Agnes:

Hi Robin.

Robin:

Hi Agnes!

Agnes:

So you know, we just talked about the criminal justice system. So I thought we’d change topics to which are the prettiest colors? Somebody who—

Robin:

Similarly important topic!

Agnes:

Yeah, exactly! So I’m gonna give you my argument telling you which are the prettiest colors and then you can respond to it. So the first premise of my argument is that the specialists in any domain are going to be the best at distinguishing what is making the relevant distinctions in that domain, right? So you know, those who specialize in x, and especially like, value x, and spend a lot of time engaging with x, are good at like telling what is x-ish for any x. That’s the first premise.
And the second part is that we do have a set of specialists in prettiness, which is little girls. So little girls, they like all the things that are pretty, like unicorns and princesses and fairies and like, dresses, flowers. Right? And then the third premise is that little girls tend to like pink and purple. And so therefore pink and purple, we should trust them—they’re kind of like the experts—that these are in fact the prettiest colors. That’s my argument.

Robin:

Okay, so I mean, the first thing that happens is you throw me and I say, Well, you know, why do I care what the prettiest colors are exactly? That is, I’m looking for a way to operationalize this question, to connect it to other questions I might care about so that I can try to figure out how to decide even what these words mean. Right?

Agnes:

Okay, so you don’t care which are the prettiest colors.

Robin:

I don’t immediately, but I might like want to think about it. But then so if I just sort of said, Well, you’re going to have an event, say, where people who like prettiness are there, and we want to know what colors to decorate that event in, well now I’ve got an anchor here. I have a certain set of people I’m trying to please. And… Or I thought maybe there was a feeling, like, of prettiness, right? Like, and so I wanted to evoke that feeling, right? Maybe somebody is down, and maybe somebody says pretty things will bring this person up. And now I have an anchor, okay—I want to bring this person up. So I want to put pretty things around this person. Right?
And so those would be like grounded versions of the question that I can relate to better, because now I can import a whole structure for each— each of the questions like brings in a structure that helps me answer the question, and helps me think about how to answer. Whereas when you say, What’s the prettiest color? I’m sort of at a loss because this word pretty has so many connotations.

Agnes:

So like one reason why I find that to be a strange response from you is that you talk about things like aliens that we’re not going to communicate with, and these brain emulations that maybe have a 10% chance of happening like a long time in the future and stuff, where in a lot of these cases there is nothing that we can do. There’s nothing to be done in relation to the question, but you’re just interested in the question of what will the future look like, maybe?

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

Like, what— It probably won’t look like this, but it could look like this—a tiny chance.

Robin:

So to my mind at least, the words are anchored, like, in a context which gives them the meaning that you could then use to answer the question. So I’d have a similar issue by like saying like, you know, is music or dance better conducive to love? And I might go, Well, which kind of love? Because there’s a lot of kinds of love and people use it in different ways. And I might, like, be looking for a way to give a more specific version of the concept that I can connect to these other concepts of say, music or dance.
Or literature, say. If you might say like, which is more conducive to love, music or literature? And so again I’d be trying to turn it into a more concrete question like, What should you use to serenade her: music or literature? If you’re trying to, you know, to impress somebody, that would be a different thing. Or which should we have more of a wedding? Maybe we say we have too much music and not enough literature at weddings, because literature would be better at promoting love at a wedding. I mean, again, then I can get my teeth around it more.

Agnes:

So I mean, see for me with that case it’s like conduciveness to love is a quite alien property to me. Like I’ve never thought about what it would be for something to be conducive to love. So I agree for you to be puzzled. You know, what does it mean? And maybe what it means is it’s an instrument for the bringing about of love, right? And then we want to know which kind is it going to bring about? Or maybe it’s supposed to keep love going or whatever, right?
So you’re right: That’s a weird property to ask about. But I feel like prettiness is not such a weird property to ask about. Like I feel like it’s one of the properties that is sort of immediately available and familiar to everyone. You use the word “pretty,” kind of everyone knows what you mean. So it doesn’t seem like I’m making such a strange or alien claim.

