Felix Kaufmann, The Issue of Ethical Neutrality in Political Science (1949)

Felix Kaufmann’s journal article, originally presented to the American Political Science Association in December 1948, examines whether moral judgments legitimately belong within political science. Its central claim is that ethical neutrality cannot justify excluding moral judgments as inherently subjective. Properly understood, it requires clarification of the standards those judgments presuppose—the same requirement that governs scientific criticism. Kaufmann develops this argument through an analogy between ethical and methodological judgments, a distinction between ambiguity and subjectivity, a criticism of Max Weber, and concluding reflections on the common ground beneath political disagreement. Philosophy’s contribution is interpretive rather than legislative: it makes explicit the principles that inquiry already employs.

The first conceptual move separates an act of approval from a judgment that such approval is correct. Saying that one approves of an action reports a valuation; calling the action morally good claims that others ought to approve it. The latter therefore invokes a standard rather than merely expressing a feeling.

Moral judgments are judgments concerning the correctness of moral valuations.

This definition shifts the issue away from the contrast between private emotions and publicly testable perceptions. Moral judgments are critical judgments, comparable in structure to scientific assessments of whether an assertion is warranted. Scientific criticism distinguishes acceptable from unacceptable assertions by applying rules of procedure; ethical criticism distinguishes proper from improper approval by applying moral standards. Psychological and social influences on valuations do not establish the subjectivity of ethical criticism, any more than wishful thinking establishes the subjectivity of scientific criticism.

Given the standards of ethical valuation, we must attribute objectivity to moral judgments in terms of these standards, if we are to use the term "objectivity" in the sense in which it is employed in scientific criticism.

The qualification “given the standards” is essential. Kaufmann does not claim that logic establishes an unquestionable moral system. He distinguishes applying standards from justifying their adoption. Ethical subjectivists correctly deny that a particular moral system possesses ultimate rational justification, but incorrectly treat this as a decisive difference from science. Scientific method likewise lacks ultimate rational justification: Hume’s argument concerning induction extends, Kaufmann maintains, to empirical methods generally. Greater agreement about scientific procedures does not remove their dependence on presupposed standards.

The article’s next move distinguishes disagreement or ambiguity from subjectivity. Ordinary moral statements often omit the standards that determine their meaning. Such elliptical formulations require clarification, not dismissal. Kaufmann understands subjectivity as an absence of standards, whereas ambiguity can arise when applicable standards remain unspecified. His legal example makes the distinction concrete: whether adultery constitutes a crime depends on a particular penal code, but that dependence does not make “crime” a subjective term. It makes it relational. Similarly, scientific terms such as evidence, confirmation, and solution depend on procedural rules, even when scientists leave those rules unstated.

They are used equivocally and are in need of being strictly defined, but this does not mean that moral terms and moral judgments are subjective and are therefore devoid of scientific status.

Here Kaufmann is discussing “good,” “bad,” “just,” and “unjust.” His point is methodological symmetry: ethical terms should receive the same demand for precision as scientific terms, rather than face exclusion because their standards are contested. Objectivity is thus compatible with dependence on an explicitly identified system; it is not equivalent to universal agreement about that system.

This analysis grounds Kaufmann’s criticism of Weber’s contention that science cannot answer fundamental ethical questions, including how far an end justifies indispensable means. For Kaufmann, such questions are incomplete until a standard of justification is supplied. Once specified, they become answerable within that framework. The objection that people may never agree on the framework concerns the selection of standards, not the intelligibility or answerability of judgments made under them. Ethical neutrality consequently becomes a demand for unambiguous language, applicable to every scientific term.

The concluding discussion asks how much agreement clarification itself can produce. Kaufmann rejects the inference from failure to establish a unique hierarchy of values to radical relativism. He argues that substantial agreement exists concerning promise-keeping, human dignity, helping others, and self-perfection. Violations do not necessarily disprove this agreement: attempts to justify departures can reveal implicit acknowledgment of the violated standard.

In other words, they agree upon what is good or evil, but they disagree upon what is the higher good or what is the lesser evil.

Kant’s dispute with Benjamin Constant over lying to save a threatened friend illustrates conflict over rank rather than complete opposition of values. Kaufmann extends this interpretation to freedom and social order, and to tradition and progress. Political antagonists may share commitments while ordering them differently. Political science should therefore reconstruct their underlying ethical systems and identify the actual extent of disagreement, correcting the distortions produced by partisan claims to absolute rightness.

The article’s relevance lies in this conjunction of logical clarification and political interpretation. Kaufmann neither supplies a final moral hierarchy nor equates objectivity with value-free inquiry. He argues that moral judgments deserve scientific consideration when their standards are explicit, while preserving the distinction between reasoning within a system and choosing that system. Ethical neutrality becomes a discipline of clarification rather than a prohibition on ethical reasoning.