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Machan's Musings-Revisiting Objectivity likes and dislikes and guard against their influence and also check for influences coming from outside, such as flattery on the psychological front, or obstruction of visibility on the perceptual. To avoid bias one needs discipline and self-understanding. If I know that I am partial to those who are tall, blonde or athletic, while working as a teacher, juror or judge, I need to make doubly sure that what I think of their performance, the merit of their work or their legal status isn't based on my liking (or disliking) them for irrelevant reasons. One can generalize this and figure out if prejudice is unavoidable or whether discipline can overcome it. Some argue there is no way to overcome prejudice, bias or the determination of one's culture or community when one thinks about anything. Indeed, they claim, everything we think is unavoidably influenced by such factors. Some even go so far as to claim that the very fact of having a human mind guarantees that the world won't be understood as it really is, but only as it appears to us. This and related positions are, however, troublesome to uphold consistently because they also indict the person who advances it. It makes it appear that one need not take the skeptical positions seriously since they, too, are just prejudices and thus quite unreliable. Actually, human beings are well able, but rarely fully willing, to rid themselves of prejudices. We can turn our minds to consider things carefully, consider how others would see matters, and even as human beings as such, free of prejudice or bias, never mind specific background. A human being's mind need not be prejudiced or biased at all since it is just the sort of organ that can gain understanding without shaping the world at the same time. It is akin to when one grabs a cup, hammer or baseball—just doing that need not have any influence on what is being grabbed. (On the other hand, if what one uses to grab something has on it paint or glue or some other stuff that can easily be transferred, the situation is different. Similarly, if one has many prejudices, biases, preconceptions one hasn't purged, one's judgments will reflect this and will be unreliable. But that isn't necessary by any means.) Scientists, engineers, jurors, judges at athletic events or beauty pageants as well as philosophers do manage to understand the world, or at least parts of it, all the time, more or less successfully. Yet even to say that assumes that now and then success can be had, otherwise how would we even know that sometimes we fail? What would our failed efforts compare to? Consider, in this connection, jury selection, where one gets the impression that to have an opinion at all disqualifies someone on grounds of bias! Now, it may well be that many people haven't worked hard enough to keep their biases at bay when it really matters. This may be what attorneys worry about. The general impression created by the process, however, is that we are entirely unable to set our biases aside. For various reasons many people, often even the majority, fail to keep in check their biases, or refuse to do so or are prevented from doing so by bullies or adverse circumstances. This happens with some juries, so that jury experts are sometimes able to "predict" how jurors will vote in the end, suggesting clearly that the facts will not matter to such folks. But this still doesn't show that objectivity is impossible, only that it takes hard work not all are willing or able to exert. But really the major problem with denying that people can be objective is that such a denial implies that it, too, is non-objective, biased, prejudiced. And then what good does it do us? Back during the 2000 election debacle I listened a bit to Bill O’Reilly of Fox TV. I wanted to know how he sees matters but all I got is the remark—he seemed to treat it as a confession of sorts—that no one can be objective about what transpired there, not even journalists. I immediately switched from Fox to some other news station because, well, if O’Reilly thinks he cannot be objective in his reporting, he probably isn’t going to try to be objective. In that case, however, what’s the point of listening to him? Objectivity is not automatic. It must be achieved. But it can be, with the appropriate effort.
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