Marchetti and Marchetti offer readers a solid collection of thirteen original essays from scholars hailing from around the world on various relations between facts and values.  At the outset of the volume, the editors pitch the book as nothing short of “a robust, multipronged attack” on the fact-value distinction (19).   This characterization probably goes too far.  Some of the chapters argue for conclusions that are perfectly consistent with maintaining a firm fact-value distinction (Miller’s “Normativity without Normative Facts”), and some of the chapters that are more clearly in attack mode are not particularly robust (Scheman’s “On Mattering”).  Nonetheless, each of the chapters is an intriguing invitation to think carefully about facts and values.

Marchetti and Marchetti divide the book into three sections.  The first is history-oriented: it seeks to show how various eminent figures in the history of philosophy have handled the fact-value distinction or the reality that facts and values are entangled in important ways.  The second section reads like a recent edition of Oxford Studies in Metaethics: it largely treats familiar topics in analytic metaethics (e.g. moral objectivity, moral relativism, moral semantics), sometimes explicitly broaching the fact-value distinction issue, sometimes not.  The third section is what one might call the “Other” section: it considers questions about the fact-value distinction with a focus that is neither historical nor predominantly drawn from contemporary metaethics.  In what follows, I discuss each of these sections in a little more depth.

The history section of the book is particularly strong and cohesive.  Hilary Putnam and Robert Schwartz both deploy Dewey to think about facts, values, and their relations.  Putnam’s chapter aims to show how Dewey can help us see past certain iterations of the fact-value distinction; while Schwartz’s chapter also marshals Deweyan arguments to fell the fact-value distinction but this time in the service of expositing a view he calls pragmatic constructivism.  Maeve Cooke and John McGuire explain how critical theorists engage in debates about the relations between facts and values.  As someone with only a passing familiarity with the Frankfurt School, I found Cooke’s chapter especially edifying.  McGuire’s contribution nicely brings things full-circle because he comments on both Habermas and Putnam.  The history section of this book is good enough to make the entire book worth reading.  It contains one of the last works by Hilary Putnam, surely one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th Century.  Moreover, the four chapters really seem to talk to one another and to develop a conversation worth listening to.

The metaethics section of the book is, frankly, a bit of mixed bag.  There are two kinds of chapters in this section.  There are the tightly-argued pieces that defend or rebut a well-defined thesis, and then, there are the more ambitious, exploratory pieces.  Mauro Rossi and Christine Tappolet offer a nice instance of the former with their piece, “The Evolutionary Debunker Meets Sentimental Realism” as does Kenneth Taylor with his “How to Be a Relativist.”  Carla Bagnoli’s “Change in View” and Naomi Scheman’s “On Mattering” both instance the latter.  Some readers will, no doubt, find one or the other style of writing a little frustrating.  Other readers, more catholic than I am, will have no trouble shifting between these different modes of expression.  Though I prefer the more tightly-argued chapters and though I called it “not particularly robust,” Scheman’s piece is one of the most memorable and intriguing chapters in the book.  She draws on such disparate phenomena from the Black Lives Matter movement to photography to indigenous people’s knowledge attributions in order to suggest that “mattering, valuing, is at the heart of thing-ness” (132).  Her chapter felt too rich to be persuasive; her host of exciting ideas clearly deserves a book of its own.

What I have called the “Other” section of the book is what Marchetti and Marchetti have called “Some Applications.”  This name is misleading, for it suggests that the proceeding sections are general discussions of the fact-value distinction, while the chapters in the “Applications” section are the downstream runoff, the merely applied, but this is not true.  The previous section, which I dubbed the metaethics section and the editors call “Varieties of Entanglement,” is largely a metaethics section.  As such, it is no more general than the articles in the “Applications” section.  Why is this nomenclature issue worth mentioning in a review?  Well, these section headings perpetuate a misguided thought, namely that metaethics is the site of the central conversations about normativity while conversations about normativity had by philosophers of science and philosophers of law are somehow peripheral.  I strongly doubt that the editors would endorse the view that metaethics is central while philosophy of science and philosophy of law are peripheral, but, as thinkers who wrestle with fact-value entanglement, they should worry about how seemingly innocuous, value-free categorizations can code or signal value judgments.

Enough about the framing of the last section.  I now turn to its content.  Two of the three chapters stand out as among the best in the volume and merit special attention.  David Macarthur’s chapter “Science and the Value of Objectivity” endeavors to show that, in science, objectivity itself and anything deemed to be an objective fact crucially rely on value judgments.  As someone who endorses a version of the fact-value distinction, I found myself pleasantly unsettled by Macarthur’s powerful arguments.  Douglas Lind’s “Fact/Value Complexes in Law and Judicial Decision” astutely blends legal scholarship with keen philosophical reflection.  Lind describes phenomena he calls “fact/value complexes,” and he seeks to show both that these complexes are ubiquitous in the law and that their existence should abate any demands for value-free judicial decision-making.  While I am not wholly convinced of Lind’s points on either score, his arguments handsomely repay careful attention.

While I recommend this book for libraries and scholars, this is not the book for the philosophical novice or layperson.  About half of the book assumes knowledge of Hilary and Anna Ruth Putnam’s early attacks on the (most rigid forms of the) fact-value distinction; thus, this is not the book to learn about those attacks.  Several individual chapters of the book are adequately self-contained such that one might read them without background knowledge of the Putnams or other contemporary philosophy, but they are the exception and not the rule.  For professional philosophers, though, this is a very welcome addition to existing debates on the fact-value distinction, so those who care about overcoming (or shoring up!) this distinction in ethics, law, science, epistemology, or metaphysics should check out this book.

© 2018 Raff Donelson

Raff Donelson, JD, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Law and Philosophy at Louisiana State University.