Objectivity is a matter of ethics. Discuss using ethnographic examples.
Objectivity refers to the quality of being objective and is often likened to impartiality, fairness, and absence of bias. However, what ‘being objective’ entails is in fact variable. Notably, while it is considered a fundamental backdrop to scientific practice, with objectivity informing how science should be practised and how truths may be found – free of personal biases, prior commitments, and emotional engagements – objectivity in law is inevitably bound up in a specific legal culture, with varying conceptions of law and approaches to legal methods. Yet, how does the ideal of objectivity interact with the reality of its practice?
In asking whether objectivity is a matter of ethics, this essay will focus on the malleability of the concept of objectivity. It will first look at how objectivity has come to be defined. It will then assess whether the ideal of objectivity is desirable. Lastly, it will ask whether objectivity is achievable.
Objectivity is, paradoxically, multiple. Indeed, while there exists an ideal of objectivity, loosely mapped onto the concept of scientific objectivity, its translation in everyday practices, scientific or not, is multifarious. Conceptually, objectivity refers at once to faithfulness to facts, absence of normative commitments, and freedom from personal bias or judgement. In the field of science for instance, objectivity is immediately ethical insofar as objectivity has value. In calling something objective, importance and approval are implied, and while objectivity comes in degrees – i.e. claims, methods, results, are not always equally objective – to describe something as objective carries a certain rhetorical force. As Daston and Galison (1992) note, the concern with letting nature ‘speak for itself’ which emerged in the nineteenth century, implicated not only a concern for accuracy but also morality with the ‘all-too-human scientists [needing to], as a matter of duty, restrain themselves from imposing their hopes, expectations, generalisations, aesthetics, even ordinary language on the image of nature’. To prevent potentially perverse ramifications of human intervention between nature and representation, mechanically produced images were privileged to ‘eliminate suspect mediation’; enlisting ‘polygraphs, photographs, and a host of other devices in a near fanatical effort to create atlases, [i.e.] the bibles of observational sciences – documenting birds, fossils, human bodies, elementary particles, and flowers in image certified free of human interference’ (emphasis mine). Thus, scientists by relying on factual, interference free, scientifically produced representations, minimised potential ethical issues. This innately objective dimension is to some extent to what science owes its universality. As Porter (1995) posits, ‘science is supposed to be about nature[, it] is supposed to yield knowledge that is impersonal, and in some way objective’. This drive for objectivity is often successful and consequently ‘knowledge in the sciences is widely shared, to the point that the same textbooks can be used all over the world’.
However, the task of defining objectivity is complicated by the issue of judgment. Porter claims that ‘someone who ‘isn’t objective’ has allowed prejudice or self-interest to distort a judgment’. Thus, mechanical objectivity comes in to counteract the at times adverse consequences of judgment in science. Chiefly, when a consensus of experts is hard to reach, or does not satisfy outsiders, mechanical objectivity comes into play. It refers to the following of rules and the imposition of self-restraint insofar as ‘rules are a check on subjectivity: they should make it impossible for personal biases or preferences to affect the outcome of an investigation’. The importance of rules, external checks, and accountability in scientific practices reveals the moral tinge of the objectivity ideal. Indeed, Daston and Galison (1992) write about the trope of scientific humility whereby ‘the experimenter’s mind differs from the metaphysician’s or the scholastic’s in its modesty, because experiment makes him … conscious of both his relative and his absolute ignorance … [and, as such,] in teaching man, experimental science results in lessening his pride more and more’. Interestingly however, Bernard (1865) stresses that ‘man is by nature metaphysical and proud. He has gone so far as to think that the idealistic creations of his mind, which correspond to his feelings, also represent reality’, thus underlining the limitations of even experiment in the face of such perversities of human nature. Daston and Galison (1992) contends that, consequently, the ‘external check of experiment must be supplemented by the internal check of self-restraint and the scientist must ‘never answer for her (‘her’ being nature) nor listen partially to her answers by taking, from the results of an experiments, only those which support or confirm his hypothesis’. Thus, objectivity bears a negative quality; ‘it is an ethos of restraint, both external restraints of method and quantification and internal restraints of self-denial and self-criticism’. Yet, this ideal is confronted by the importance of judgment in professions that are predominantly based on an ethos of objectivity. Medicine and accounting are exemplar of this dichotomy, with on the one hand, unexpected realities of patients that come to destabilise objective and established knowledge, calling for the use of professional judgment, and on the other hand, the accounting profession’s prime attribute being professional judgment. Indeed, Porter (1995), puts forward the idea of the difficulty of transposing the definition of scientific objectivity – i.e. the ‘ideal’ objectivity – to other areas of life. He notes how, while judgment, professional or otherwise, is ‘a product of the mind’, if judgment must be ‘made synonymous with subjectivity, we cannot have objectivity and a profession at the same time’, therefore rendering the acceptance of such a view of objectivity difficult. Accordingly, having recognised the particular, rather than universal, nature of objectivity – with objectivity emerging as a ‘multifarious, mutable thing, capable of new meanings and new symbols’ (Daston and Galison, 1992) – the latter part of this essay will focus on the limits of the desirability of the ideal of objectivity as well as the reality of the difficulty in attaining it.
