Transcending Positive Psychology

Part 2, What Is the Fact/Value Split?

In the last post I described the virtues of positive psychology as "zombie virtues," virtues that have been torn from the metaphysical matrix that animated them and gave them life. This, as I argue in The Shape of Joy, is an example of how positive psychology, due to its commitment to the fact/value split, routinely fails to give a full and comprehensive account of human flourishing.

Now, some readers might be able to connect all these dots, but if not I'm going to take a few posts to make this story plain.

To start, what do we mean by "the fact/value split"?

You might not know this, but the fact/value split sits behind so many of our modern debates and troubles, from our post-Christian crisis of meaning to the relationship between faith and science to the role of religion in the public sphere. Let me put it this way: the fact/value split is the undiagnosed infection causing our societal fever.

In short, if you want to have a clue you need to know about this.

At its most basic, the fact/value split argues that facts and values represent distinct sorts of claims. On the one hand are factual claims, claims governed by scientific observation and empirical methods. On the other hand are value claims, claims about ethical norms, right versus wrong, and transcendental values related to the true, the beautiful, and the good.

Critical to the fact/value distinction is the grounding of these claims. Factual claims are objective, empirical, and public. Value claims, by contrast, are subjective and private. That is to say, "water boils at 100 degrees" is something that can be adjudicated through shared observation. By contrast, "you should not have sex before marriage," as a value judgment, lacks public consensus. Nor is there an empirical test we can conduct to bring this value into public view. Thus, value judgments can only be grounded in personal opinion and private conviction.

Broadly speaking, the Enlightenment gave birth to the fact/value split. On the political side, it was argued that since the state could not get the public to agree upon issues of religion, due to the religious fracturing of the Protestant Reformation, it was best to regulate religion to the private sphere. Thus the fact/value split gave birth to the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, that the state would not establish (or privilege) a religion. Consequently, the fact/value split sits behind all our debates about the place and role of religion in our civic life. And while I am not fond of the Christian nationalists, they do raise a legitimate question, one asked by political philosophers from many different persuasions: Can a country survive and thrive without values? And if not, who supplies those values? And how do you get a diverse electorate to adopt one set of values over another set of values? Especially when there is no objective criterion to adjudicate between those values?

This goes to another consequence of the fact/value split. An issue I've talked about a lot over the years concerns Hume's Dictum, that you cannot get an ought from an is. That is, you can't get a normative claim from a descriptive claim. Simply put, science can't tell you how to live your life by way of moral obligations and duties. This subjectification of value sits behind many modern problems. For example, the relativization of morality. If there is no objective standard of value, I'm free to decide for myself what is right or wrong. The societal consequences of this relativization is something we regularly worry over and debate.

As one more example, the fact/value split is also implicated in our modern crisis of meaning. As I describe in Hunting Magic Eels, a purely factual description of the world bleaches it of value and meaning. The New Atheists reaped the whirlwind on this score. During their heyday the New Atheists pushed a fundamentalist materialism, an ideology sometimes called "scientism." All that existed and was real was the physical, material world. Well, that season of atheistic evangelism didn't age very well. The implications of the fact/value split quickly came into view. Science is devoid of both moral and existential content. Science cannot tell you how to live, or if there is any point or purpose in living. More, science cannot account for the transcendent values, like human dignity, that undergird the morality of liberal humanism, the go-to moral code of the New Atheists. The New Atheists found themselves stuck on the fact side of the fact/value split only to realize that what makes life worth living was the value side. But the worldview the New Atheists preached--scientific materialism--couldn't bridge the fact/value gap, leaving them with a message that was, in the end, ugly and nihilistic.

Stepping back, I hope you can see that the fact/value split is a really huge deal. The fact/value split is, in many ways, the question of our lifetimes. This crack runs through your life and society as a whole. So many problems trace back to the fact/value split, from politics to the culture wars to our mental health crisis. But this raises a question. If the fact/value split is a split then there must have been a time when facts and values were unified. And if that's true, how were they unified?

We'll turn to that part of the story in the next post.