The Validity of Value

...Professor Flathman, surely, performs a service for political science and philosophy in bringing to bear on the former genuinely significant writing done in the latter...

...Tradition is not always master of wisdom...

...If more and more people are happily able to dispense with the use of moral terms, substituting statements of emotional preference, or to use moral terms to do jobs which philosophers might consider inappropriate for them, no amount of empirical investigation into how the term 'the public interest' is used will establish how it ought to be used...

...Flathman asserts that "the logic of the concept" of the public interest requires that any judgment concerning it at least satisfy the principle-attributable to Kant and recently defended by Marcus Singer-asserting that an action right for an individual (person or government) in given circumstances is right for any other individual in just those same circumstances...

...Having made the distinction they declare that, as social scientists, they are concerned with apodictic statements-those which can be investigated and discovered to be either true or false-and they confidently assume, in addition, that normative judgments can only express the emotional preferences of the speaker...

...It is to be used for a vast number of highly important purposes...

...English Philosophy Since 1900: "Language does not develop in a random or inexplicable fashion...

...Great...

...Now bypassed by the philosophical tradition that produced its most sophisticated formulation,' writes Flathman, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Chicago, this conception of normative judgments still commands widespread allegiance...

...His analysis attempts to surmount the vast difficulties of deriving normative conclusions from collections of facts about consequences, but the problem remains formidable, and it is at this point that the limitations in Flathman's effort are most apparent...

...The justification for this has been well expressed by G. J. Warnock in his study...

...The scientific political scientist," he says, "holds to the view that value statements are emotive expressions (with most dramatic results in studies of the public interest) without realizing that it has been undermined...

...For several decades, social scientists have been setting forth their understanding that one must distinguish clearly between statements of fact and judgments of value...

...The existing preferences of the members of an existing community are never sufficient to indicate what is in the public interest, since one can always ask of those preferences (whether held by a majority, by all but one, or even unanimously): Are they good ones...

...Public interest,'" Flathman says, "is not simply a rubric or category under which certain aspects of political life can be grouped and discussed...

...But his argument remains subject to the wellknown objection that whenever X is said to be good because it leads to Y, this merely leads us to ask: What's good about Y? And if we answer that Y is good because it leads to Z, we can ask the same about Z, and the process must continue indefinitely unless stopping points are, simply, chosen...

...David Truman in The Governmental Process, Glendon Schubert in his own The Public Interest, and Frank Sorauf in his contribution to the collection of essays on the public interest edited by Carl Friedrich, are among the many who suggest that since "the public interest" is a term with which one can do no more than express subjective preferences, political scientists would serve the interests of clarity by getting along without it...

...Flathman relies for the crux of his argument on the position that our use of moral words is not arbitrary, that value judgments are capable of rational intersubjective determination, and that the correct use of moral language requires that we be able to give "good reasons" for our moral judgments...

...It is at the same time very unlikely that any invented, artificial, or ad hoc terminology will be an improvement on that which has already satisfied the most stringent of tests-that is, survival in (probably) centuries of constant actual use...

...More fundamentally, no matter how established a usage, we may wish to choose a meaning not yet widely employed in hopes that it may become so...

...For both claims he relies on the philosophical argument that their denial would represent a misuse of language, a failure to understand how we ordinarily do use words...

...But this is not to say that the philosophical work on which he reports is adequate to the task he sets it, or that the rescue of 'the public interest' has more than begun...

...and, more inconveniently, "it is wrong to obliterate racial minorities" has no more cognitive content than "Spinach...

...He has read extensively among current philosophical writings which attempt to solve various traditional philosophical problems by careful analysis and close empirical investigation of how we ordinarily use the language, which serves us so admirably, to say what we mean and mean what we say...

...He concludes that to say that something is in the public interest is to imply, if the term is being correctly used, that there are good reasons for thinking so...

...One of the difficulties in relying on ordinary usage for the rescue of the concept of the public interest is that, just as the philosophical assumptions of the political scientists may have become outdated, the assumptions made by linguistic philosophers about ordinary language may be in need of revision...

...that, for instance, to say the Poverty Program is in the public interest is to imply it will have consequences taken to be good ones, such as reducing unemployment and alleviating the distress of poor children...

...The second is that value judgments can have a defensible cognitive content...

...and it is at the very least unlikely that it should contain either much more, or much less, than those purposes require...

...In a similar vein, Flathman argues that "exclusive reliance upon whim and caprice is incompatible with the manner in which 'public interest' is employed in our discourse " and that a theory which leads to "reversing the very firm connotations of common words is likely to have gone wrong somewhere...

...And "nowhere is it more widely accepted than among those who make it their business to study the workings of political life...

...He uses the concept of the public interest to illustrate his case...

...It stands for a distinct dimension of political life, the attempt to evaluate and justify public policy...

...He even considers his book a sort of behavioral study of how language is used...

...He assembles distinctively useful quotations and arguments from the Oxford English Dictionary, from R. M. Hare's The Language of Morals, P. H. Nowell-Smith's Ethics, various of the writings of H. L. A. Hart and the late J. L. Austin...

...Flathman's attempt to dismiss the concern that moral justifications may be "ultimately arbitrary" with the cavalier observation that "there are few words used more loosely in academic circles than 'ultimately' and 'arbitrary' " reveals a serious gap in his understanding...

...Reviewed by VIRGINIA HELD Lecturer in Philosophy, Barnard College The burden of Richard Flathman's argument is that his colleagues are out of date: His fellow political scientists pride themselves on having cleverly grasped and made theirs a philosophical position which has, since they looked, been eroded...

...And although we cannot provide any final, all-embracing descriptive meaning for the concept, "we can generalize about the decision criteria relevant to assigning descriptive meaning in any individual case...

...But this test does not enable us to establish the Tightness of actions...

...Unfortunately, to say that X is good for the good reason that it leads to Y may add nothing to the merely factual claim that X leads to Y, and the criticism may be as relevant when leveled against British analytic philosophers as against the American pragmatists they have sometimes not bothered to read...

...The first is that descriptions of it are, indeed, primarily normative, and cannot be reduced to any set of factual assertions...

...Flathman's attempt to come to the rescue of the concept of the public interest and thus, hopefully, of what it conceptualizes, rests essentially on two claims...

...X is good,' in this analysis, is comparable to "X...

...We base our estimate of the moral standing of a given action, he says, on the desirability of its consequences, and the justification for accepting this Principle of Consequences "depends upon facts about language...