Robin:

So I mean, in most contexts where people talk about things being pretty they tend to make choices about what’s pretty, and they aren’t usually looking for other people’s advice about what’s pretty.

Agnes:

But you always care what other people think, right? That’s one of your views.

Robin:

Okay, well, so if we wanted to know, you know, if I wear this dress or that dress, which one will look prettiest, then we might depend on the context: So if you’re a grade-school teacher—

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

—or you’re going to a, you know, an expensive ball, that would evoke different sort of audiences who might judge prettiness. But then it would be less important which audience is the best judge of prettiness because we want to know what this audience will judge prettiness to be there.

Agnes:

But you might— for instance you might think, Look: Adults become sort of like, you know, jaded and conformist in their aesthetic tastes, especially with respect to, say, clothing, right? And they all start to look alike and they lose even an interest in looking like beautiful, right? And then so you might like, you know, look to a population that kind of took a native interest in prettiness, right?
And you know, someone might similarly, they go to a restaurant— like they go, they’re in a foreign country and they want to have the best version of some kind of food, right? And they might not be able to tell that it’s the best one, right? They don’t have defined palettes to discriminate, but they still care. Which is the— But they might ask for a recommendation, Where do I get the best version of this dish? And they want to have the best one, right?
And so similarly, you might want to actually have the prettiest, like, clothing or wall decorations or whatever. And maybe if you start doing that you’ll become more attuned to its prettiness and even learn to appreciate it more, as you might with the food, right? But people regularly take a kind of interest in having the version of something whose “bestness” is not immediately apparent to them, but they sort of trust the experts: wine, food, etc. And why not with prettiness too?

Robin:

In this context there’s the interesting phenomenon that supposedly these experts become worse over time…

Agnes:

Yes.

Robin:

…at this thing they’re they’re supposedly expert at.

Agnes:

Yes, that is interesting.

Robin:

And that’s more paradoxical about it, right? So if we were talking about 70-year-old versions of these people who after a lifetime had especially the judgment of prettiness, we’d be less puzzling here.

Agnes:

Yes.

Robin:

But here we’re sort of— So here we’re positing some degrading of their ability to discern, or their interest in discerning or something, that says something especially interesting about this concept. It says that people can’t seem to maintain an interest in it or maintain an ability to discern it, which then might speak to its usefulness: Like, well, who will want prettiness if these people who once wanted it, they don’t want it so much anymore? Who does want prettiness?

Agnes:

Right, so you know one thing that I might say to you under these circumstances is something I say to my undergraduate students in say, if I’m teaching The History of Philosophy I, okay—so this is Introduction to History of Philosophy—so we’re reading Plato and Aristotle, but for many people this is their first philosophy class. And often I’ll put an argument on the board, right? And I’ll say premise one, premise two, premise three, conclusion, and then I’ll turn to the class and I’ll say, Okay, responses.
And I’ll get a lot of different kinds of responses. Some of them will be like, I don’t even see why we’re arguing about this. I don’t know what the point of this is, if we were— which is a little bit how you responded, right? Then they also— Often they want to object to multiple premises at the same time. They want to object to all the premises, for example. And they’ll tell them, No, you’re not allowed to do that; yeah, there are rules for how we do this, right?
And those rules are, here’s one important rule: You’re not allowed to object to the conclusion. You have to tell that to the students. They’re like, I think the conclusion’s false. I’m like, No no no! You’ve got to show me, right? Because I did this thing, you can’t just object that the conclusion is false. That’s not, you can’t— That’s not in the space of responses, right? And you can’t object to more than one premise at a time. You can say that there’s a fallacy of equivocation or something like that. So you can say that the argument is invalid, the conclusion doesn’t follow, but that’s different from objecting.
Okay. So I’ve given you an argument with some premises. And now the thing that you were just saying was maybe—though you didn’t quite phrase it this way—an objection to one of the premises. We could phrase it that way. Namely, one of the premises of this argument was that little girls are the experts in pink and purple. And you might think, Well, I have an argument to the effect that they’re not, namely, there’s a way that expertise usually works.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

Okay. The way that it usually works, people don’t tend to like lose it or become less expert over time. And that indicates that little girls are not, in fact, the experts in prettiness. Right?

