about. I’d now like to turn to a related argument Putnam makes that will be of interest to followers of Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s argumentation ethics. Putnam wasn’t familiar with Hoppe’s work, but he was well aware of the views of Juergen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel, both of whom influenced Hoppe. These philosophers contended that there are objective ethical norms that tell us what we ought and ought not to do, but “values” have no objective standing and instead depend on a consensus reached about them in rational discussion. If, for example, a dispute arises over whether a way of raising children is cruel, there is no objectively correct answer, because opinions about what is cruel are no more than “value judgments.”

Putnam rejects this division between norms and values. The main problem with it is that it takes for granted that all binding norms are universalizable: questions of value cannot be binding in this way because answers to them depend on particular conditions within a society. But, Putnam counters, the conditions for rational discussion that Habermas and Apel set forward are empty unless “value” terms, of just the sort they deem subjective, are specified. If these terms are subjective, the whole objective basis of rational discussion dissolves. In Putnam’s words,

…if the claim that the correct verdict in an ethical dispute will be arrived at in an ideal speech situation just means that it will be arrived at if the disputants are ideally socially sensitive, imaginative, impartial, etc. then the claim is a purely “grammatical” one; it provides no content to the notion of a “correct verdict in an ethical dispute” that the notion did not independently possess. Indeed, not only are “ideally morally sensitive,” etc. themselves ethical concepts, giving them content in any actual dispute will require “thickening” them, replacing them by terms which are still value terms, but which have more descriptive content.

I am not sure what to make of this argument and I am not even sure I fully understand it, but I am sure that it is worth “untangling”—whatever that means.