Science & Values
Facts and values aren't enemies. Honest inquiry is the only foundation for moral progress — and for better policy.
The False Divide
We're told there are two things in this world: facts and values. Science gives us facts — what is. But values — what ought to be — are supposedly beyond its reach. Questions of meaning, morality, how we should raise our children, what makes a good life — science supposedly has nothing to say.
This is wrong. And the consequences of believing it are everywhere.
When we say science can't touch the most important questions in human life, we're saying something remarkable: that when we get our biases out of the way, when we most fully rely on clear reasoning and honest observation, when intellectual honesty is at its zenith — those efforts have no application to the questions that matter most. That would be very strange if it were true.
Why “Pragmatist”
Our name isn't a synonym for “practical.” It comes from America's homegrown school of philosophy — the pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Their core claim: the meaning of an idea is the difference it makes in practice, and the test of a belief is how it performs when you act on it.
The pragmatists treated beliefs the way engineers treat a bridge: instruments, kept while they carry weight and revised when they fail. Dewey spent a career arguing that democracy and science are the same habit at different scales — a community of people testing ideas in public, correcting errors in public, and refusing to let any authority place its claims beyond the reach of evidence.
That is the tradition this party is named for. Not certainty — method. The rest of this page is a modern restatement of the same instinct: questions about how we should live together are questions we can actually investigate.
The Moral Landscape
The sharpest modern version of this argument comes from the philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris, whose book The Moral Landscape gives this section its name. We find it persuasive, so we present it honestly, with credit — one influence among the thinkers this page draws on.
Here's a starting point that shouldn't be controversial: the worst possible misery for everyone is bad. If the word 'bad' applies anywhere, it applies to a universe where every conscious creature suffers as much as possible for as long as possible.
Once you admit that, you've admitted something profound. You've admitted that there are better and worse ways to live, that some states of the world are objectively preferable to others, and that it's possible to be wrong about how to navigate from one to the other.
Think of it as a landscape — peaks that correspond to well-being and valleys that correspond to suffering. There may be many peaks. Many different but equally valid ways for people to thrive. But there are far more ways to fail. And the difference between a peak and a valley isn't a matter of opinion.
Health, Not Opinion
Consider physical health. It's surprisingly hard to define precisely. How fast should a healthy person be able to run? That question might not have an answer. But this doesn't make the concept of health vacuous. The distinction between a healthy person and a dead one is as clear and consequential as any we make in science.
Nobody is tempted to attack the foundations of medicine by asking, 'Who are you to say that not always vomiting is healthy? What if someone wants to vomit until they die? How could you argue they're not as healthy as you are?' We recognize this as absurd.
Morality and human values work the same way. We're talking about mental health and the health of societies. It's possible to value things that reliably make you miserable. It's possible to be closed to experiences you would want if you were only knowledgeable enough to want them. It is possible not to know what you're missing in life. Things can be right or wrong quite independent of a person's opinions.
Science Was Never Value-Free
Here's the thing most people miss: science has always been in the values business. We cannot speak of facts without resorting to values.
Take the simplest scientific statement: water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. Seems value-free. But what do we do when someone doubts it? We appeal to scientific values — the value of understanding the world, the value of evidence, the value of logical consistency. If someone doesn't value evidence, what evidence could you provide to prove they should? If someone doesn't value logic, what logical argument could demonstrate its importance?
Every branch of science rests on axiomatic assumptions. Every objective framework has to make a first move — has to step into the light based on some foundational judgment. A science of morality is on exactly the same footing as physics, chemistry, or medicine.
Why This Matters for Politics
The reason this matters is that right now, our political system treats values as though they're purely tribal — you pick your team and adopt its moral framework, and every framework is treated as beyond question.
But policies aren't beyond question. Some demonstrably increase human suffering. Some demonstrably reduce it. Some ways of organizing society produce more flourishing. Some produce less. These are empirical questions with better and worse answers, and we can study them.
The Pragmatist Party exists because we believe policy should be evaluated the same way we evaluate medicine — by its outcomes. Not by which team proposed it. Not by how it makes us feel. By what it actually does to real people living real lives.
The Double Standard
There's a strange double standard in how we think about moral questions. On one hand, some people's moral sensibilities are finely calibrated to detect the slightest ethical misstep in certain areas. On the other, those same people will shrug at enormous suffering if it comes wrapped in the right cultural packaging.
This isn't just a problem for academics. It's the same double standard that lets us spend months debating a policy's optics while ignoring whether it works. That lets us condemn one side's failures while excusing our own. That lets us fight over symbols while real people suffer from real problems.
The pragmatist response is simple: follow the evidence. If a policy increases well-being, it doesn't matter who proposed it. If it increases suffering, no amount of good intentions redeems it. Outcomes over ideology. Results over rhetoric.
Honest Inquiry Is Enough
We don't need to agree on everything to agree on this: honest inquiry — clear reasoning, honest observation, openness to evidence — is the best tool we have for answering questions about how to live well together.
Whatever is true about our moral situation is discoverable. It can be discussed in language that doesn't require faith in any particular tradition. What remains for us to discover are the facts that will allow the greatest number of people to live lives truly worth living.
A global civilization of 8 billion people cannot be built on claims that some of us may question and others may not. It can only be built on what we can honestly demonstrate works. The only tool we need — the only tool that has ever actually delivered moral progress — is honest inquiry.
Policy grounded in evidence, not ideology
See how we apply this thinking to the issues that matter.