Robin:

Okay.

Agnes:

Okay. So that move is permissible within this game that we’re playing, but—except that—in addition to presenting that premise of little girls being specialists— I actually give you a mini argument for them being the specialists, right? And when you get an argument for a premise, then you’re— then the premise itself is kind of a conclusion, right? And then you’re not just allowed to object to the to the premise.
My little argument was, Well, think of who is the population that is sort of, you know, exclusively concerned with pretty things: That is, they’re only concerned with pretty things, that pretty things are the only things that they’re concerned with. And I listed some pretty things.

Robin:

So you’re postulating some sort of natural decay with limited attention. Like little girls are paying more attention to prettiness. And later on they get distracted with other things. And so their expertise of prettiness would naturally decline with their distractions.

Agnes:

Well, so now you’re— you’ve noticed something here, right? So you’ve noticed this is a weird kind of expertise. And now you want me to explain how this happens, and I’m happy to try to do that. But if I were teaching— if this were a class, I would teach and I would say, You’re going off on a tangent. Right?
We can try to like explore that question later, if you want this question of, How does this funny kind of expert come into being? And maybe we should—I think it is an interesting question. But that’s irrelevant to the argument that I just gave you. Maybe you just accept the argument. Right? Maybe you think I’m right? And then we can move on to that question.

Robin:

I think I sort of just misconceived the whole framing of the discussion, which maybe I’m learning. But like I wasn’t primarily concerned with evaluating whether you had made a valid argument.

Agnes:

Valid incentive, right? I— that is, I mean, yeah: The premises have to be true and the conclusion has to follow.

Robin:

I was more trying to find a way to sort of engage what you said and to connect it to things I think, and try to wonder like can I— can we talk productively about this topic? So I’m looking for a broader framework to share. And that’s the thing I was worried I don’t have…

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

…when you have this word pretty, that I’m not quite sure what it means.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

So I was going to make the comment that I think actually one of the most important intellectual skills—especially for people who like to think in abstractions, like you and do—is to choose the right level of abstraction at the right moment in a conversation or analysis. So I think the most powerful thinkers are really good at taking concrete examples and then jumping to abstractions, and then jumping back down to concrete examples, and back and forth. So that they sort of get the most out of their inference and then their reasoning.
And so, you know, there’s a common observation that’s a complaint by some sort of intellectuals, that they have just gotten so abstract that they don’t really know what their words mean, and they’ve lost any grounding, and they just like keep— they’ve got— They’ve agreed on some rules about how these words are used in their debates, and then they just go on, but they just, you know, the rest of us can’t figure out what they’re saying or why it would be valuable because they just won’t connect their abstract words to concrete things we understand.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

And so I think that does happen sometimes, and I’ve seen it happen sometimes. And so that’s why— So here, you know, I like talking with you abstractly. We talk about many abstract things. But here I was feeling like this is getting too abstract in the sense that, you know, this word prettiness: I don’t know what it means.

Agnes:

I believe this is our least abstract discussion that we had. So let me say, so first of all I think “pretty” is like not a very abstract concept. That is, many of the words we use are not— like “norm”, right? We use that — you and I use that word all the time. Most ordinary people don’t use that word so much. And I gave a list, right? Rainbows, unicorns, flowers, fairies, princesses, dresses, right? So it’s like a pretty concrete list of things that are pretty.

Robin:

Oh, those are things that girls like! But whether they are “pretty”…

Agnes:

Oh, so we can go back to the argument, right? And you can say, Look, your second premise, right, into— in effect contains an argument, and I don’t think those things are pretty, those are just things little girls think are pretty. That’s a fair response.

Robin:

They are pretty in some senses.

Agnes:

Okay.

Robin:

And the question is like, Which senses do we want to talk about here?

Agnes:

Okay. Maybe it would help me, like, what— give me another sense of pretty. Like what are some things that are— that you think of as pretty but that don’t fit this mold?

