Avoiding the Nazi Problem Kathryn Pogin In his article “Is Longino’s Conception of Objectivity Feminist?” Daniel Hicks has laid out an interesting and persuasive argument claiming that Helen Longino’s account of scientific objectivity may be subject to what he terms the “Nazi problem.” The charge is that Longino’s view requires the active cultivation of Nazi viewpoints for objective scientific inquiry, and so cannot properly be termed “feminist.” Hicks further argues that a potential solution, the good faith argument, is equally problematic in that, as long as the good faith argument excludes Nazi viewpoints from our scientific community, it will also exclude feminist standpoint theorists and feminist communitarians as well. In what follows, I lay out a brief overview of the importantly relevant aspects of Longino’s account of objectivity, Hicks’s argument against it, and a response. I argue both that Hick’s proposed solution would not fail as he purports, and moreover, that it was not needed in the first place. Even a broadly inclusive and pluralistic social epistemology, such as Longino’s, provides room for legitimate distinctions to be made regarding what epistemic value—or disvalue—different kinds of diversity generate within an epistemic community. Longino’s Account of Objectivity To understand Longino’s account of objectivity in science, it is essential to realize that her theory incorporates a version of social epistemology. Longino argues that, “An adequate normative theory of knowledge must then be a normative theory of social knowledge, a theory whose norms 1