The boundaries of the thinkable

[watertank]

Our starting point is Tetlock's sacred value protection model (SVPM), which takes as its starting point an undeniable fact of political life: the tendency of like-minded souls to coalesce into communities of cobelievers dedicated to defending and advancing shared values. The SVPM posits that cobelievers seek reassurance from each other that their be liefs are not mere social conventions but rather are anchored in backstop or sacred values beyond challenge. These values can be as diverse as the causes around which human beings cluster: in pro-life communities, it would be bizarre to challenge the sacred mission of saving the unborn; in libertarian communities, it would be bizarre to challenge the sacred status of property rights ; and in scientific communities or groups relying on scientific expertise, it would be bizarre to challenge the notion that assertions about nature can be tested objectively (within a range of uncertainty) and deep truths revealed. Those foolish enough to ask why sacred values are so special - what is wrong with stem cell research or faking data or redistributive taxation? - reveal themselves to be dim-witted or ill-intentioned outsiders who just don't get it.

The model predicts that when there is no pressure to confront secularsacred trade-offs, people and political movements will adopt the low-mental effort solution of accepting their own side's no-trade-off rhetoric at face value. Such low-effort options are easiest to deploy in the political sphere when one's movement is in an oppositional role (as environmentalists mostly feel they have been during the Bush administration) and has no responsibility for making policy. However, trade-off denial is not an option when one is compelled to develop and advance politically viable solutions, not just denounce the solutions proposed by others.

The most resolute antiutilitarian defender of the taboo would be a respondent who refuses to participate on the ground that the questioning process is morally corrosive (to compare is to destroy) : a process akin to asking how much money it would take to sell your children to slave traders. The next level down would be those who insist that there is no remotely plausible cost-benefit calculus that would change their minds. The next levels down now put us on a potentially slippery-slope continuum of affixing increasingly plausible numerical values to questions that open the door - to varying degrees under varying contingencies - to compromise.

Philip E Tetlock, Michael Oppenheimer. (2008). The boundaries of the thinkable. Daedalus, 137(2), 59-70.