Robin:

So if I was trying to say what does “pretty” mean…

Agnes:

Mm-hm.

Robin:

…first I would— you know, it would be comfortable. So that like things that are threatening are not pretty.

Agnes:

Okay, comfortable.

Robin:

That would be an essence. It would also have to be like, attractive. Like it would draw you toward it. But that’s why I might add the “comfortable,” right? So hideous things might draw you toward them—

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

—you might, can’t look away from something hideous, but you wouldn’t call it pretty. So there’d have to be like an attraction without that matching repulsion.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

Right? And then it would have to sort of be foreground and background. Right? So you can be in a pleasant environment, but you won’t call it pretty unless you’re directed to pay attention directly to it. Otherwise it will just be a nice background. Right? But if— even in a park, you could walk along in the park and then not be looking at the park, just enjoying the experience. When you say the park it’s pretty, that immediately calls whoever you’re talking to to look at the park directly and like ask themselves, When I look directly at the park, does it seem pretty?

Agnes:

And so Imagine you’re in a park right now, okay? And it’s an extraordinarily pretty park, but you’re going to attend to some of the most pretty— some of the most paradigmatically pretty things in it, what would those things be?

Robin:

Well so these would be things that are attractive and not hideous, and that call your attention. So they would tend to be colors, for example…

Agnes:

Okay, colors, yeah? What else? I mean—

Robin:

There would be textures. There would be contrasts—

Agnes:

You mean textures can be pretty? Wouldn’t it be things?

Robin:

A mixture of— A nice mixture of textures. So the bark of the tree, the smooth of the leaf, the ripple of the water: The mixture of textures would be pretty.

Agnes:

The bark of a tree is pretty?

Robin:

In the context of the other textures, yes.

Agnes:

So I tend to think of pretty as applying first and foremost not to, like, not to textures but to things, right? And then—

Robin:

I would say a scene is pretty. So I wouldn’t necessarily— I could pick a butterfly or a flower as things in the— if I had to pick something that was pretty.

Agnes:

Okay, if you had to pick something you’d pick butterfly and flower: That’s exactly what little girls would pick. Those are the two things they would pick, butterflies and flowers. If you look at little girls’ dresses, they’re covered in butterflies and flowers. So still, for you, good little girls. At least as far as which things.

Robin:

Well, but you made me pick a thing. But I would first say the whole scene was pretty.

Agnes:

Okay.

Robin:

I would be less likely— I mean I might pick a particular flower and say, That’s an especially pretty flower.

Agnes:

Okay.

Robin:

And the flower would have a mixture of colors and textures.

Agnes:

Sure.

Robin:

And you know, shading and shape. And it would be pleasant, it wouldn’t be hideous, right? I would, you know, I could see a mixture of colors in a bird whose head had been torn off, but that won’t be pretty.

Agnes:

Right, right. Even though, I mean—

Robin:

It could striking—

Agnes:

It could be striking.

Robin:

… and it could be [extra resonating], and make me pay attention to it.

Agnes:

Why couldn’t it be pretty? I mean, that is, it wouldn’t be comfortable. But why wouldn’t it be comfortable? It’s not gonna attack you. The head’s been torn off.

Robin:

But still, it has— it brings out these associations that are uncomfortable.

Agnes:

Okay, good. So it has to have like no uncomfortable associations.

Robin:

Reduced.

Agnes:

Reduced uncomfortable associations, right, which makes sense with the rainbow, flower, unicorn, fairies… butterflies.

Robin:

But I mean, there is going to be an element of what I would call “spice.” So if you’re in a say, pleasant park-like environment over and over and day after day, you will become like used to it. And then something is pretty that will stand out relative to that, even if it isn’t like as fundamentally pretty, perhaps, just taken by itself and without comparing it to other things, right?

Agnes:

Right. So it has to grab your attention.

Robin:

Right. And so for— it has to be different, and that will compromise on some of these other things, right? And that’s in some sense, you know, I would think— If I’m thinking of like, What’s the main ways people could disagree about what counts is pretty? That would certainly be one of them. That is, I think most adults who would criticize a child’s choice of pretty would be complaining that it’s just too easy and obvious and standard, and a kind of pretty that they’ve gotten tired of. And they will want spice, they will want something that stands out as a bit different than pretty. Right?

