Glossary Home

Objectivity:

A method of evaluating knowledge based on whether it conforms to reality or not.

While logic aims at making sure your ideas are consistent with one another, objectivity seeks to keep your knowledge connected to reality. It keeps you focused on checking whether your facts are really true. This is embodied in the scientific approach that demands experimentation and observation to validate a theory. By these methods, a theory is tested and evaluated based on whether it accurately reflects reality.

Objective evaluation is another form of objectivity. It seeks to make judgments based entirely on facts. By picking the right kind of standard of judgment, one's evaluation can be made based on facts alone, with a clear way of judging those facts. In that way, anyone could look to reality to make the judgments, and come to the same conclusions. For instance, if one wanted to know which of several houses was the most expensive to purchase, it's just a matter of finding the relevant information and analyzing it in a very well-defined manner. Anyone with access to that information could make the same judgment.

Objective morality is a kind of objective evaluation. It involves using a standard of value which is used to measure the benefits and costs of every possible value. When that standard is well-defined, the evaluations are no longer based on subjective preferences, but instead are based on facts alone. In Objectivism, life is the standard of value, and values are measured by how much they benefit or hurt that life.

Objectivity is often misunderstood as being unbiased. This comes from a view that our mind is clouded by our emotions, and we would be able to think clearly if we could overcome them. Emotional neutrality, and lack of bias, are viewed as being objective. In fact, even a lack of bias can result in non-objectivity if reality is not explicitly contrasted with. Also, while emotions may create incentives for us to leap to a conclusion or avoid an answer we don't want to know, that difficulty does not actually prevent objectivity. By keeping our focus on reality, we can overcome these difficulties and make sure we are in fact objective.