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 Can the Science of Well-­‐Being be Objective? (9888 words) Abstract: Often science studies phenomena whose definition relies on a normative standard. For example, well-­‐being, health, freedom and many more. I propose the notion of a mixed claim to denote the cases when a normative concept appears in an empirical hypothesis. I argue that mixed claims are different from other cases of value-­‐ladenness in science and that, although they pose distinct problems for objectivity, we should not seek to eliminate them from science. Rather we need to develop principles for their legitimate use. Philosophers of science have already reconciled values with objectivity in several ways, but none of the existing proposals fits the case of mixed claims. Using the example of the science of well-­‐being, I articulate a conception of objectivity for this science and for mixed claims in general. (129 words) Introduction Consider a claim “C causes E” which is well confirmed by standard scientific methods. What if the definition of E presupposed a moral standard such that this standard determined how E is conceptualized and measured? Would you trust this causal claim? Would you grant it objectivity? Would you let it be part of science at all? Empirical claims about health, well-­‐being, child development, freedom, economic growth, resilience, frailty and so on appear to have such a structure. 1 They relate ordinary purely empirical variables such as geographic location with a variable that is defined in partly normative terms such as health status, as in “Living in East St Louis harms health”. Or they may relate two variable that both appear to have a normative component as in “Unemployment negatively impacts well-­‐being”. ‘Health’, ‘unemployment’ and ‘well-­‐being’ as concepts are partly normative in the sense that their definition and measurement, at least on the face of it, depend on moral claims such as “Healthy life requires freedom from fear of being murdered”, or “Involuntary unemployment does not exist”, or “Happiness is necessary for well-­‐being”. I propose to call the causal or correlational claims with such normative presuppositions mixed claims because they mix the moral and the empirical in a way that ordinary scientific claims do not. Mixed claims typically occur in the social and medical sciences such as economics, clinical and developmental psychology, but can also be found in the biological and environmental sciences. Although a number of philosophers have noted instances of such mixedness, there is still no clarity as to whether mixed claims should stay or go and whether they pose special problems for the objectivity of these projects. In this paper I put forward the following claims: 1) Mixed claims are distinct from other well-­‐rehearsed ways in which science can be value-­‐laden. (Section 1) 2) Some projects in the social and medical sciences are and should remain mixed. (Section 2) 3) Although philosophers have recently developed accounts of objectivity that make room for values, none of the existing views fit the mixed sciences. (Section 3) 2 4) Nevertheless mixed sciences can be objective in a sense that I articulate and defend. (Sections 4 and 5) I couch these theses as concerning mixed claims in general, but my examples will be mostly about the science of well-­‐being. It is worth concentrating on well-­‐being for several reasons. First of all, well-­‐being is arguably the most prominent of the recent mixed projects in science. It is studied all across social, psychological and medical sciences. It has a number of newly dedicated journals and professional societies and it regularly tops the lists of the most popular key words in abstracts of published papers.1 The second and best reason to focus on well-­‐being is that other normative concepts that figure in mixed sciences regularly bottom out in well-­‐being. Measures of health, growth, development etc. are justified in part on the basis of their ability to capture well-­‐being. So having an account of how the science of well-­‐being can be objective will take us a long way towards an account that will apply to mixed sciences in general. Our argument here concerns the very nature of objectivity: unless we insist on purging science of mixed claims altogether – and that would require a great deal of purging – we better create a standard for producing and justifying these peculiarly value-­‐laden claims, that is a standard for their objectivity. In recent years philosophers, especially in the feminist tradition, have shown ways to marry values and objectivity. However, if I am right, mixed claims require an even deeper union between the two than previously thought. Scientific objectivity may well demand moral objectivity. 1 See Zacks and Malley 2007, as well as Journal of Happiness Studies, International Journal of Wellbeing, and the International Society for Quality of 3 1. What are mixed claims? The first order of business is to get clear on what mixed claims are. I start with some examples from the science of well-­‐being and then distinguish the value ladenness in question here with other modes of value ladenness philosophers of science have identified. 1.1 Examples and a definition The science of well-­‐being is an umbrella term for a multidisciplinary study of happiness, positive emotions, functioning, flourishing and related phenomena. Psychologists working in in this field study the variety of positive emotions, their heritability, their relation with personality traits, their stability over time, their reaction to changes in environment, prosocial and anti-­‐social behavior, career and friend choices and so on (Lopez and Snyder 2009). Some research in this tradition can proceed relatively value free – take a range of those emotions that people call positive and find their causes, correlates and consequences in the environment. Often, however, psychologists are more ambitious than this. They wish to know whether and which positive emotions are good for us: how they enable better functioning both at individual and community levels (Fredrickson 2001), but also whether they harm us sometimes (Gruber et al 2011). In referring to ‘better functioning’ and ‘harm’ these researchers presuppose a notion of well-­‐being and this is where the substantive normative assumptions enter. Although psychologists rarely explicitly commit to a theory of well-­‐being, their choices of constructs betray a variety of views on the topic. A construct is 4 an attribute, perhaps unobservable, that serves as a dependent or independent variable in the hypotheses tested in empirical research. A measure is a tool for detecting the relative levels construct. Normative claims about the nature of well-­‐being inform how researchers delineate the construct and, via this decision, they affect which measures are used. In psychology there are currently roughly three leading constructs of wellbeing. There are more or less classical hedonist proposals to treat