Can we take a step back this week and discuss the normative versus positive distinction? I hardly know what’s necessary to discuss these days, but I have noticed a certain amount of confusion relating to normative and positive propositions, so maybe worthwhile?
Positive propositions are about what is, in a factual sense, not what one supposes ought to be the case or what one ought to do. So a statement about observable reality, or at one step removed science depending on empirical verification, or what the heck, maybe also formal systems as math. The point of a proposition being called positive is it is capable of being refuted with reference to some objective standard. So statements of fact, science, are meant to be assessed relative to shared reality, while statements in formal systems relative to some agreed definitions, rules. Everyone around the world can discuss proposed facts, scientific theories, mathematical or logical problems, and agree on their proper mode of evaluation or assessment.
Normative propositions are about ought rather than is. They’re humans expressing their own personal judgments about what they or others ought to do based on their subjective moral senses or sensibilities. They’re not really refutable per se, although one may evaluate, discuss, dispute them. Now in a normative context one may attempt to create a false criterion for objective evaluation by simply declaring some theory, book, creed to be dispositive in a normative sense, write it into law, enforce it, etc. However, that’s not agreement of criteria in the philosophical sense. No breaking of prior agreements relating to arbitrary terms or definitions, no bit of illogic, no affront to shared factual reality is involved if someone says he or she thinks it should really be some other theory, book, creed that should be normatively dispositive. It’s subjective opinion.
A while back, a great deal was made of interactions between positive and normative in generally positive or normative theories. For example, ethical theories are normative theories but if they’re addressed to the real world they will involve factual premises about the world, which are positive. Or again, ethical theories typically have some logic to their arguments. Do the positive elements mean ethical theories are not “normative theories?” I wouldn’t say so. The conclusions are normative propositions about one ought to do and must involve normative evaluation at some point. On the positive side, a great deal was made about potential normative influences on the conduct of positive science as far as motivations, interests, imagination, resistance to findings and theories, and so on. I recall a great deal was said about in the philosophy of science circa 1970s. Does it suggest we can’t really call scientific theories as positive? Again, I wouldn’t say so. At the end of the day, they’re about reality and intended to be evaluated on that basis. They’re positive theories, but they can interact with normative propositions via bias, motivations, etc.
The culmination of that bad philosophy was the contention there is no difference between positive and normative propositions, which the scientifically illiterate embraced as justifying their anti-science views and the philosophically illiterate embraced as suggesting ethics are objective facts. One still sees the influence of that bad philosophy especially in the philosophically clueless field of academic economics, in which some suppose neoclassical welfare economics is not a normative theory because it involves math or logic, others conflate it with predictive modeling. A typical example of such confusion in the context of normative and positive economics is conflating “false simplifying assumptions” in the predictive engineering models of positive economics with “false factual premises” in the ethical arguments of normative economics.
My primary concern is normative economics, the normative or ethical arguments made in neoclassical welfare economics about socially “optimal” economic arrangements, policies, what people ought to do, and how that is twisted in normative anti-democracy bad economics in the conservative style. I contend that is the bit of economics that accounts for most of the controversy, confusion and conflict relating to real economic issues and policies, the bit academic economics typically fail to adequately address, the bit fueling anti-democracy sentiment and dodgy ethical thinking. I’m not very interested in positive economics, predictive modeling mostly, although I have some residual interest in the difference between predictive engineering models (and related storytelling) and real cumulative science, from a youthful brush with the philosophy of science. In the old days, if a student expressed any interest in normative economics, they were shuttled into philosophy of science under the conceit economics is a science, so the only normative content must be potential interactions with normative propositions as discussed in the philosophy of science. I didn’t know enough at the time to object, so chalk that up as one more intellectual mugging at the hands of academic economists in the devious old men versus naive teenagers division. But I do now. That’s not the “normative economics” I mean to discuss. I mean the other one: the ethical theory.
