Not in practice. There are many kinds of truths, or alleged-truths, and the scientific is only one kind of truth; the claim that scientific truths have greater authority in the formation of policy than moral or religious truths is an ideological position, grounded in certain assumptions about how the state is supposed to work. And that's what Zelig is claiming, that certain kinds of "truths" (economic, empirical) are preferable to other kinds of "truths" (moral, ethical) and should take primacy in policy debate.
It may be that somebody advocating this position is correct; they're certainly more correct than somebody said "God says to do X". But they have not transcended ideology, they've merely occupied a certain ideological position.
I mean, I think Zelig is right, that debates around the minimum wage should be better-grounded in empirical evidence, I'm just cautioning that we shouldn't mistake that for an escape from ideology, shouldn't allow ourselves to become un-self-critical simply because we've lined up a lot of numbers behind our argument.
Well, obviously I disagree, simply because the kinds of moral "truths" that we are likely to have debates about are necessarily the ones that we have less certainty about. If everybody agreed on the truth or falsehood of a moral statement, then the debate wouldn't depend on them. So we must only ever have debates about statements that we as a society aren't sure about. We don't know whether X is true or not, so we have policy debates about the law regarding X.
Therefore, scientific or empirical truths are a priori more authoritative in such debates, because we can be certain of them.
But putting that to one side for a minute, I don't agree that Zelig is claiming that certain types of truths are better than other types of truths. I think Zelig is demanding a better process for policy-making, one that is based on things that are actually true. The way we know things are true is via some intellectually rigorous method of analysis. Therefore, Zelig is demanding that we apply an intellectually rigorous method of analysis to statements before using those statements to inform policy. What you're trying to tell me is that demanding that truths are established via an intellectually rigorous method of analysis is inherently ideological. That demanding such a thing is no less ideological than demanding that truths are established via reference to the Bible or Quran.
Well, fine, if you want to call this demand "ideological", then you can, but I think there is a world of difference between demanding fact-based policy and demanding Bible-based policy. I simply can't get behind such a definition of "ideological".
And I think this brings me to my problem with your line of reasoning. You're talking about ideology in a way that makes it easy for people to agree with you, and you've phrased it in an rhetorically compelling way. But actually, you're using the word ideology in a way that most people wouldn't agree with, if put under a microscope. I think you can see that in FP's response. He's agreeing with Zelig that you need to base policies on empirical facts, but that, afterwards, you need an ideology to sort through them. Fine, I agree - I pretty much said the same in the post he's responding to.
But you're saying something different. You're saying that
the demand for fact based policy is inherently ideological, because it only includes science-facts or economic-facts, and not bible-facts or nationalist-facts. I doubt that many people would actually agree with that, because I think most people would agree that (a) empirical facts are ideologically neutral, and (b) demanding empirical facts as the basis of policy-making is pretty darn non-partisan, to the point where it's probably the exact opposite of "ideological".
I think we were effectively two steps higher than the 15 dollar an hour step years ago.
