ABSTRACT
For more than a quarter of a century Hilary Putnam has been concerned to undermine the fact-value dichotomy. Indeed, his The Collapse of the FactValue Dichotomy and Other Essays (Putnam 2002) is entirely devoted to that effort. Two years later, in Ethics without Ontology (Putnam 2004a), he returned to the question of the objectivity of ethics. During the same period he has become more and more interested in the writings of the classical Pragmatists, in particular, those of William James and John Dewey. The aim – to defend the objectivity of ethics – and the interest – in Pragmatism – are, of course, connected. The Pragmatists, Dewey explicitly and James implicitly, rejected the fact-value dichotomy; both defended, as does Hilary Putnam, the objectivity of moral judgments. Indeed, one might say that one attacks the fact-value dichotomy in order to establish the objectivity of ethics, for what masquerades as the fact-value dichotomy is actually the thesis that ethical judgments are not factual. However, subjecting the fact-value dichotomy to critical examination
reveals more than that ethical judgments can be objective. It reveals, for example, the crucial role epistemic values play in science. This was, in my opinion, Hilary Putnam’s most important early contribution to the philosophical debate concerning the status of values. Critical examination also reveals that our moral lives – our moral lives as we actually live them – involves the use of “thick” concepts, concepts that have both evaluative and descriptive content. Both points demonstrate what Putnam calls “the entanglement of facts and values.”1
