From: Robin Hanson (rhanson@gmu.edu)
Date: Tue Sep 05 2000 - 14:54:03 MDT
I asked:
>Under standard accounts, decisions are made by combining positions
>on values and beliefs about facts. ... So which is it, do our
>disagreements with opponents tend to be more about values, or more
>about facts?
Many people here don't seem to accept the standard account of decisions.
John Clark is the only one who gave a straight answer: "Values I think."
QueeneMUSE replied "Obviously it's both," and Eugene Leitl said "it can
only be decided from case to case." So I guess they reject the idea that
a set of cases can "tend" more in one direction than the other.
T.0. Morrow wrote:
>I doubt that the fact/value distinction holds up under close scrutiny. What
>seem like values almost always represent positions held only contingent on
>certain factual assumptions. Take, for example, valuing "the environment."
>Though proponents of environmentalism often present it as a per se good, they
>in truth accept certain claims--industrialism increases human suffering,
>ecosystems exist in balanced harmony absent human intervention, population
>growth increases pollution, and so forth--that may or may not be facts. Only
>at a very fundamental, arational level--seek social status, maximize
>pleasure/pain ratios, reproduce, and so forth--do values not rely on beliefs
>about facts. And at that level, almost everyone agrees.
T. appears at first to reject the fact/value distinction, but as far as I can
tell then embraces it as holding at a fundamental level. And I agree that
decision making often uses multiple levels of beliefs, where beliefs at each
level are built on beliefs from the level below, and that beliefs above the
base level are often mixtures of facts and values. If every disagreement at
a higher level can be traced to disagreements about lower level beliefs,
however, then it seems we can still talk about how much a disagreement is
due to facts versus values. In principle, we just trace disagreements back
to the fundamental level belief disagreements they are due to, and see how
much of those are values versus facts. And given T.'s last statement, it
seems that T. thinks most disagreements are about facts, presumably including
our disagreements with opponents.
Robin Hanson rhanson@gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu
Asst. Prof. Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444
703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323
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