‘In defending the scientific community’s just claims to knowledge I am also defending the moral superiority of that community relative to any other human association’ (Rom Harre, 1986). Morality and objectivity operate in a mutual interaction.Insofar as objectivity refers not only to truth to nature but also to ‘impersonality, fairness, universality, and in general an immunity to all kinds of local distorting of factors like nationality, language, personal interest, and prejudice’ (Porter 1995), it is held to a high standard of accountability. This is due to the fact that, crucially, objectivity is construed against specific political and cultural backdrops. Porter goes so far as to claim that ‘objectivity derives its impetus, and also its shape and meaning, from cultural, including political, contexts’. What is more, Puig de la Bellacasa (2011) stresses that how we present things matters, it becomes a problem of ‘knowledge politics’. Latour (2004) echoes this by contending that ‘only about statements do we raise the question ‘Is it real or constructed?’, a question that seems not only profound but also morally and politically crucial to maintain a liveable social order’.
Yet, that knowledge is morally and politically tainted promotes a curious juxtaposition of ethics and superiority. Fortun (2005) writes that the science studies tradition for instance, predicates itself on a ‘politics of judging, achieved through an ethic of critique based on the superior knowledge of the ‘social’ analyst’. Of note is Fortun’s argument regarding ‘normativity’ of science achieved through science studies; by which the ‘science analyst feels him-or-herself called upon to correct the ethical, political, and social failures, erasures, or perversions of the sciences and their practitioners’, insofar as they feel that they can achieve some form of truer objectivity, of meta knowledge and analysis. Further, Fukuyama (2002) makes a note of the interesting dynamic between objectivity and ethics, observing that ‘in any discussion of cloning, stem-cell research, germ-line engineering, and the like, it is usually the professional bioethicist who can be relied on to take the most permissive position of anyone in the room. But if the ethicist isn’t going to tell you that you can’t do something, who will?’. Yet, in the drive for objectivity, aren’t moral preoccupations naturally set aside? Is true objectivity necessarily amoral? Is that desirable? Aren’t ethicists fundamentally as objective as the researchers in the discipline their branch of ethics is interested, albeit differently, insofar as they must know a vast amount of knowledge to be ethical?
Driving further the issue of the desirability of objectivity, Porter’s (1995) analysis of the pursuit of objectivity in science and public life, opens the question beyond the confines of science. Regarding the quantification of public life, he emphasises the difficulty encompassed in and problematic quality of mapping mathematics onto the world, highlighting how ‘critics of quantification in the natural sciences as well as in social and humanistic fields have often felt that reliance on numbers simply evades the deep and important issues’. Interestingly, faith in objectivity, Porter suggests, tends to be associated with ‘political democracy, or at least with systems in which bureaucratic actors are highly vulnerable to outsiders’. In fact, it seems that numbers and their appeal are especially compelling to beaucratic officers lacking either the mandate of a popular election, or the divine right given that ‘arbitrariness and bias are the most usual grounds upon which such officials are criticised’. Consequently, decisions made by numbers or explicit rules retain the appearance of being both fair and impersonal. As such, ‘scientific objectivity [provides] and answer to a moral demand for impartiality and fairness[, with] quantification [becoming] a way of making decisions without seeming to decide’; thus, ‘objectivity lends authority to officials who have very little of their own’ (emphasis mine). Nonetheless, while this form of objectivity seemingly aligns itself with moral requirements, it is not in fact neutral. While statistics are supposedly the gold standard of objectivity, Porter contends that there exist numerous controversies in the United States regarding the divergence between the statistical reality and lived realities vis a vis homelessness, with questions arising about ‘whether to incorporate the Census Bureau’s own estimate of its undercount into the official numbers’. This is far from neutral and is actually a rather politically charged issue, especially since the undercount is assumed to have particularly affected the inner-city homelessness’. Similarly, Porter outlines how official statistical categories occupy ‘contested terrain’ given that the numbers they contained at threatened by both misunderstanding and self-interest. Principally, the problem is one of replication as ‘thousands of agents must be trained to arrange an unruly humanity into comfortable categories’, but, as Desrosieres and Thevenot of the French national statistical office (INSEE) bring to light, this is harder than it may seem, reporting that ‘even in this exemplary statistical agency, a repeat interview will assign an employee to a different occupational category from what was initially reported in up to 20 percent of cases’. This is an even big problem concerning racial and ethnic categories, which have been a longstanding and contentious issue. For example, while activists alongside bureaucrats have managed to create the category ‘Hispanics’, out of ‘Americans of Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Iberian, and Central and South American descent’, this was ‘by no means universally supported among the people it labels’ (emphasis mine), underlining the ironic subjectivity of objectivity, as well as the ambivalence of desire vis a vis the objectivity ideal, which often ends up, once put into practice, divorced from lived realities.
