RESOLVING DISPUTES INVOLVING VALUES1

By David Braine

We have seen that there is no single or unified body of theory or thought behind social and
community work, but a great many different kinds of influence and theory derived from many
different sources and often opposed to each other. The result is hot disputes and deep divisions
of attitude between different social and community workers on many crucial questions:
disputes about the use of learning theory and physical methods of psychiatry, and about the
validity of psychoanalysis; disputes about the importance of economic structures in generating
social problems, about the evils of bureaucracy, and about the value of participation, of a sense
of community and of group work; disputes about the attitudes to be adopted to different kinds
of antisocial behaviour, and about the need to respect people's freedom and independence so
that they can make their own decisions.
The question we must now consider is: are these disputes capable of being thought through
and resolved? Are they amenable to reason, i.e., to reflective and co-operative discussion? Or,
alternatively, are reason and discussion ultimately useless except as propaganda devices, so
that all we can do is just choose or assume some view which we cannot ultimately justify, and
then, once having chosen or assumed it, merely proceed to fight for it, so that the situation
becomes that of a power struggle between those who have adopted the different views
involved—a power struggle within the social services to control policies and use of resources,
and a power struggle within the community at large, without reason and co-operative dialogue
having any place left to them?
There is no easy "scientific" route to the resolution of these disputes, and the question
remains: are they amenable to reason at all and does science, or does the consideration of
"facts," whether "scientifically" established or not, have any role in resolving them? If we wish
to assess the validity of Marxist, or liberal, or existentialist, or behaviourist, or any other such
set of ideas, is there any reasonable way for us to go about it, or do we just have to plump,
entirely arbitrarily, for one way of thinking rather than another, without reason coming into it?

I. Four explanations of the origins of disputes affecting values

In order to decide whether reason, or reflective and co-operative discussion, has any role
to play in resolving these disputes, or what role it has, it will be useful to consider four different
theories about why these disputes exist, and why they are so difficult to resolve.
The student will have noticed that one thing which all these disputes have in common is
that they all relate either directly or indirectly to values. That is, they all concern value-
judgments or else matters immediately affecting value-judgments. By 'value-judgments,' we
mean judgments about the rightness or wrongness of various kinds of action or method of
action, and about the goodness or worthwhileness, or lack of them, of various proposed ends
or goals for human action. Against this background, the four theories the student has to consider
are those which locate the root of the difficulty in resolving the disputes concerned respectively
in (A) a supposed gulf between facts and values, (B) the existence of different ultimate goods
alongside each other, each recognisably of value in itself, but not directly comparable with each
other, and not being capable of being directly weighed or measured against each other, (C) the
existence of deep disagreements about facts, disagreements which it does not seem within the

1
This paper was originally part of a proposed course for social workers.
 2

power of science or history to resolve, and (D) the prejudiced assessment of facts. Let us look
at these explanations, each of them in turn.