well-­‐being as happiness or a favorable balance of positive over negative emotions (Kahneman et al 2004a,b). This can be measured by various experience sampling methods. There is also by now a robust tradition to treat well-­‐being as reflected by life satisfaction, an individual judgment about how one’s life is doing overall (Diener et al 2008). The main measurement tool here is a self reported judgment of life satisfaction. Finally, a third approach speaks of well-­‐being as of flourishing or good functioning, an ensemble of strengths such as competence, relatedness, sense of achievement and meaning (Huppert 2009, Ryan and Deci 2001). Measures of flourishing are mostly self reports about the subject’s performance in various domains of life. Which construct of well-­‐being is adopted is often a matter of philosophical differences between the scientists, differences that partly reflect the disagreements in philosophy about the nature of well-­‐being. (More on that in section 4) The partly normative nature of the claims of the science of well-­‐being becomes particularly visible when researchers put forward empirical claims such as the following: ‘Happiness is not always conducive to well-­‐being’ (Grueber et al) ‘Long commutes are associated with lower well-­‐being’ (Diener et al 2008) 5 ‘Early learning difficulties have a disproportionate impact on life well-­‐being’ (Beddington et al 2008) Other disciplines that study well-­‐being – sociology, medical and clinical sciences, parts of economics – display a similar dynamic. Some hypotheses are on the face of it value free, but they rarely exhaust the full intent of researchers. Economists seek to learn about happiness in order to have a more faithful account of economic growth, sociologists are interested in dignity and well-­‐being at work, development psychologists focus on the processes and risk factors that greatly affect children’s future functioning. I propose a definition to capture what is going on. A hypothesis is mixed if and only if: 1. It is an empirical claim about a putative causal or statistical relation. 2. At least one of the variables in this claim is defined in a way that presupposes a moral, prudential, political or aesthetic value judgment. The first part of this definition specifies mixed claims as causal or correlational claims typical in the social and medical science. (They are normally probabilistic claims relating more or less general kinds). Such claims play a crucial role in explanations and policy interventions. However, they do not exhaust the science of well-­‐being or any other science for that matter, nor are they somehow more fundamental or more important than theoretical claims, non-­‐propositional knowledge, measurement instruments etc. So we can equally well have mixed theories, mixed measures and more generally mixed sciences. 6 The more crucial feature of mixed claims is in the second part of the definition, that is their reliance of a normative judgment. Philosophers of science distinguish between cognitive values – simplicity, explanatory power, coherence, generality etc. – on the one hand, and non-­‐cognitive values -­‐ moral, prudential, political or aesthetic – on the other (Longino 1990, Lacey 2005, Brown 2013). It is this second kind of values that figure in mixed claims. Following Brown let us call them social values. In the case of the science of well-­‐being (and also plausibly health and child development sciences) the social values are, what philosophers call, prudential, i.e. that which is good for a person all things considered irrespective of moral or other values (Crisp 2013). In other cases, such as claims about voluntary employment, dignity at work, political legitimacy, the values presupposed are ethical and political. Ever since Bernard Williams coined the term, philosophers have referred to ‘well-­‐being’, ‘courage’, ‘kindness’, ‘care’ etc as thick concepts, differentiating them from ‘good’ and ‘right’ which are supposedly thin. Although the precise definition of thickness is elusive, thickness is meant to signal a certain entanglement between descriptive and evaluative properties in a concept (Kirchin 2013). For example, ‘well-­‐being’ is thick to the extent that it is a good thing to have, but also to fare well is to have a certain amount of health, not to be depressed, lonely etc. Mixedness is a property of claims rather than concepts, but if we were to extend the property of thickness to propositions and not just concepts, then mixed claims would plausibly come out as thick. “Someone who is well does not cry herself to sleep” is an example. For simplicity, I will reserve the term ‘mixed’ for hypotheses and ‘thick’ for concepts. 7 Philosophers have noted the presence of mixed claims in sciences, albeit without identifying them as such, in the concepts of efficiency (Nagel 1961), rape (Dupre 2007), spousal abuse (Root 2007), unemployment (Hausman and McPherson 2006), divorce (Anderson 2004), inflation (Reiss 2010), and of course wellbeing and welfare (Hausman and McPherson 2006, Tiberius 2013 and many others). But it is not enough to notice mixed claims. We also need to understand their significance for the nature of objectivity, get clear on the dangers and opportunities they offer and set up for some initial ground rules for their use. To make progress on this I start by differentiating the value-­‐ladenness of mixed claims from others. To this end I present a taxonomy of the ways in which social values can enter science, pointing out that in each case mixed claims are different. 1.2 Values as reasons to pursue science To value knowledge, both theoretical and applied, is to value understanding and perhaps also the possibility of control over environment. This is, of course, a normative stance without which pursuit of science as a social enterprise would be impossible. Whether or not we want to insist that the practice of science presupposes an evaluative stance about the importance of knowledge, this sense of value-­‐ladenness clearly does not imply that individual scientific claims presuppose a specific standard about, in our case, well-­‐being. It is perfectly possible to do without mixed claims while also valuing knowledge. 1.3 Values as agenda-­‐setters 8 Normative commitments about what phenomena are interesting, important and worth studying are factors in setting the agenda for the sciences. For social sciences, Max Weber has famously accepted the role of cultural, moral and other commitments for selection one ideal type over another (Weber 1949). Nowadays a similar argument is made by several others and not just about the social sciences (for example, Kourany 2003). Hugh Lacey identifies autonomy as one of the senses of value freedom and defines it as the absence of external influence of moral, cultural and economic nature on the priorities and direction of basic research (1999, 2005). He maintains that such an autonomy is an impossible ideal, just because any scientific inquiry must start with a strategy that specifies what there is in the world to be known and how to proceed. Lacey’s notion of strategy is a broad one, akin to Kuhn’s paradigm or Lakatos’s research programme. Any such strategy starts from a cultural and historical standpoint and will prioritize some phenomena and methods over others by appeal to moral or cognitive values. And yet failure of autonomy, it is claimed, need not necessarily compromise the authority of science. Philip Kitcher’s ideal of a well-­‐
