Unfortunately, detached objectivity₂ is often rapidly expanded to value-free objectivity₂ […]. In value-free objectivity₂, all values (or all subjective or “biasing” influences) are banned from the reasoning process. This meaning of objectivity derives support from the idea that values are inherently subjective things, and thus their role in a process contaminates it, making it unobjective. In an effort to prevent this, philosophers and scientists have argued that we need to exclude values from science, particularly ethical and societal values. Note how much broader this prohibition is from prohibiting values from supplanting evidence. Values can play many roles in the reasoning process aside from displacing evidence, from focusing interests and questions to determining which errors are more tolerable. However, we remain under the grip of a post-positivist hangover that all (non-epistemic) values in the (internal stages of the) scientific reasoning process are bad. We fear that any role for values (which some positivists defined as inherently meaningless) in epistemic processes will “distort” knowledge. We train scientists to believe that values are not allowed in science and they must ward off any appearance of personal values or personal judgments playing a role in their doing of science. Thus, scientific papers have a very formulaic structure in which the role of the scientist as active decision-maker in the scientific process is deftly hidden.

Heather Douglas, “The Irreducible Complexity of Objectivity”