A. Gulf between facts and values?

The first view to be considered is the view that the systematic reason rendering these
disputed questions insoluble is that there is an absolute logical gulf between facts and values.
That is, on this view, there is never any sound or valid argument to be drawn from statements
asserting what are believed to be facts (whether empirical facts, such as those of physics or
history, or metaphysical facts, such as about the existence or non-existence of God or of the
soul) to statements or judgments about value. Reason is, on this view2, limited to (1)
discovering inconsistencies in people's value-systems, and (2) deciding technical questions
about what means exist for bringing about this or that end. Therefore, on this view, reason has
no part in deciding any question of intrinsic value, whether as to what is morally good or bad,
or as to what is good or bad for individual people, i.e., whether questions of morals, or questions
of interest or prudence. What would be a good, satisfactory, or desirable life for me is, on this
view, just as much outside the sphere of reason as questions of morals. On this, until recently
very fashionable, sceptical view, judgments of value always express a mere choice of
preference, unguided by reason or by anything objective, because here, this view suggests, at
the crucial points, reason has nothing at all to say.
Those who have taken this view have often expressed it by saying that all disputes about
value with a political aspect are ideological.3 They have reckoned that within political thought,
there is firstly an empirical or scientific element, and then secondly a philosophical element
occupied only with the analysis of concepts—beyond these two elements, all the rest is mere
“ideology” because it involves evaluation. Like the Marxists, they use the word “ideology” to
imply “system of belief, the holding of which is not determined or guided by rational, objective,
or scientific considerations,” but whereas Marx used the term to imply that what determined
the beliefs concerned was the distortions produced by class-interest, these thinkers tend to think
that the operative factor is choice or preference. And whereas, for Marx, the Marxist philosophy
does not represent yet another ideology, but an undistorted, objectively based understanding of
the world and therefore an escape from ideology, by contrast, in the view of these philosophers,
no escape from ideology is possible. The student should realise that the word “ideology” is thus
a loaded one, implying the predominance of emotion, or ultimately arbitrary choice, or class-
interest, and the absence of rational justification or basis for the view described as
“ideological,” and should therefore be wary of it in application to his own views unless he is
happy to accept that these then have no rational justification.

B. Non-comparable goods?
Secondly, we very often meet with the view which amounts in effect to this: not that
argument about values is impossible in principle, as on the view we have just considered, but
that, on the contrary, it is in a way too easy, so that we can produce cogent argument for doing
each of two opposite things; just as in disputes in law-courts, we may often meet what seems
to be unanswerable cases presented from each of two opposite sides. The problem on this
second view is not that we have nothing which objectively speaking has any value at all, but
that we have two rival courses of action or two rival ends, each of which appears to have some

2
Stated by A.J. Ayer in Language, Truth, and Logic, R.M. Hare in The Language of Morals, and assumed
by others.
3
See A.M. Quinton’s Political Philosophy.
 3

value which is not in dispute. This happens to Sartre's case of the choice between whether to
fight for the Free French, or whether to remain at home looking after one's mother who needs
help.4 It is the problem which results from there being a variety of fundamental goods or
fundamental values, which men largely or entirely agree to be each separately worth seeking,
but which they sometimes seem to have to choose between without having any balance to
weigh the one against the other.
Some utilitarians, such as Bentham, have thought that there was such a balance: one simply
measured the amounts of pleasure and pain consequent on the proposed action and chose the
course of action which generated the most pleasure and least pain. But most moral philosophers
have agreed that we cannot measure pleasures and pains or compare them quantitatively
because they are of such discrepant kinds. And Mill, for instance, insists that the quality or kind
of a pleasure needs to be considered as well as its quantity in assessing its importance within
the general happiness.5 Further, many would object to the tendency to assess the good in a
human life by considering this life as atomized into bits of pleasure and pain instead of
considering it as a whole, its structure and general orientation or meaning6. Moreover, even
utilitarians tend to have attributed a value and importance to equality or fairness, to liberty, to
rationality, and to respect for truth, which seem to go beyond what their arguments about what
general happiness requires would seem to justify.
Thus this second view, what some people would call the view that there are
“incommensurable” (i.e. non-comparable) values or goods, is the view that there is no way of
measuring different ultimate goods against each other on some common balance or weighing
scales, i.e., no way of deciding dilemmas involving rival values or goods by calculation, or of
reducing the decision to a matter of calculation. Thus, on this view, it is merely artificial and
arbitrary to pretend that one ultimate earthly good is to be preferred to all the others, and to
give it absolute precedence over all the others—whether it be liberty, or equality, or the
attainment of some perfect or “classless” society—and to proceed in this way, ignoring or
setting aside all other values as secondary, would be, according to this view, yet again to
commit oneself to an “ideology,” a system of conviction determined merely by unsupported
choice, or narrowed vision, or group interest, not guided or supported by reason or any
objective considerations of human value.7
This second view seems much closer to experience than the first. For there do seem to be
various goods such as knowledge and understanding, truth and rationality, creative production,
liberty or freedom from restriction on one's movements and actions, fairness, freedom from
pain and distress, having one's bodily faculties in a healthy functioning state, companionship
and friendship, truthfulness and fidelity to one's commitments to others, and so on, which
practically all men of every culture see some value in and would like to have if these things did
not interfere with each other. It is true that one cannot prove by logic alone, if one means by
“logic” the study which deals with those types of inference or argument which arise in the same
way in every subject matter (i.e., inferences depending only on those formal laws and those
kinds of definitional transformation which can be used without introducing any assumptions
about the subject matter being argued about) that pain or deception or the loss of one's eyes or
legs are evils, i.e., things preferable to avoid and to be accepted if at all only because necessary
for some other good. But the same is true of propositions such as that causes do not come out
after their effects or that time is not cyclical: it does not follow that objective knowledge is