ordered science also calls for moral and political values, so long as they are endorsed by a representative community, to determine the agenda of scientific research (Kitcher 2011). Exactly how and to what extent values should determine the agenda of science remains up for grabs. For our purposes, we only need to distinguish this agenda setting function of values from their role in mixed claims. There can be moral and political reason to initiate a scientific study of human and animal well-­‐
being, but these reasons alone do not mean that measures and definitions of 9 well-­‐being must be normatively informed. We could instead insist on new value-­‐
free definitions of well-­‐being as we shall see in Section 2. 1.4 Values as ethical constraints on research protocols Along with the first two roles of values, a third and probably the least controversial role for values in science is the specification of ethical constraints on research. These constraints specify how to treat human and animal subjects during experiments, surveys and clinical trials. Again nothing here speaks for or against the use of normative categories to define the target phenomena as in the case of well-­‐being research. A scientific protocol can be ethical or unethical irrespective of whether the claims it produces presuppose social values. 1.5 Values as arbiters between underdetermined theories When empirical evidence alone is insufficient to adjudicate between two or more theories, values have been noticed and indeed called to close the gap. Feminists philosophers in particular have invoked this argument to point out the legitimate role in theory choice of not just cognitive values, but also of social values (Longino 1990, Kourany 2003 and many others). I submit that our case is different. Take the claim that long commutes are on average costly for well-­‐being. Of course, this claim could be underdetermined by evidence. Is it really the commute? Maybe the commuters are particularly grim characters to start with? A great deal of intricate and careful work goes into the confirmation of these hypotheses. Researchers infer to the badness of commute for well-­‐being from a variety of evidence: negative emotions, stress hormone levels, irritability, self-­‐reports. But crucially for us, a standard of well-­‐being is not 10 brought in to adjudicate between equally confirmed hypotheses. In mixed cases values to do not close the gap. 1.6 Values as determinants of standards of confirmation Another role for values explored originally by the 1950s by Richard Rudner and revived recently by Heather Douglas is in setting the level of evidence required for acceptance of empirical hypotheses (Douglas 2009). When there is uncertainty about a hypothesis that can inform important policy decisions (for instance, that drug X has certain side effects), moral considerations can be used to settle the level of evidence required for this hypothesis. Depending on the gravity of the consequences, a different level of evidence can be required. When the suspected side effect of the drug in question is as serious as a heart attack, even a small amount of evidence can be sufficient to accept the hypothesis “Drug X causes heart attacks”. There is still a debate about whether or not such an importation of values into science is legitimate (John 2012). But regardless of the outcome, the fate of mixed claims remains unaffected. Mixed claims can take inductive risks just as much as non-­‐mixed claims. They would still remain value-­‐laden even if moral considerations were purged from decisions about the level of evidence required to accept hypotheses. 1.7 Wishful thinking and bias History of science is replete with examples of social values, along with fear, desire for glory and power, and other emotions, determining the judgment of scientists. In our mixed cases, as we shall see in section 3, social values too can 11 determine what theories and claims are accepted. But for now I want to draw a prima facie plausible distinction between the clearly objectionable practices such as fudging data, falsifying results, rejecting a theory because it’s Jewish, on the one hand, and the less obviously objectionable practice of basing a science on a thick concept as in our case. It may still turn out that mixed claims are illegitimate, but that should be for a different reason than the illegitimacy of wishful thinking. This completes our taxonomy for present purposes. There are other roles for for values in science that may be confused with mixed claims. Social may also affect how we communicate scientific findings to the public, or what metaphors we choose to describe them. But the bottom line is that mixed claims are different in a specific way. Hugh Lacey’s notion of neutrality is useful here. According to neutrality scientific claims neither presuppose, nor support social value judgments (Lacey 2005, 25-­‐26).2 Mixed claims clearly violate neutrality. In the science of well-­‐
being in particular, mixed hypotheses presuppose a given standard of well-­‐being, and in doing so favor some conception of prudential value over another. Now that this is clear, we can ask the big question: Are mixed claims legitimate? I will tackle this question in two stages. First, we need to decide if there are good prima facie reasons to have mixed claims in science. Second, we need criteria for their legitimate use. 2 Lacey eventually redefines neutrality as inclusiveness and evenhandedness (Lacey 2013), an ideal which mixed claims can satisfy as we shall see in Sections 4 and 5. 