How Are Facts & Values Related | Paul Nedelisky

Lecture Title - The Myth of the Fact/Value Gap

Our knowledge of nature is based on observation and experiment, and thus is objective. Our knowledge of ethics—the good—is based on culture, religion, and philosophy, and so seems subjective. If this usual story is correct, then how can these orders be united? How can this “gap” between facts and values be overcome? I will argue that understood in the right way, there is no gap. I will then offer a big picture explanation for how the good fits into the natural order. Or, rather—as ultimately makes more sense—how the natural order fits into the good.

Paul Nedelisky (PhD University of Virginia) is Assistant Director and a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. He is co-author of Science and the Good: The Tragic Quest for the Foundations of Morality (Yale University Press, 2018).