The issue thus becomes whether objectivity is achievable insofar as objectivity as an idea and objectivity as practice are in fact at times markedly different from each other. Latour (2002) argues that to ask whether a statement is ‘real or constructed’ seems to have a moral and political traction, one crucial to maintain a ‘liveable social order’. Yet he stresses that for ‘articulated propositions’, such a query is ‘totally irrelevant and slightly quaint since the more artificiality, the more sensorium, the more bodies, the more affections, the more realities will be registered’. In his 2004 work on How to Talk About the Body he adds to this, positing that ‘reality and artificiality are synonyms’ given that ‘learning to be affected means exactly that: the more you learn, the more differences exist’ (emphasis mine). Thus, if learning to be affected by ever changing subtleties and distinctions is an ongoing process, how can one be truly objective? What is more, the ideal of objectivity, notably in scientific endeavours, is skewed by the reality that ‘to be scientific […] knowledge has to be interesting’, leading scientists to juxtapose the qualification of ‘Is it scientific’ to the query ‘Maybe so, but is it interesting?’. Rheinberger (1997) highlights that ‘fecundity, productivity, richness, originality’ contrary to ‘boring, repetitive, redundant, inelegant, simply accurate, sterile’ is what discriminates between a good and bad articulation. Similarly, the dichotomy between ideal and practice is complicated by the question of passion. In fact, Latour (2004) suggests that most protocols qualify as scientific due to scientists being as ‘little engaged as possible in interacting with entities which are running with as little interference as possible from them’. Yet, Despret (2004) warns of the dangers of the ideal of the disinterested scientist refraining from any interference with uninterested entities because this produces ‘totally uninteresting’ i.e ‘redundant articulations’. Latour (2004) echoes this in stressing that, conversely, ‘the path to science requires [a] passionately interested scientist who provides his or her object of study with as many occasions to show interest and to counter his or her questioning through the use of its own categories’. In parallel to this, Latour discusses the place of distance and empathy in scientific fields, maintaining that ‘abstaining from biases and prejudices is a very poor way of handling a protocol [and in fact,] one must have as many predjucices, biases as possible, to put them at risk in the setting and provide occasions of manipulation for the entities to show their mettle’. Additionally, he contends that ‘it is not passion, nor theories, nor preconceptions that are in themselves bad [rather they] become bad when they do not provide occasions for the phenomena to differ’. He illustrates this by noting the limits of the ideal of objectivity, notably in hospital settings, underlining that ‘even the hospital is not able to reduce the patient to a ‘mere object’’; in interacting with a hospital, ‘your ‘rich subjective personality’ is not reduced to a mere package of objective meat [instead] you are now learning to be affected by masses of agencies hitherto unknown [to] you’. This casts a new light on Porter’s (1995) introductory statement on objectivity which states that while its presence is undoubtedly required for ‘basic justice, honest government, and true knowledge’, an excess of it can crush individual subjects. Interestingly, the ideal of objectivity still exists despite discrepancies in its application to the extent that it is often not ‘closely defined, but simply invoked to praise or blame’. Thus, objectivity is suspended in a limbo between its ideally unachievable nature and its ethical repercussions in practice, with objectivity serving as a sort of moral guide to behaviour despite the innately subjective interactions in different professions.