4
See Nausea.
5
See Robert Simpson’s “Happiness.” American Philosophical Quarterly 12.2, 1975.
6
Ibid.
7
See Isaiah Berlin's Two Concepts of Liberty.
 4

absent, but only that logic, if understood in a very narrow strict sense, can resolve no
substantive questions. The problem is not with getting knowledge of the value of these very
great kinds of things, but with how to make a rational choice when these things that all agreed
to have value interfere with one another, e.g., when the value of liberty is interfered with by
the values of fairness and equality, or of protecting people's welfare or well-being, or of
preserving peace and order in the community.
The fact that different fundamental goods cannot be measured against one another on a
balance does not necessarily imply that there is no method of coming to a rational choice when
they appear to conflict with each other, but only that there is no simple or straightforward
method of resolving these problems of choice by mere calculation. Once one gets away from
conceiving of human happiness, or of the good life for the individual or the community, as
consisting of a collection of atoms of pleasure and instead gets to see it as an integrated
structure of interrelated and interdependent parts or aspects, then a possible avenue is open
towards deciding some of the choice-problems that arise. For instance, instead of supposing
either that we should always give respect for the individual and his liberty priority over a
concern for the protection of the community, or that we should always give the good of the
community precedence over respect for individual liberty—instead of merely swithering about
between these, or falling in with some arbitrary compromise between them, we can perhaps
envisage that the good of the community is just as much injured when the individuals which
make it up and who give it what life it has are not respected as when they are not protected
from each other; and again, that the good of the individual is injured not only when his liberty
is not respected, but also when he is unable to or fails to form proper relationships with the rest
of the community. When one takes this kind of structured view both of the good of the
individual, and also of the good of the community, one will find many dilemmas begin to
resolve themselves.
This approach, which one might regard as a development of Aristotelian ideas as to how
one should approach moral and political questions, could be supplemented by some principle
of respect for values stemming partly from the realisation that in a situation in which we cannot
expect an outcome that is in all respects satisfactory, it may be more important to preserve
respect for certain values than to achieve a marginal increase in certain others. For instance,
we may insist on not writing off certain members of the community as not worth caring for
despite the fact that their situation is not likely to improve, even though this involves a diversion
of efforts and resources from others more able to improve in their situation. Or we might insist
on the importance of not lying to or breaking trust with clients even where doing this might
have seemed to be of some marginal convenience.

C. Deep disagreements about facts?

Those who take the first view I mentioned, namely that the reason why disputes affecting
values are so difficult to resolve is a supposed logical gulf between fact and value, imagine that
it is very common for there to be a major dispute about values while all the facts are agreed.
But, in actual experience, this is very rare. That is, it is very rare for us to meet with a
disagreement about values which is not accompanied by serious and relevant disagreements
about facts. The facts concerned, about which there are disagreements, are of course not
normally facts easily decided uncontroversially by resort to observation or empirical science.
Thus, firstly, we never seem to get away from the need to rely upon some pre-scientific
judgment about the general effects upon the individual or society of this or that action or change
in the law. For instance, although we may well consider that a relatively easy divorce law was
required out of consideration for individual liberty in a pluralist society within which people
have different beliefs about marriage, someone else could reasonably question whether it
 5

