Science, including moral science, is thus scientifically obligated to place itself beyond good and evil in its quest for objective knowledge, and concern itself with facts in the determination of truth.119 Science should neither seek to decide what is good or evil, nor be governed by such ideas of good or evil. Any inclusion of moral ideas in the determination of truth will confuse issues of logic, reality and factual truth with moral issues - which is a practice that is detrimental to any cognitive pursuit as well as being detrimental to the tenability of both the scientific and the moral discourse. In fact, the scientific and moral discourses generally tend to contradict the results of one another. If moral science is to be ascience at all, it must restrict itself to investigating factual valuations. Moral science should thus refrain from prescribing “objectively binding” valuations and also refrain from deciding values with a universal applicability and reach without reference to those factual circumstances that apodictically could support aclaim of this type:“moral science may not be a teaching in morals, but only a teaching about morality.”120 With regard to the relationship between facts and values,Hägerström argues that values and evaluations neither can constitute scientific arguments (proving facts or describing reality), nor have their intrinsic validity and truth value demonstrated in an objectively conclusive manner. Provided that this is the case, then values, because of their inability to provide a proper description of facts and reality, lack value as elements in scientific argumentation. There are two reasons that can explain the sway that values and evaluations have held over scientific reasoning.The first is that such arguments tend to influence the scientific analysis in a ca l l f o r s c i e n t i f i c p u r i t y 281 119 See also Hägerström, “I moralpsykologiska frågor II,” p. 90.Where Hägerström asserts that any scientific investigation into moral and morality striving to describe facts, rather than to determine formalitites must use facts as its sole foundation. As it is the objective of empirical sciences to extract an inductive basis to its general principles about facts. 120 Hägerström,“Moraliska föreställningar,” p. 50;“Moral Propositions,” p. 96. Swedish: “Den hävdar endast, att moralvetenskapen icke kan vara en lära i moral, utan blott en lära om moralen.”
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