Agnes:

And yet when asked for your paradigmatic examples of which things count as pretty, you gave the same— you didn’t give some new adult version.

Robin:

Right?

Agnes:

You didn’t say like lion, or something more, you know—

Robin:

Right. Because I haven’t actually walked in a park with a lot of colorful flowers lately, and it would be fresh and new for me at the moment.

Agnes:

Okay…

Robin:

But here I am in an office building.

Agnes:

Okay.

Robin:

And so, you know, if I had walked all my life in an office— in the park, and if I had been a forager or, you know, and walked all my life in the woods, and I finally came across this building I’m in right now and I’ve never seen a building like this, this would be pretty.

Agnes:

Do you— I mean, so you— It must be that sometimes in your life, you’ve encountered very novel forms of architecture that you hadn’t experienced.

Robin:

Right. Or a street full of them.

Agnes:

But like in most of those cases, when I think about my own cases, even ones that I really liked, they don’t strike me as pretty. That’s not the word that I would use.

Robin:

And you just may have a better sense in your mind of what the word pretty should go with—it’s not a word I use a lot. And so that’s part of what’s going on here is I just have to ask—

Agnes:

Right, and so maybe you’re not the group. But see, little girls use the word a lot.

Robin:

But so if I want to know what people who use the word a lot mean by it, then, you know, it follows if I just want to say, Well, what’s the most common usage of the word by the people who use the word most? Sure. But then…

Agnes:

But I mean, if you— If there’s, with respect to a given concept, say, there’s a group of people who use the word a lot, it plays an important role in their lives, they make a lot of decisions on the basis of it, etc.—like normally those criteria are sufficient for us to say these are the specialists. So what is it that the little girls are lacking?

Robin:

I think I and most people, and maybe even you, are just more careful and cautious when like values are at play.

Agnes:

Uh-huh.

Robin:

And “pretty” evokes status, so “pretty” is a value judgment. It’s seen as value judgment. And so when you’re saying something’s pretty, you are saying that it’s more valuable.

Agnes:

Okay.

Robin:

And you know, I have learned that people are more sensitive about value judgments, and they want you to be more careful with them. And so I try harder to sort of not make assumptions too easily about value judgments that might, for example, offend somebody, or make them feel unvalued. And so that’s why I would be especially careful with, you know, agreeing to a claim that includes a word that’s a value judgment, especially if I’m not so sure I know what the word means.

Agnes:

So you’re kind of just wary of this argument.

Robin:

I’m being defensive.

Agnes:

Okay.

Robin:

Yes, defensive about just the conclusion itself, right?

Agnes:

Okay, but this is interesting, right? If you think about it you might— You, in the beginning you were inclined to think this is kind of a trivial thing. Right? Unimportant. But actually you’re afraid of this argument and wary about it, right?

Robin:

Well it’s both, I mean that both that it’s—

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

Right, you can have an important topic but still not see like what you’re going to gain about talking about it.

Agnes:

Uh-huh.

Robin:

And so you both want the topic to sort of be a thing that matters in some absolute cosmic sense, and then you want there to be reason why you should talk about it now. What you’re going to do with it, what you could do with it. Right? So for example, you know, many people want to have an answer to “Is there a God?” And some of us want to know, What do you mean by a God? before we answer the question, right? Before we get into that. Because there are all these different concepts of God, and maybe our opinion about whether there’s a God depends on which kind of god you’re talking about.
And sometimes people, they don’t want to make a decision, they just want to have an opinion on whether there’s a God and it’s somehow important just to have that word. They want to have the word “I believe in God,” and then they’re often quite lawyerly about coming up with a definition of God that will allow them to say they believe in God. Even though I might think, Well that’s not what most people mean by God, but they wanted to believe in God.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

And so that makes me wary about these situations where people have these big words and they like seem to like focus on a pretty basic but value-laden claim about a pretty abstract term that I’m not sure what it means.

