ABSTRACT
During the past half century the role of value judgments in economics has so frequently been discussed that any further excursion into this verbal jungle calls for some preliminary justification. Within the past decade or so there has been a pronounced swing towards the “positive”, natural science interpretation of economic method, and a concomitant stress on the need for empirical testing and verification; but this has become so fashionable that the difficulties of attaining the “positive” ideal are being seriously underestimated, and consequently the extent of recent methodological gains is tending to be exaggerated. This contention is, of course, difficult to prove; but it gains support when one contrasts the familiar text-book versions of “positive” economics with the trend of recent work in ethics, linguistic analysis, and the history and philosophy of science. According to the text-books, economic science is ethically neutral, concerned exclusively with “what is” rather than with “what ought to be”, and hence value judgments (which are usually regarded as normative propositions) have no place in the subject. On the other hand, recent discussions in logic and philosophy reveal that the relationships between factual and value judgments are far more subtle than economists generally recognise, and historians and philosophers of science have been demonstrating that value judgments play an indispensable role in the scientist's work. 2