12 2. Mixed claims should stay A case against mixed claims can be found in Ernst Nagel’s classic The Structure of Science, a section entitled “On the Value-­‐Oriented Bias of Social Inquiry”. In it Nagel discusses the possibility that social science cannot, even in principle, be value free. He cites Leo Strauss’s examples of quintessential thick concepts – art, religion, cruelty – which when identified as an object of study by a social scientist presuppose a normative standard. Nagel agrees that the evaluative content is there and that it may be practically difficult to extricate it from the positive content. However, it is still possible if we distinguish two senses of ‘value judgment’ at play: one “appraising” and the other “estimating”. We appraise when we endorse an ideal and judge something as meeting it or failing to meet it. We estimate when we judge to what extent a given phenomenon exhibits the features characteristic of a given ideal. Nagel’s example is of anemia, but I shall apply his distinction to well-­‐being. A social scientist appraises when she takes a stance on what well-­‐being is and then uses it to judge whether a person or a community is doing well. On the contrary, she estimates, when, using a theory of well-­‐being, she judges how much a person or a community exhibit the features this theory deems as well-­‐being constitutive. In the first case, there is a genuine value judgment, while in the second a mere use of a normative criterion to make an empirical claim. Nagel’s goal is in that chapter is a narrow one – only to establish that there is nothing inherently different about social sciences in the way they use values. For that, Nagel points out that physicists and biologists would also face 13 the same issues when working with notions of ‘efficiency’ and ‘anemia’. I readily agree. But Nagel’s desire to prise apart appraisal from estimation has more ambitious roots. The point of drawing the distinction is to eliminate appraisal from science, leaving only estimation. The ideal science for him is an ethically neutral one (Nagel 1961, 495). What I have called mixed claims are plausibly appraising claims on Nagel’s picture. So his proposal would be to reformulate them as estimation claims and eliminate the appraisal element.3 Let us examine it. One way to implement Nagel’s proposal is to convert mixed claims from regular causal or correlational claims into conditional claims. Take one of our early examples: psychologist Jane Gruber’s claim that happiness is not always conducive to well-­‐being (Gruber et al 2011). Gruber documents the negative effects of positive emotions on problem solving, social bonds, mental health etc. The title of her article -­‐ A Dark Side of Happiness? How, When, and Why Happiness Is Not Always Good – reads very much as an appraisal claim. But we can reformulate it as an estimation claim is as follows: “If well-­‐being is understood as good functioning across many domains and over the course of our lives, then happiness can impede well-­‐being”. 3 Douglas too appears to endorse Nagel’s proposal: “The entanglements between the normative and the descriptive cast doubt on the possibility for any truly value-­‐free statement of fact, but that need not mean we can have no objective statements. Central to such objectivity is the maintenance of at least a conceptual distinction between the descriptive and the normative” (Douglas 2011, 35). 14 Since there is no commitment to the truth of the antecedent, this claim is value free in the sense of Nagel’s estimation claims. Let us grant to Nagel that we can prise apart the positive content from the normative content in a mixed claim as he suggests and keep only the positive one. There is still a question about which normative standard scientists should use in order to make their estimation claims. Which standard of well-­‐being should Gruber employ in the antecedent in the example above? One option is to recommend that she sticks to the proverbial folk theory of well-­‐being. More generally mixed claims could be rendered value-­‐free if they defined their thick constructs using the value judgments of the community they studied. “Happiness can impede that which people call well-­‐being”, would be Gruber’s claim. Or when both the putative cause and the putative effect are thick we get the following: “What people call secure attachment is a major cause of what people call child wellbeing”. Naturally often the folk would disagree on the substantive normative issues, just as philosophers disagree on the nature of well-­‐being and other values. In that case, this extension of Nagel’s proposal might counsel that scientists study the empirical relations between well-­‐being and a given factor on all the existing views of well-­‐being. If the folk intuitions are fairly represented by hedonic, life satisfaction and flourishing approaches, then the science of well-­‐
being should build up a store of conditional claims: “If well-­‐being is positive hedonic profile, then it is caused by…” “If well-­‐being is life satisfaction, then it is caused by…” “If well-­‐being is flourishing, then it is caused by…” 15 But it is hard to see why we should stop at these three. History of philosophy especially if we look beyond the Western tradition, boasts of other theories of well-­‐being: well-­‐being as knowledge of God, well-­‐being as a meditative state, etc. Using them all is impossible, but a choice requires a normative judgment about their relative plausibility – a judgment that the Nagelian hopes to keep out of science. At this point the Nagelian must invoke some sort of division of labour – philosophers take care of values, while scientists take care of facts. The Nagelian would presumably argue that the right standard of well-­‐being to use in the science of well-­‐being is within the purview of moral philosophers (or perhaps also democratic decision making). Scientists can participate in this discussion, but not qua scientists. Now I would like to suggest that such separation of powers should be rejected on methodological grounds. It ignores the deep interdependence of facts and values in the scientific research in question and in doing so stops a great deal of important science in its tracks. This interdependence is well documented by now. I highlight three points of contact just for the science of well-­‐being. First of all, empirical facts about what people value and how they use notions such as ‘happiness’, ‘good life’, ‘well-­‐being’ etc. are relevant to the philosophical theories of these to the extent that philosophers care that their theories track the existing folk concepts at least to some extent (Tiberius 2013, Haybron 2008 among others). Second, in mixed cases normative decisions do not occur just at the beginning of the scientific process when the object of study is defined. Rather they keep reoccurring throughout, all the way down to the many practical 16 decisions of scientific protocol. Those who define well-­‐being in terms of authentic happiness, need an account of authenticity and a whole string of other value-­‐driven notions about how to measure it properly (Sumner 1996, Tiberius 2013). The economists adhering to the preference view of well-­‐being refer to the notion of ‘clean’ preferences to differentiate authoritative from unauthoritative desires (Benjamin et al 2012). Definitions of child well-­‐being refer to healthy and unhealthy parental involvement. When divorce is viewed as a transformation rather than only as a loss, it is worth studying the evolution of divorcees coping strategies long after the divorce and not just their shock and loneliness immediately after (Anderson 2004). And so on and so forth. On the separation picture implied by Nagel, the scientist keeps running back and forth to the philosophy (or keeps changing her identify from scientist to philosopher) whenever an evaluative question arises. The impracticality of this proposal is the least of its problems. Thirdly and most importantly, the separation in question