Racist Value Judgments as Objectively False Beliefs: A Philosophical and Social-Psychological Analysis

We argue that racist value judgments express beliefs that are objectively false. In our view, racist value judgments have cognitive or descriptive content that is empirically inaccurate and this inaccuracy is, in principle, available to objective, rational assessment. Our position responds to a popular view that, while some value judgments, such as racist judgments, might be abhorrent, values generally are not the sorts of things that are related to the evidence of experience, or if they are so related, it is not available to us to say with any objectivity that the evidence claims are true or false. In more philosophical terms, our position cuts across a number of metaethical debates, contrasting, for example, with what might be called “non-cognitivist” views of racist value judgments, just in case these views deny that such judgments are beliefs that have some relation to empirical content, and with some subjectivist or relativist views, just in case these views deny that any of the content inherent in racist value judgments can be assigned objective truth values. We should note, however, that our position does not straightforwardly chime with any number of metaethical views labeled “cognitivist” or “objectivist.” With backgrounds in epistemology and sociology we intend instead to bring together two areas of research not often addressed in philosophical debates about values generally, or racist values in particular, namely, Donald Davidson’s naturalized, holistic account of meaning and the prominent social-psychological theory of values pioneered by Milton Rokeach. We use this interdisciplinary approach to defend the view that, insofar as racist value judgments are meaningful, then they are beliefs that have empirical content, or must be inferentially linked to beliefs that do; that the truth or falsity of that content can be objectively assigned; and that this assignment is amenable to rational assessment. This is not, of course, to claim that such rational assessment is always practiced, just that, insofar as we believe that this sort of assessment is, in principle, available in the case of more straightforwardly descriptive judgments, so too it is, in principle, available in the case of value judgments. Similarly, any rational assessment regarding the objective truth or falsity of a value judgment is as fallible—that is, as amenable to correction in the light of new evidence—as is the assessment of the truth or falsity of any given descriptive judgment.