contributed to the general happiness. He might reckon that unstructured situations often
generate pointless distress and insecurity and contribute towards a decrease in committedness
in personal relationships, and he might suspect that the increase of instability in even
unsatisfactory marriages would contribute to an increase of loneliness for many people in old
age.8 Or again, we might be reluctant to separate a child from its mother or from its brothers
and sisters because we tend to presume the presence of hidden, difficult to quantify or measure
benefits of structured family life. If the social worker who adopts attitudes like these refused
to pay any attention to contrary arguments or evidence, we might suspect him of prejudice, but,
on the other hand, the idea that one can ever get away from drawing on judgments of these
rather imponderable and difficult to verify kinds constitutes the chief part of the false scientism
we referred to earlier.
Secondly, there are general beliefs which often affect the consideration of issues about
values indirectly, by affecting one's general view of how much weight should be given to
different aspects of human good or how these are to be fitted together, or how absolute the
respect given to this or that particular value should be. For instance, if one reckoned that the
outcome of wars and revolutions is never anything more than a very moderate improvement in
the human lot, one would be less inclined to subordinate all other aspects of human good to the
achievement of success in war or revolution—less inclined, for instance, in war to use methods
involving indiscriminate killing of non-combatants and children, and the wanton destruction
of homes and the environment, and less inclined in a period leading up to revolution or radical
change to set aside care for the good of individuals. Or again, while everyone may wish to
accord some respect to human life, and nobody wishes to write off the case of anybody as
absolutely hopeless, nevertheless if a person believes in God and thinks of God as having a
hand in the coming into existence of each new human being and having a care for them both
before and after death, then it is likely that he will feel much more absolutely committed to
never writing off people as useless, and committed to spending more effort and time upon of
those for whom sickness, alcoholism, or constant recidivism seems to render their present
situation irremediable. It is also likely that they will insist upon a much more absolute respect
for human life, when this life is not involved wilfully in harming others or breaking the bonds
of community with others (i.e., when this life is "innocent" in this technical sense), and this
will influence their attitudes to abortion.

D. Prejudice in the assessment of facts?

Because facts seem relevant to the maintenance of judgments of value when we are already
committed to some judgement of value, i.e., if, for instance, we are already determined that our
reluctance to place restrictions on people's liberty, or our concern to protect people from assault
or theft, or our pursuit of some political end such as revolution, or our continued practice of
some psychiatric or medical technique shall continue unimpeded, then we may allow our
commitment to certain practical choices to distort our perception of facts and to render us
reluctant to attend to evidence or argument which might seem to tend in the opposite direction,
leading us to oversimplifications or to a false scientism when these fit what we want. And, in
our public presentation of a view, it may even lead to the straightforward suppression of any
awkward facts, e.g., the fact awkward for the economic liberal that economic structures do
generate many social evils, or the fact awkward for the Marxist that some social evils surely
spring from things like death, disease, or freedom in personal relationships, which the
revolution is not designed to remove.

8
This may be an example of some so-called utilitarians in fact preferring individual liberty as a goal or
value to the "general happiness" to which they are theoretically committed.
 6

These last two views of the roots of disputes about values are the ones which are suggested
by the writings of modern anthropologists. They do not root the difficulty in obtaining
agreement on the questions of value in any supposedly absolute gulf between fact and value,
but in the difficulty of obtaining an objective view of the facts relevant to moral decision
because they realise that the relevant facts are not all straightforwardly easily agreed historical
and scientific kinds, and that one's view of them is often affected by one's values.