ignores or devalues scientists’ knowledge about values, which they have acquired in virtue of their knowledge of facts. This knowledge enables them to make better normative choices qua scientists. It is because developmental psychologists know the effect of, say, institutionalization of orphans that they believe attachment to be crucial to child well-­‐being. Similarly, it is because divorce scholars know the consequences of divorce that they conceptualize it as an opportunity for personal growth and not merely a loss (Anderson 2004). In all these familiar cases value judgments are a result of an epistemic process, they are informed by facts. Because of this, scientists are in a good position to make some value judgments. Consulting philosophers and the public when making 17 normative choices is an admirable impulse, but that does not mean scientists should completely outsource value judgments to those outside the scientific process. To treat values as responsive to facts does not presuppose any controversial metaethical views. As Elizabeth Anderson points out, even if Hume’s prohibition of inferring facts from values is correct, values can still be supported by facts: Even if we grant that no substantive value judgment logically follows from any conjunction of factual statements, this merely puts value judgments on a logical par with scientific hypotheses. For it is equally true that there is no deductively valid inference from statements of evidence alone to theoretical statements. Theories always logically go beyond the evidence adduced in support of them. The question of neutrality is not whether factual judgments logically entail value judgments, but whether they can stand in evidentiary relations to them (Anderson 2004, 5) So the division of labour, which is a natural consequence of Nagel’s proposal, is unsustainable. It ignores methodological realities of mixed sciences and it wastes the normative knowledge scientists acquire while in the business of producing mixed claims. That much is sufficient to establish a prima facie case that mixed claims are worth standing up for. There are positive reasons to keep them in a science. They are repositories of valuable knowledge. Purging them from science puts the brake on scientific process. Presumably, not even the Nagelian believes that well-­‐
18 being is not worth studying. The upshot of this section is that studying it properly requires mixed claims. At this point the Nagelian could accept our reasons in favour of keeping mixed claims but nevertheless appeal to their dangers. He might argue that it would indeed be nice to have mixed claims, but, as matter of empirical fact, they bring with them dangers of dogmatism, bias and wishful thinking. These are the very charges that have been levied against proposals of feminist science (Pinnick et al 2003) and that advocates of feminist science have gone to lengths to dismiss (Anderson 2006 among others). In case of the science of well-­‐being the most serious charge is an importation into a science of substantive views about the nature of well-­‐being that those whose well-­‐being is being studied do not accept. This danger is real. When a group of eminent economists headed by the Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman advocate a measure of national well-­‐being that takes into account only the average ratio of positive to negative emotions of the populace (Kahneman et al 2004a), the citizens can legitimately object if they take well-­‐
being to consist in more than that. Perhaps they believe that national well-­‐being should also encompass the compassion, kindness, mutual trust of their community, the sustainability of their lifestyle, not to mention justice. A related danger is when the scientists engaged in mixed science fail to notice the value judgments they are making. Economists have been known for treating the preference satisfaction view of well-­‐being as definitional and thus not needing a justification. In those cases presenting empirical findings about well-­‐being, freedom or health while failing to make explicit the normative 19 assumptions on which these findings depend, amounts to misusing the authority of science. It sneaks controversial values in through inattention. Let us call these dangers imposition and inattention respectively. They undermine trust in science and raise the danger of paternalism and even coercion when policy makers use this research (Haybron and Alexandrova 2013). What criteria of objectivity could guard against these mistakes? 3. Do the existing standards of objectivity work for mixed claims? Before formulating a criterion of objectivity for mixed claims, we need to satisfy ourselves that the existing such criteria are insufficient. This is the business of this section. Objectivity has a number of meanings which change throughout its history (Daston 1992 among others). I follow many philosophers in helping myself to the least demanding concept – objectivity of procedures. It does not require God’s point of view and it does not guarantee truth. It does, however, demand objectivity of procedures that make up the scientific method. These procedures are objective to the extent that they are impersonal, i.e. they do not presuppose a point of view of any particular person, group, or ideology (Porter 1995). On this conception objectivity is a certain kind of intersubjectivity and its point is not to secure truth but trust, by specifying the procedures scientists are to use (Fine 1998). What principles secure procedural objectivity? Historically value freedom was thought to be the hallmark of procedural objectivity. But recently the ideal of value freedom has been challenged. Philosophers, including in the feminist 20 tradition, have formulated principles of objectivity that make room for values. Since mixed claims are value-­‐laden, these new proposals should be our first stop. Perhaps the best known value friendly account of objectivity is Helen Longino’s summarized by herself here: Data (measurements, observations, experimental results) acquire evidential relevance for hypotheses only in the context of background assumptions. These acquire stability and legitimacy through surviving criticism. Justificatory practices must therefore include not only the testing of hypotheses against data, but the subjection of background assumptions (and reasoning and data) to criticism from a variety of perspectives. (Longino 2008, 80) She argues that this sort of criticism can be secured by a community characterized by five features: availability of venues for criticism, uptake of criticism, public standards to which theories and procedures can be held and an equality of intellectual authority (Longino 1990 among other places). Like Longino, Hugh Lacey too emphasizes pluralism of research strategies as a way of counterbalancing the value-­‐ladenness of background assumptions (Lacey 2005). When scientific research proceeds from multiple ideological and metaphysical stances and when each is forced to justify itself in a public forum, the outcome is an objective inquiry. On what grounds are the scientists to justify their theories in the public realm? This is where the ideal of impartiality usually comes in (Weber 1949, Douglas 2009, Lacey 2005, Anderson 2004). As we shall see shortly, impartiality is tricky to formulate, but roughly it specifies that cognitive values alone, and not 21 moral and political ones, should justify our acceptance and rejection of theories (Lacey 2005, 23-­‐24). To violate impartiality, it is claimed, is to commit the error of wishful thinking. Speaking of social sciences in particular Douglas argues: If values (…) serve as the reason in themselves for a theory choice, we have confused the normative and the descriptive in precisely the ways that Weber and Nagel warned us against. Our values are not a good indication, in themselves, of the way the world is (Douglas 2011, p 23-­‐