Candea (2010) in his work on engagement and detachment in human-animal relations notes on the limits of scientific detachment as the objective, morally adequate, stance. Despite detachment often being viewed as the ‘hallmark of a truly scientific approach to animals’, notably in its propensity to suppress temptations of anthropomorphisms, more frequently, detachment comes to be associated with ‘coldness and lack of caring’ to which engagement is believed to be the cure. He emphasises that while meerkats’ interactions with each other make them interesting to study, it is their capacity to sustain relationships with scientist that renders them accessible to research. Indeed, the Kalahari Meerkat Project (subsequently KMP) meerkats are acclimated to human presence conversely to their wild counterparts. Yet, it is inherently due to this habituated state the meerkats are in that boundaries are blurred in important ways relating to scientific observation. Because of habituation processes the animals alongside their behaviour can no longer be considered ‘mere objects ‘out there’’; with Candea qualifying this outcome as a ‘generative practice of mutual modification, not a distance act of scientific observation’. Importantly, habituation was explained by researchers not as underpinned by the aim of building social relations but as an attempt to disappear, to become ‘part of the scenery’. Candea suggests however that, rather than necessarily understanding animal-human relations as inter-subjective, striving to conceptualise habituation as a non-relation is not innately misleading or a sort of false consciousness, with researchers’ interest being unilaterally imposed on the meerkats; rather he suggests that ‘maintaining proper distance is a project that meerkats and scientists have in common’, with both meerkats and researchers being keen on ‘keeping a polite distance’. However, while measures such as rotas to ensure meerkat groups were visited evenly were implemented in an effort to eliminate bias or skew, paradoxically, it is also believed that ‘greater familiarity with on group would help volunteers become better, more finely tuned observers’. Thus, Candea highlights how detachment does not stand in opposition to involvement, or retreating to a ‘theoretical or distant perspective’, rather, the actual process, mediated through rotas, consists of the opposite, as the ‘pursuit of more involvement, new attachments’ interrupts the ‘monopolizing claim of older ones’. He further argues that, consequently, the experienced volunteer’s detachment is in fact the very opposite of an outsider’s lack of interest. In fact, ‘the volunteer’s detachment [stems] from an empirically grounded and hard-earned relationship to the entire meerkat population [… as such,] this was a version of ‘standing back’ that enabled multiplied engagements or, conversely, a multiplication of engagements [allowing] one to detach’. As such, perhaps detachment can be understood as objectivity put in practice, reckoning with the complexities involved in ethical interactions.
Lastly, Candea writes about the unclear boundary between scientific non-intervention and impartiality, and required ethical involvement, decisions, and responsibility. Notably, the existence of the reality tv show Meerkat Manor, focusing on the lives of the KMP meerkats, complicated the scientific drive towards objectivity insofar as viewers would try to hold volunteers accountable for letting meerkats die; with viewers believing it the responsibility of volunteers to ensure meerkats stay alive, and volunteers maintaining that they must keep their distance and keep interventions minimal to ensure findings be as objective and scientifically accurate as possible. Candea underlines however that assessing what counts as intervention in practice is difficult and ‘ultimately, one’s action in any of these contexts [involve] complex, situated ethical decisions [reflecting] individual volunteers’ personalities and commitments to the animals as much as their reflexive engagement with the principle of scientific detachment’.
To conclude, to ask whether objectivity is a matter of ethics is misleading insofar as objectivity is multiple, variable, and malleable, and, as such, ascertaining how ethics and objectivity interact is a task that should be particular and located. Importantly, objectivity in its ideal form differs from its lived applications, further complicating its relation to ethics. Still, it is non-negligeable that ethics drive the ideal of objectivity, and this of course has repercussions on how particular individuals engage with concepts of objectivity in practice.
Bibliography
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Candea, M. 2010. “I fell in love with Carlos the meerkat”: Engagement and detachment in human-animal relations. American Ethnologist 37, 241–258.
Daston, L and Galison, P 1992 ‘The Image of Objectivity’ in Representations 40:82-128
Fortun, M. 2005. For an ethics of promising, or: a few kind words about James Watson. New Genetics and Society 24, 157–174.
Latour, B. (2004). "How to talk about the body? The normative dimension of science studies." Body & Society 10(2-3): 205.
Porter, T 1995 Trust in numbers. The pursuit of objectivity in Science and Public Life. Princeton University Press.
Puig de la Bellacasa, M. 2011 Matters of care in technoscience: Assembling neglected things Social Studies of Science, 41:85