II. The implications and assessment of these four theories

Of these four theories, only the first represents these disputes affecting values with which
we are concerned as in principle absolutely impossible to resolve through reason and reflection.
The other three leave it open that, although some of those disputes may turn out to be
irresolvable, we cannot say beforehand that any of them is in principle impossible to resolve.
Rather, the last three explanations present three different kinds of difficulty (not systematic
impossibility) in resolving or coming to agreements through reason and discussion in these
disputes, and we can quite well accept that all the last three named factors have a role as long
as we reject the first explanation, which fits with none of the other three.
The first view has many weaknesses. Firstly, the supposition that no evaluations have any
reason behind them fails to explain either the extent of the agreement that we do find about
values, or the extent of our capacity to sympathise with and understand the points of view of
those with whom we radically disagree. It fails, in brief, to explain our experience of being
confronted with rival goods (what we called the problem of non-comparable values). Secondly,
the supposition that facts have no implications for values makes it obscure why it is so rare to
find a moral disagreement in the absence of some (often deep) factual disagreement and why
acceptance of certain values should so often distort one's perceptions and considerations of
facts in the way that experience suggests that it does. Moreover, if there is no good in either of
the things I may choose between, freedom to choose between them seems to be of little
significance. Further, if disputes about values are in principle irresolvable through reason and
reflective discussion, this seems to remove anything but a pragmatic propaganda purpose from
people's discussing issues with each other. And if all one can say to the Nazi or racialist is this:
“I believe that what you are doing is wicked, but of course, no belief or question of value of
this kind is any more correct or incorrect objectively than any other opposite belief,” then the
position one appears to be taking up is humanly spineless and itself morally objectionable—
besides, as our arguments in this paragraph and the next show, not intellectually attractive.
In any case, the philosophical basis for this first view is highly dubious. Firstly, it rests
philosophically on the over-simple assumption that everything known is either
straightforwardly empirically established or else proved through mere logic. Secondly, it
presents the implausible suggestion that no evaluations whatsoever are objective, whereas the
involvement in any rational activity at all seems to presuppose the value of truth and of some
knowledge or understanding, and again, if the loss of eyes or legs does not count as suffering
harm, it is difficult to say what the word "harm" might mean.9
Accordingly, the situation seems to be that there are no dilemmas about values about which
we can say beforehand that they are in principle unresolvable and it is useless to reflect or argue
about them. There are indeed evident difficulties, firstly, in seeing how to relate different
fundamental goods or different fundamental aspects of human goods together in one structure,

9
See Mrs. Philippa Foot and Gilbert Ryle's article "On Forgetting the Difference between Right and
Wrong."
 7

so as to be able to resolve rationally problems of choice when they are in tension with each
other; secondly, in seeing how to resolve disagreements in the non-scientific or pre-scientific
judgments which people inevitably make about human society, human nature, and God; and
thirdly, in escaping the limitations of one's imaginative perception of different kinds of human
situation and of obtaining a balance between, on the one hand, a false scientism and uncritical
reception of the results of often superficial and occasionally prejudiced or even fraudulent
research and, on the other hand, an imperviousness to any new evidence, argument, or
imaginative presentation of situations. As a result of these difficulties, we may at some
particular time not see how to resolve the problems that are confronting us and may have to
make a judgment of a provisional kind based on what we realise to be insecure grounds, perhaps
relying on the judgments or policies of the department we work for or of people we respect so
that we may remain uncertain about the rightness of the action we take.
But it is important that the situation is not static and the case is not hopeless. We cannot
beforehand rule out the possibility of obtaining new understanding and appreciation of how to
approach and resolve the problems under dispute with the help of longer and new kinds of
experience—experience in which we are not merely passive, but are involved actively in
reflection and in sympathetic relationship and discussion with others, colleagues and clients,
and in which we are both involved in the efforts and pressures of decision-making and able to
stand back from them, and to view the issues and difficulties involved in wider human
perspectives utilising all the powers of attention and imagination in our command. Upon this
belief, that the disputes affecting values here concerned are not in principle unresolvable,
depends the possibility of social and community workers working together or learning from
each other.