24).4 Pluralism and impartiality are the hallmarks of procedural objectivity on these liberal accounts especially friendly to values. But even they cannot help us with mixed sciences. Pluralism alone does not guard against imposition and inattention, and impartiality is either too strong or not strong enough. I explain these points in turn. What would a pluralistic study of well-­‐being amount to? Presumably it would counsel to adopt a plurality of definitions of well-­‐being and study the causes and correlates of well-­‐being under all the plausible accounts: hedonic, life satisfaction, flourishing, etc. This is actually already happening. No single construct of well-­‐being dominates the current landscape. Rather a great pluralism of constructs reigns. Psychology alone boast three constructs as we have seen; health sciences use quality of life constructs adapted to different 4 To be precise, Douglas’s conception of impartiality is different from Lacey’s. She does not rely on the distinction between cognitive and social values, but instead on the distinction between direct and indirect roles of value. Once values have been invoked ‘directly’ in our choice of what to study and methodology, no further direct role of values is permitted. When it comes to confirmation of hypotheses values are only to be used ‘indirectly’ for managing uncertainty (Douglas 2009, chapter 5). 22 diseases; developmental psychology has a conception of child well-­‐being; mainstream economics is wedded to preferences as revealed by choices; development economics uses the capabilities approach, and so on and so forth (Alexandrova 2012). Having a variety of constructs of well-­‐being could alert researchers to the problems of inattention and imposition. But by itself pluralism does not ensure that moral presupposition are noticed and justified. Constructs of well-­‐being are often selected on the basis of ease of measurement, institutional and disciplinary inertia, personal preference. To guard against this, constructs of well-­‐being need justification on special normative grounds that pluralism does not specify. Can impartiality help? Not at all. Indeed when impariality is formulated in a standard way as forbidding that values determine our acceptance of hypotheses, mixed claims face a test they could not possibly pass. This is because in a mixed claim the initial value judgment does preclude certain findings and to this extent values do determine what we will find. Consider a stark example: a researcher is a staunch Aristotelian about well-­‐being who believes that an immoral person could not possibly flourish, so she inserts a morality constraint into her measure of well-­‐being (ignore for a moment the practical difficulty). With this measure in hand, she finds that well-­‐
being is very low in a community of sociopaths. Clearly this finding is determined in part by her initial value judgment and in this sense it fails the impartiality test. Similarly, psychologists who use life satisfaction questionnaires as their measure of well-­‐being cannot discover a well-­‐faring albeit constantly complaining kvetch, while those who use hedonic measures cannot discover a well-­‐faring tortured artist no matter how satisfied she claims to be with her life. Definitions of well-­‐
23 being constrain the range of available findings, just as theories constrain the range of available observations. When a social value judgment is part of the background theory, impartiality thus defined cannot be sustained. It makes mixed claims come out illegitimate by definition. They cannot escape the company of wishful thinking and scientific fraud. As I urged in 1.7, this is unsatisfactory: legitimacy of mixed claims should not be a matter of definition. A better formulation of impartiality is as follows: Impartiality 2: A mixed claim is impartial if and only if, once all the value decisions about the constructs, measures, methods and required levels of confirmation are made, social values to do not play any further role in determining whether the hypothesis is accepted. To be fair, this is probably the version closest to what advocates of impartiality have in mind5, and it may well be an acceptable version. Or if it isn’t, I will not pursue this question any further. This is because Impartiality 2 does not help us with the problems of imposition and inattention. Impartiality 2 is supposed to guard against the imposition of values into claims already stripped of social values. It cannot there tell us how to deal with claims that are not stripped of them, for example, mixed claims. 5 Lacey 2003 makes allowance for the use of values in methodological choices in the human sciences and Douglas would classify the choice of thick concept to study as an initial methodological decision in which the direct use of values is permitted (personal conversation). Anderson 2004 too is careful in formulating impartiality: “If a hypothesis is to be tested, the research design must leave open a fair possibility that evidence will disconfirm it”(19, my italics), the implication being that choices of methodology are not always meant to be tested. 24 So while both pluralism and impartiality 2 are important ideals, mixed science needs additional principles. 4. Objectivity for mixed sciences How can we guard against imposition and inattention? Inattention results from the failure to acknowledge the role of social values shaping a research agenda. Philosophers of science of all persuasions have urged that the first step to objectivity is making these presuppositions explicit (Weber 1949, Nagel 1961, Hausman and McPherson 2006, Douglas 2011 and others). This should remain part of the picture. Imposition though is more complicated. What constructs and measures the scientists of well-­‐being should use, how these decisions should be informed by the views of the subjects whose well-­‐being is in question, and whether it is permissible to override the subjects’ judgments about their well-­‐being, are deep questions in moral and political philosophy. They do not arise for the study of electrons and genes, so it is no wonder that the principles of objectivity formulated for those sciences are insufficient in this case. But that should not stop us. The first step is to recognize that the obstacles to objectivity in mixed sciences are in part moral problems, for instance, using an objectionable conception of well-­‐being. It follows then, that an account of objectivity for mixed sciences has to include a condition that ensures moral objectivity. To trust a science of well-­‐being is in part to trust that it is based on an appropriate account of well-­‐being. 