The Middle Way: an interview with Robert M. Ellis

On this occasion I have the pleasure of interviewing Robert M Ellis, founder and chair of the Middle Way Society, Ph.D. in philosophy and author of a large number of books on buddhism, ethics and the Middle Way. 

I have been very interested in your idea that there is a certain chasm or separation that has been created between the notions of 'fact' and 'value'. Could you explain to us what this is about? Where does this dualism come from? 

Robert: An unnecessary distinction has been created between facts and values and treated as necessary, with lots of negative effects. Maybe that’s a “chasm” in the sense that people think it’s bigger than it is! The distinction goes back to David Hume in the eighteenth century, who asserted that values were just a matter of “sentiment” that was not implied by factual claims. So, for instance, if you recognise that your dog is hungry, that’s a “fact” that is supposed to be entirely separate from the “value” of you feeling a responsibility to feed the dog. 

Much philosophy and science continues to assume that distinction, and it often seems to be inculcated in an insufficiently reflective way as part of scientific education. To some extent, in learning scientific method, or developing it in the early stages, it may have been useful to focus on the objects of observation in a disciplined way whilst trying to avoid interference from other personal assumptions. However, we deceive ourselves if we ever think we have managed to edit out our ‘values’ from our factual beliefs. 

The effect of the fact-value distinction is often that we are blind to the way that values are shaping our perspective. For humans, everything we pay attention to, and the whole way we describe things is formatted by both individual and social values. The problem with the distinction works the other way, too, in that you can’t describe values without assuming facts. 

How can the Middle Way solve or reframe this apparent dual separation? 

Robert: The Middle Way is the practice of recognising our absolute assumptions, whether positive or negative, and giving them a larger context in which we reframe them. In terms of the fact-value distinction, that means recognising that in terms of human experience, both facts and values consist in judgements. If those judgements at a particular time are sustained, they then become beliefs. The Middle Way involves making all our judgements are provisional and incremental. The provisionality would involve being ready to change our categorisations in the light of further experience, and incrementality would involve understanding them as a matter of degree. 

So, we might think of a particular belief that we might arrive at, “the dog is hungry”, as fairly factual, but not totally. I would only have noticed that the dog is hungry in the first place if I felt a certain concern (i.e. a value) about the situation. I would also be willing to change that assessment, e.g. if the dog started behaving differently, or if I realised that I had been making wrong assumptions in how I interpreted the dog’s behaviour. “I should feed the dog” is a fairly moral statement, but also one that is embedded in cultural assumptions about our relationship to pets, individual experience, psychological states, and so on – all of which are apparently ‘factual’. 

So it’s not just a matter of ‘sentiment’, as Hume put it. The value primarily depends on my goals and feelings, but my judgement about it needs to be a matter of degree (maybe I’m only responsible up to a point), and subject to change from new information – for example, if a friend persuaded me that my assumptions about responsibility in pet ownership were wrong. So we don’t get over the fact-value distinction just by denying it. It requires a practical approach to change our habitual ways of thinking about the distinction. These don’t just deny our experience of finding it useful to categorise claims as ‘facts’ or ‘values’, but rather puts it in a bigger context. 

From my experience being formed in orthodox neoclassical economics, I was taught this distinction between 'positive' and 'normative' aspects of economics, the first referring to the purely descriptive side of economics and the latter referring to the way specific parties evaluate specific types of income distribution. This normative aspect was portrayed as the 'subjective' or the justice side of economics where no real 'objective' consensus could be made. How do you see this relating to the fact/value dualism? 

Robert: I think it is more helpful to understand objectivity personally and incrementally. We can become more objective, either individually or as groups, by being more in the habit of taking more conditions into account (and thus also by avoiding the absolute thinking that stops us from doing so), but that’s a matter of degree, not a dualism between being totally objective or totally ‘subjective’. I’ve given up using the term ‘subjective’, as it seems entirely useless to me. All our judgements are ‘subjective’, in the sense that they pass through our individual experience with its limitations, so the term ‘subjective’ differentiates nothing. 

As for the idea that justice in economics is ‘subjective’, this is nonsense. You can make judgements about justice that are more or less justified, depending on how much you take into account. Justice is not the only value we apply to our judgements: loyalty, authority, purity, freedom and care are also important to us as human beings (using Jonathan Haidt’s useful analysis of foundational social values). So developing an incrementally objective judgement about justice involves balancing those different values in a way that addresses the conditions in the whole situation as far as is possible in the circumstances. That’s not an easy task, but the complexities of incorporating increasingly objective value judgements would be one of the things economics would be for, if it was setting about its task responsibly rather than on the basis of dogma. 

More generally, your approach appears to want to rescue the idea that there is such a thing as 'moral objectivity'. Could you explain to us the idea behind this notion? 

Robert: My Ph.D. thesis, written nearly 20 years ago now, was on the theme of moral objectivity, though it’s not something I emphasise so much these days. It’s one way into thinking about the Middle Way, but not the only one. As I’ve suggested above, if we see objectivity as a personal and incremental quality, it becomes one we can justify in experience rather than making absolute or dogmatic claims about. Moral objectivity is not distinct from scientific, aesthetic or any other kind of objectivity, except in the context in which it is applied. Wherever one is cultivating objectivity, one begins by identifying absolute assumptions to avoid, whether positive or negative (the Middle Way), and one is then in a better position to assess both the evidence available and one’s response to it. If those absolute assumptions are moral ones (e.g. that we should always act in accordance with the God’s will) or factual ones (e.g. that people are always motivated by self-interest), makes no difference to the approach. A more objective approach following the Middle Way is not necessarily ‘true’ or ‘correct’ (by whatever criteria one tries to judge that), just in a general zone where all the options are better than they are outside that zone. We become more objective primarily by taking our limitations fully into account. 

Me: It seems to me that cultural practices and institutions are greatly shaped by philosophical theories, especially when certain philosophical concepts are incorporated in common language (e.g. essence, ideal, excellence, etc.). Do you consider this historical philosophical weight as an obstacle to the development of middle way thinking? In which respects? 

Robert: Some aspects of philosophical theories are indeed shaped by those absolutising assumptions, and I agree that that creates a big obstacle to Middle Way thinking. However, philosophical traditions, like other traditions (religious, scientific, artistic) are complex, and also offer insights that can help us. Hume, whom I mentioned above, is a good example of this. On the one hand he left us the fact-value distinction, which is now being interpreted in ways that are often dogmatic (and making analytic ethics pretty useless for its supposed task of guiding moral judgement). On the other hand, though, he was the pioneer of the view that metaphysics should be avoided because of its inadequate relationship to experience, and of the view that the incremental weight of evidence should be the basis of our judgement (for example, concluding that it’s more likely that miracle stories are wrong than that they’re correct, even though it’s possible that they are correct). 

I find helpful and unhelpful elements in pretty much every tradition, although of course the proportions vary, and some traditions are more helpful than others. That’s why I like to put a lot of weight on interpretative responsibility in the way we approach any tradition, rather than assuming that it ‘essentially’ means this or that (e.g. that Christianity always means ‘believing’ in the ‘existence’ of God). However, it’s undeniable that some traditions have a heavy weight of absolutisation that it’s difficult to avoid.