| Abstract: | Conclusion The thesis of value neutrality is logically untenable and anthropologically naive. It is logically untenable because it does not attend to contextual (i.e. historical, sociological and political) meaning. It is anthropologically naive because it does not take into account that values are culturally mediated and historically situated, i.e. it assumes that values are the result of arbitrary choices. And, one must add, it is morally objectionable because it eliminates the notion of responsibility, though it pretends to defend it.Rather than attacking the thesis of value neutrality by following the more usual procedure of unmasking specific substantive theories, I have dismantled the logic of value neutrality itself by concentrating on the insurmountable formal contradictions of the fact-value dichotomy. In neglecting social, economic and cultural constraints, while stressing the freedom of the individual, the thesis of value neutrality emerges as liberal ideology. Whatever the liberating effect of decisionism may have been, it has de facto become the ideology of a scientific establishment which was conditioned to sell its services to the highest bidder. Decisionism has promoted a division of labor between those who determine the ends and those who supply the  technical means without being concerned about their application . Thus it supports the status quo, and becomes a means of repression and exploitation .Decisionism is an inherent aspect of positivism . The subjectivity of ethics is the counterpart of the objectivity of science. Both are the result of a subjective idealism which takes the individual subject as point of departure. It is the individual subject who constructs his world on the basis of sensory impressions and his reason and who chooses his values. This implies not only the autonomy of ethics vis-à-vis science, but also an autonomy of facts vis-à-vis theory, and an autonomy of both science and ethics vis-à-vis history. This epistemological position is, therefore, elementaristic, individualistic and ahistorical.A radical alternative has to take as point of departure that cognition in its diverse manifestations (scientific and epistemological paradigms, logic, etc.) and value systems are interrelated historical products. It has to reject the compartmentalization of fact and value, fact and theory , subject and object, and it must place these relations in a truly dialectical perspective. Such a perspective does not provide us with unshakable moral and political precepts, but — since it does not take what is historically given for the eternally valid nor confound history with mere arbitrariness — it does point to the possibility and necessity of transformation and emancipation, i.e., the historically ly possible.Cornelis J.J. Vermeulen is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam.
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