It's all relative, right?

William Voegeli, writing for the Claremont Institute, critiques various critiques of the Catholic Church's "absolutism." He also reminds us that words and phrases, like "values" and "value judgments," have histories that we would do well to remember if we want to understand our own intellectual and cultural heritage. (I'm in my "Western civilization is going to hell in a handbasket mode" today, so I'll add that when most high school graduates can't tell you the dates of WW2 or of the Civil War, it's rather quixotic to suggest that they should pay attention to philology).

Here's Voegeli on the fact-value distinction:

The term "values" has become so widely used as a synonym for "moral beliefs" that it is hard to remember the term has a history. Though Max Weber did not invent the fact-value distinction, his profound influence on American social scientists caused them to promote the idea here after World War II. They insisted that their study of society was scientific because it was confined to statements of fact, which could be empirically verified or disproven, differentiating such statements from "value-judgments." "Values" were irrational, subjective personal preferences. Because value-judgments could not be tested, none could be described as true or false, much less as wise or foolish, or good or evil. A debate between people with opposed views about the meaning of justice would as pointless as a debate between people with different favorite flavors of ice cream.

The fact-value distinction has swept all before it. It's hard to find any American who doesn't speak the language of values and value-judgments, or who understands that this distinction is a recent innovation, one never employed before the last century and incomprehensible or ludicrous in any age but our own.

This triumph has occurred despite the weakness of the fact-value distinction as an idea. There is, for one thing, the inability of the fact-value distinction to account for itself. The assertion that every other assertion can be categorized as either a statement of fact or a value-judgment cannot, itself, be a statement of fact—there is no conceivable way to test it empirically. If it is a value-judgment, an expression of some arbitrary personal preference harbored by Max Weber or his followers, there is no reason to believe the fact-value distinction is true, or even a way to speak meaningfully of the possibility that it might be true. And if, finally, it is somehow true despite being empirically unverifiable, then we cannot rule out the possibility there are other assertions both true and empirically unverifiable—a possibility that, like a crack in a dam, would demolish the fact-value distinction.

Read the whole thing.