25 This realization might cause despair in some. Moral objectivity is a famous philosophical quagmire. Must objectivity in science really depend on it? Yes, I answer. Unless we are willing to purge moral content from mixed sciences, an option I rejected in Section 2. But moral objectivity is far less impossible than it might seem. Committing to a standard of moral objectivity as part of scientific objectivity need not plunge us in the depth of controversies about the nature of ethics. We can maintain trust in moral discourse while disagreeing greatly on its nature. Moral objectivity can be made compatible with expressivism about the semantics of moral terms; it does not necessarily require a transcendental mind-­‐
independent existence of moral facts and can be fit into a naturalist worldview (Pettit 2007 among others). A theory of objectivity for mixed sciences can rely on the possibility of moral objectivity without having to resolve these long standing debates in metaethics. We could formulate an ideal in a way that accommodates these disagreements and then look for principles that could help mixed sciences to approach this ideal even though the disagreements remain. My proposal for a mixed objectivity (hereafter MO) as follows: MO: A mixed claim/project/method is objective only if and to the extent that the social values it presupposes are (a) explicit, (b) reflect the consensus reached by an ideal deliberation of the community for whom this science is relevant. For the special case of well-­‐being, MO becomes WBO for well-­‐being objectivity: WBO: A claim/project/method of the science of well-­‐being is objective only if and to the extent that the conception of well-­‐being it presupposes 26 is (a) explicit and (b) reflects the consensus reached by an ideal deliberation of the community whose well-­‐being is in question. Three features of MO and WBO are worth noting straight away. First, they seek to specify a necessary condition for objectivity, not a sufficient one. This is natural since there is more to procedural objectivity than just getting the thick concepts right. MO and WBO do not guard against all vices. The existing accounts discussed in previous sections are designed to deal with epistemic inertia of established research programs that are often steeped in unchallenged sexist, racist and exploitative ideologies. The norms of pluralism and impartiality are supposed to correct that. Undoubtedly, the mixed sciences need these norms too. But they also need something more, which MO I hope captures. Secondly, MO and WBO are ideals that rely on an impossible to reach and possibly non-­‐existent model deliberation in which the experts themselves together with all those concerned decide what social value must be presupposed by a mixed project. This is a standard constructivist strategy in normative ethics – to ground an outcome of a moral debate by specifying an ideal procedure to resolving a disagreement.6 Kitcher’ ideal of a well-­‐ordered science too relies on an ideal deliberation about how the epistemic energies of a community are to be apportioned (Kitcher 2011). MO and WBO are different from well-­‐ordered science in that they are focused more specifically on the methods to be used in a mixed project. But the basic idea is similar: a mixed science is objective to the 6 See Street 2010 for an overview of constructivism in ethics and Quong 2013 for the role of the notion of an ideal public deliberation in theories of democracy and collective decision making. 27 extent that it presupposes values that that those to whom this science matters would endorse. Since procedural objectivity’s goal is trust, objectivity for a mixed science is trustworthiness of its values. As ideals, MO and WBO only tell us the standard to which mixed sciences should be held without telling us the principles we should follow for achieving it. Finally and specifically to WBO, just because this principle is couched in terms of ideal public deliberation does not imply that it endorses a substantive thesis according to which well-­‐being consists in whatever this imaginary model community says it is. WBO is a claim about the ideal procedure for settling disagreements about the value judgments that should underlie the choice of constructs and measures in the science of well-­‐being. This deliberation could conceivably result in adoption of a number of different conceptions of well-­‐
being. In contemporary analytic philosophy, perhaps the most popular approach to well-­‐being is idealized subjectivism. Its many versions all agree that what is good for a person is a matter of this person’s attitudes (judgments, desires, beliefs) under optimal information and without irrationalities. This group of theories competes with experiential accounts, such as hedonism, which admit only mental states as constitutive of well-­‐being. There are also eudaimonist accounts which ground well-­‐being in fulfillment of objective human nature and a number of different hybrid proposals.7 These theories map only imperfectly onto the various constructs of well-­‐being used in the sciences, but that need not worry us now. WBO is formulated to be neutral on which substantive account the ideal deliberation settles on. Moreover it is even neutral on whether it settles on a 7 For overview and references see Crisp 2013. 28 single account at all. It maybe that different constructs of well-­‐being are appropriate to different scientific projects, as the current status quo in the science intimates. But this neutrality is a blessing but only if we can formulate some clear guidelines for how the mixed sciences can approach the ideal of MO. In the remainder of this paper I discuss some of these principles for the science of well-­‐