Agnes:

So I mean, let’s take, you know, if we take our previous conversation which was about the criminal justice system, I believe that I am never going to be in a position where I would be reforming the criminal justice system. And I don’t believe like, you know, what I think about it is really going to have much impact on anything else. I can be wrong about that, but that’s my advice. So do you think like, there it would make sense for me to have responded to you similarly, “I just— I don’t know why we’re talking about this topic.”

Robin:

And then I would have had a set of responses to that. Yeah, I mean that’s a completely valid point to bring up. And if I don’t give an adequate response to it then it’s a point at which it’s valid to stop thinking about the topic. Absolutely. But I think I would have reasonable responses there. But you know, I might not convince you.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

So I do think like in general we have this risk of becoming too abstract in our discussion. And it’s a risk because if you move to higher-level abstractions, like the sentences are shorter, the chains of inference are shorter. People can, you know, at least summarize you more quickly. It’s very tempting to just move to very high-level abstractions and to say, you know, God is good, good things exist, therefore God exists; you know, little games like that, right?
And, but if there’s a risk that like you’re just being really too sloppy at those abstractions and, you know, it doesn’t actually follow, then you want to push yourself to be a little more concrete. So you can like be sure you’re being careful. And so then the question is, How do you judge that?
And so I think one of the things we do is the concept of actionable, and I just think it’s a concept that academics don’t use quite as much as they should. You want to like look for a decision nearby that potentially you could make such that this would bear on that decision. And even if that’s not such an important decision, just the exercise of connecting what you say to a decision that would be actual makes things much more concrete in many ways that will be then— help to clarify what you’re talking about.

Agnes:

Yeah. So I think— I mean on the one hand I think this is very actionable for you in that like you could just decide to incorporate more pink and purple into your life, like you could decorate, your office could become purple, etc., because you want to be prettier. And maybe you would then think also you’ll become more attuned to this distinctive form of value. (We can talk about the value bit in a minute.)
And that seems actually easier to me to imagine that that will be a— This seems to be a very concrete question actually, very not-abstract, the argument that I gave. But I want to hear, how is the criminal justice question actionable for me, what can I do?

Robin:

Well, you know, most social reform, you know, doesn’t just happen by, you know, experts talking to experts and convincing experts to do things different. Living in a democracy, we typically need some recruiting of a wider circle, at least of elites, and even wider publics to support an idea or at least not oppose it.
And so quite commonly discussion of social reform considers like larger perceptions of things and tries to recruit conversations by other people to support, or at least not oppose, the reforms. So very few people make very technical, detailed reforms that are like only listened to by experts, right? So at least on something this big, clearly we would never make a change this big without a lot of ordinary people like thinking a bit about it and having a reaction.

Agnes:

So you’ve answered the question as to why it would be in your interest to talk to me about this topic: Namely, you’ve got to convince quite a lot of people to change their minds in order to possibly bring about your reform. But you haven’t answered the question, What’s in it for me? Given that I’m going into this thinking, This reform sounds kind of crazy…
Now, I’m happy to talk to you about it nonetheless, right? But I’m now wondering, suppose that I had adopted the framing of I’m only willing to talk to Robin about this if I can see some thing actionable here, right? I don’t know what would have shown up for me that way.

Robin:

Well for the purpose of clarifying concepts, it’s less important that it’s personally actionable than it’s actionable by somebody, somehow.

Agnes:

Uh huh.

Robin:

Right? So you know, maybe you don’t drive a car, right? But we could still talk about actions related to a car if we were thinking ambiguously about traffic, or thinking about the design of roads or something like that. And we were talking about like straightness of roads. Then I might, you know, ground that out into sort of how easy is it to follow the road as a driver? And then that might make it clear what I meant by the straightness of a road. And then the fact that you don’t personally drive cars wouldn’t be that big a criticism of using that example to clarify what we meant.

