Facts Depend on Moral Values

1. The supposed separation: the positivist dream

The modern scientific worldview — especially in economics and finance — was built on the claim that we can describe the world as it is (“facts”) without invoking judgments about how it ought to be (“values”).
This is the positivist ideal: that observation can be purified of interpretation; that truth can be detached from meaning.

In finance, this is reflected in the way we model risk, price, or return as if they were objective properties of reality, untouched by moral or cultural assumptions.
But this ideal is an illusion. Even the choice of what to measure, or how to measure it, already presupposes values.

Measurement is not neutral; it is the moral architecture of a worldview.

2. Facts are produced within frameworks of meaning

To call something a fact is to have already decided that it counts as evidence, that it matters, and that it can be verified within a shared grammar of truth.
These decisions — what counts, what matters, what is seen — are themselves normative.
They depend on worldviews, institutions, and purposes.

For example:

• GDP counts deforestation as growth — because our definition of “growth” values production over preservation.
• Accounting treats unpaid care work as zero — because our moral frame excludes relational labour from “value creation.”
• A risk model treats climate disruption as a variable — not as a moral limit — because its purpose is to price uncertainty, not to prevent harm.

These are not factual necessities; they are ethical selections disguised as objectivity.

3. The entanglement of perception and purpose

Every act of perception is guided by intention.
In science, we observe what we expect to find. In finance, we calculate what we aim to control.
Our models and metrics are never mirrors of the world; they are extensions of our will — tools that reveal what we value enough to measure.

Fact is frozen value.

The moment we measure, we have already participated in a moral act: we have chosen which dimensions of life are visible, and which remain unseen.

4. The historical cost of separation

When modern thought expelled value from fact, it did so to gain predictive power — and it succeeded.
But the cost was moral blindness: the inability to see the living, sacred, or relational dimensions of what we study.
This split gave birth to an economy that knows how to price a forest, but not how to value its spirit; how to hedge a risk, but not how to honour a promise.

We built systems that can describe the world perfectly, and destroy it efficiently.

5. The planetary correction

The ecological crisis has collapsed the wall between “is” and “ought.”
We now see that how we describe the world determines how we treat it — and how we treat it determines whether it survives.
The fact–value distinction dissolves under planetary interdependence: the moment you measure a carbon footprint, you are already in a moral conversation about life, death, and continuity.

In the Anthropocene, every fact is a moral fact.

6. Toward an integrated epistemology

The future of knowledge — and finance — lies in reconciling fact and value.
We need truths that are not only accurate but accountable, models that are not only predictive but participatory.
This means restoring the human capacity to know with both reason and reverence — to see data as a dimension of care.

Facts tell us how the world works; values tell us why it matters.
Wisdom begins when they speak again.