being. 5. How mixed objectivity is achieved Unearth the value presuppositions in constructs and measures. The explicitness requirement in MO and WBO is far harder to satisfy than it looks. Existing methods and techniques hide the value presupposition very effectively and it takes a great deal of work to uncover them.8 In some cases following this principle will be easier than in others. Sometimes all it takes is an open statement in the Methods section of a journal article to the following effect: “In this study we assume that well-­‐being consists in a favorable ratio of positive to negative emotions”. But at other times making values explicit will be much harder. One reason is the sheer absence of an underlying theory in some cases. For example, measures of well-­‐being are often indexes constructed of several indicators. In the social indicators tradition child well-­‐being is measured by an index of infant mortality, vaccination, school attendance and other. No researcher pretends that these factors are child well-­‐being. They are only meant 8 Hausman and McPherson 2006 chapter 2 is a classic illustration of how to unearth the moral assumptions in economic reasoning. 29 to be indicators of it. What then is child well-­‐being? Practitioners tend to avoid this question altogether (Rahgavan and Alexandrova 2014). So our requirement of explicitness urges a certain amount of open philosophizing, which is less common in some areas of the science of well-­‐being than in others. That would be a novelty in itself. Explicitness also ideally calls for an acknowledgment of the alternative presuppositions, or at least awareness that they exist and that the disagreement about them is in part a substantive disagreement in values and not just a difference about which measures are more convenient. Explain why these value presuppositions justify a given measure. A different case is when the construct of well-­‐being is apparently clear but it is unclear how the measurement procedure used in the study detects this construct. Psychologists often openly admit that they adopt a mental state account of well-­‐being (Angner 2009). But it is less clear why well-­‐being so understood has to be detected in the way that they insist. In the dominant psychometric tradition measures of well-­‐
being are justified by their psychometric properties.9 Roughly psychometric properties show the levels of correlation between answers to various questionnaires on a single topic. If these answers have the right statistical properties – for example, if they correlate as we would expect over time or with other measures – the measures are said to be valid. It is a mystery what mental state the psychometric validation is supposed to uncover. It can’t be the simple positive emotion, as that is best detected by direct experience sampling 9 For a typical example of psychometric measure validation see Diener et al 1985. 30 (Kahneman et al 2004b). Nor can it be a considered judgment about whether subjects are meeting their priorities in life, because requirements of psychometric validation are far too restrictive to allow for a genuine dialogue with the subject (McClimans 2010). So while the value presuppositions of these scientists are clear, their connection to the methods used is not. In economics, on the other hand, the approach to measurement is representational (Angner 2009). There are representation theorems that specify when choices between alternatives reveal willingness to pay, which in turn represents how much agents value a given good. Here the prudential assumptions are out in the open – well-­‐being is preference satisfaction – and it is relatively clear why this assumption justifies relying on the standard measures of welfare that traditional economists adopt. The only problem is that preference satisfaction accounts of well-­‐being are very controversial (Hausman and McPherson 2006 among many others). So the third step towards objectivity is to engage in an explicit philosophical argument about the nature of well-­‐being. Justify value presuppositions. At first this principle might come across as setting an impossibly high standard. Doesn’t justifying an account of well-­‐being require solving the millennia long debates about whether good life requires virtue, whether some pleasures are higher than others, whether a denizen of an experience machine could have a good life? If so, then asking scientists to engage in these debate is somewhat impractical. Only it does not have to be that hard. Sometimes measures of well-­‐being are robust to fundamental philosophical disagreements. Measures of child well-­‐being, for example, attempt to capture conditions that if realized in childhood enable children to grow up to 31 be all around successful adults. These adults are happier, healthier, get into trouble less and form more positive relationships – that is, they do well on a number of different theories of well-­‐being (Raghavan and Alexandrova 2014). At least this is the hope. It is this sort of robustness – invariance to different conceptions of well-­‐
being – that gives some mixed claims objectivity without a great deal of philosophizing. Unemployment has been repeatedly observed to lower happiness, life satisfaction and mental and physical health significantly (McKee-­‐
Ryan et al 2005). So a mixed claim “Unemployment lowers well-­‐being” acquires mixed objectivity to the extent that it is true on several different conceptions of well-­‐being. But philosophizing will not always be avoided so easily. Sometimes it matters a great deal which precise conception of well-­‐being is selected. One famous article title is self-­‐explanatory: “High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-­‐being” (Kahneman and Deaton 2010). When a community decides whether or not to pursue economic growth, it needs to choose whether emotional well-­‐being matters more than evaluation of life. Pitting emotional well-­‐being against life evaluation in effect pits happiness-­‐based accounts of well-­‐
being against life-­‐satisfaction ones. Which one is correct is a value-­‐based choice, but not necessarily one that does not admit of justification. First, there are powerful moral and psychological reasons to distrust judgments of life satisfaction (Haybron 2008 among many others). Second, relying on emotion-­‐
based measures of well-­‐being may accord well with the values and commitments of this community (Haybron and Alexandrova 2012). At the very least, it is hard 32 to deny that sometimes a value-­‐based choice of a measure can be warranted as WBO requires, even though the ideal deliberation has not taken place. To deny that these decisions can sometimes be more or less justified is to equate all value judgments with dogmatic kneejerk reaction (Brown 2013, Anderson 2004). True, sometimes fundamental disagreements about the nature of good life will be too profound to be overcome, but a universal skepticism is unwarranted. In the worst case we would have failed to get closer to WBO, but it least we would have tried. 6. Conclusion When the very definition and measurement of phenomena depends on moral categories, as they do in mixed sciences, we face a choice. We could reserve the notion of objectivity only to decisions and practices that avoid any such values. On this view, only after the value-­‐based choices are made, can we assess the objectivity of this science on the principles such as pluralism, impartiality etc. Or alternatively we could broaden the notion of objectivity to encompass also the value-­‐based decisions, such as which measure of well-­‐being to adopt. I have urged the second option, because there are better and worse measures of well-­‐
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