Agnes:

So I mean, the— I think the standard view about colors is that, you know—and I don’t know, because I don’t hear this topic discussed so much; people are not very willing to talk about colors, in fact—but the standard view might be there’s no such thing as a prettier or less pretty color, all the colors are equally pretty. That— I think that standard view is wrong. I think some colors are especially ugly—like sort of beigey, kind of vomity type colors? And then I think, you know, pink and purple are especially pretty, right? If my view came to be sort of dominant in the world like that there are— that there’s this, now, you know, spectrum of colors in terms of prettiness, right? Your thought is you can’t imagine any way that that would be actionable?

Robin:

I would turn around and say, If you gave that to me as the context for your question I would have a lot more to work with in thinking about what the answer to your question is. I would then know more what you meant by the words because you have given me that hypothetical as the framing of the question.

Agnes:

You mean the one where everyone comes around to the view that I have?

Robin:

Or even that it becomes accepted— widely accepted. That it is, you know, pretty colors or whatever.

Agnes:

Okay. I mean, so let’s go back to the question about you don’t like that it’s a value judgment, you don’t want to step on people’s toes. So you know, aesthetic value is a kind of value, right?

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

And there are like fine-grained words for aesthetic value. That is, we don’t only have like the phrase “aesthetic value,” right? We have, in different domains, words for, you know, I don’t know, if somebody’s playing the music was like very tight, or very expressive, or— right? And those are value terms, right, in that—

Robin:

They move in the direction of being more technical. That is, you know, if you have like, a piece of music has a little marking about whether to play it fast or slow, right? And you could say whether this piece of music was played fast or slow, right?

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

And in some sense that’s a non-value judgment. It can be used that way because you just mean to say it, like, it varies on context whether it should be played fast or slow. But in a context you might be complaining that it’s too slow, and it might be understood in that context that this sort of thing should be played fast, and that it therefore was a complaint to say that it was slow. But in that sense it wouldn’t be a value judgment, right?

Agnes:

Right. But there also— I don’t know if you ever heard it— So you know, I have a number of like music lovers and musicians in my family, that they will often speak of a particular performance, like maybe it wasn’t note-perfect, but it was very— had a lot of musicality,

Robin:

Okay.

Agnes:

I have no idea what they’re talking about, but I sort of trust them to there is this thing, musicality, it’s a distinctive form of value. They are kind of the experts in this domain because they talk about music all the time, they listen to it, it’s like a big important part of their lives. And so in effect I sort of credit them with these value terms that are terms of aesthetic value. So it’s not just a question of how fast or how slow, but distinctive aesthetic forms of value. And so that’s what I’m claiming there is for pretty.

Robin:

And if they want me to endorse a claim about musicality with this particular piece of music, then I would feel more of a problem if I didn’t know what they meant by musicality. So that’s— If I can see different communities and people using that term differently—or at least apparently using it differently, maybe there’s a unified concept behind it that I don’t see—but if they want me to endorse or not a claim about musicality, that seems like they’re trying to like recruit me in their value dispute.

Agnes:

But suppose that— So I hadn’t put forward any kind of just— I mean now I sort of did, slightly about the— Mostly I think it’s people don’t think about this, not that there’s some big dispute. But with the musicality, you know, suppose you had a bunch of musical people in your family, right? And those musical people are all like, Oh, you know, Glenn Gould plays with such musicality, right? Whatever that means.
Like now if another group comes along with— where they equally tend to use the word “musicality” all the time and they’re just very into music, and they’re like, No, he has no musicality—then you might be confused, right? But suppose that no such competition has come along yet, right? All the people you’ve ever encountered for whom this is a big deal all say, like about certain people and certain performances, there’s like a lot of consensus, right? Like there is about Glenn Gould, right? And that I’m at least inclined to be like, Okay, I guess, you know? I mean, like…

Robin:

There’s probably another thing going on here that I should just acknowledge which might seem silly, but I think it’s important: Like when somebody, say, starts a podcast, and they say, This is my claim—

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

I think you’re just more generally wondering all the different ways that claimed inference could go wrong, right?

Agnes:

Mm.

Robin:

Whereas if you had sort of asked for my assent indirectly, in the context of some other conversation, I might easily have granted it. But if you hang it out as the central claim, you know, and a lot of focus is going onto it, I mean, they’ll go, Well, like what’s the trick in this one? Why is this anything other than what it seems? Because if it was just what it seems you might think, Well, then it wouldn’t be this central and it wouldn’t be getting highlighted attention.

Agnes:

I see. So like, I mean… But then it’s not, it’s— This claim is not extraordinary. It’s just in every podcast that you’re on, if somebody makes a claim…

Robin:

What if somebody makes a claim and you’re not sure what they mean by it?

Agnes:

Okay.

Robin:

And then they wonder whether you agree. Then, you know, if it’s going to be the central point of the discussion and you’re not sure what they mean, then it seems appropriate to like first dig into what they might mean by it before you decide whether you agree or not.

Agnes:

I’m just skeptical about your claim that you don’t know what I mean here. That is it seems to me you’re quite a competent user of the word “pretty.” And when asked to identify pretty things, you identified some of the same things that I did. And your list of traits, right? Where it’s supposed to be sort of comfortable and attractive—

Robin:

So then you and I agree on that, and then realized that we don’t disagree on what’s pretty. But like, I can’t be confident of that until we go through that exercise.

Agnes:

Okay, but so now that we’ve gone through that exercise, are there any of the— Let me repeat the argument so you can remember what the premises were, so you can tell me if you disagree with any of the premises. Okay? So the first premise is that specialists in any domain, like in a domain x, are best at discerning what is x-ish? And maybe let me—

Robin:

You don’t mean to say “tends to”? You mean to say “are best”?

Agnes:

Tend to be best. I’m fine with tends. Tends to be best at discerning what is x-ish, right? Other things equal.

Robin:

Okay.

Agnes:

And maybe there are special cases that we can go into, right? And let me add something to that premise. (That’s our first premise.) Like you know, this is also true of domains of aesthetic value, okay? So x can be a domain of aesthetic value. And then the second claim is that little girls are specialists in prettiness, for which I had a sub-argument that they’re into all and only pretty things. And then the third premise is that little girls prefer pink and purple to other colors and see them as prettier. And so then I have my conclusion that pink and purple are the prettiest colors.
Okay. So now that you feel we have a shared sense of what these words mean, do you object to any of the premises, or do you think that the conclusion fails to follow from the premises? That’s the other move available to you.

Robin:

So because, you know, first of all I don’t actually know that little girls like pink and purple more than other people, but will just take that for a given…

Agnes:

And I admit that that’s just my own— going from my own sort of like personal experience, and it may have changed culturally since.

Robin:

It could easily be answered by just walking into a clothing store targeted at these little girls and looking at the colors of the clothes.

Agnes:

Yes.

Robin:

And the girls have the freedom to choose the clothes, and the marketers are trying to target them, then if I see a lot of pink and purple then I would say, Okay, looks like little girls like pink and purple.

Agnes:

Yes.

Robin:

I could be easily convinced in that way.

Agnes:

Yes. And it’s not all, like, it’s just by and large, right? So yeah.

Robin:

I could even— We can even go to a website now, like, and look at a website for little girls and say, you know, type in “little girl dresses,” and see the colors of the pictures that come up, right?

Agnes:

Okay. Yes, that’s true. Right. But so, like for, you know, and— Our listeners at home can do that while they’re listening to us, and tell us whether we’re right or not—whether I’m right about that. But so, right, so that’s a potential objection to the third premise, right? That little girls prefer pink and purple to other colors.

Robin:

I think that the hardest one is the idea that they specialize in pretty. Like—

Agnes:

Okay.

Robin:

Like, we might say they like the word “pretty.”

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

Right? But we might think that girls using the word “pretty” among themselves would be a different usage, say, than adults might have with the word “pretty” among themselves. We might not be sure it’s the same word, the same usage of the word.

Agnes:

Right. I mean, I think it’s not just that they, like, they use the word. They would also, for instance if they’re drawing pictures, they would tend to draw pictures of pretty things. Right? They would tend to— When I was maybe—

Robin:

Well, they will draw pictures of things they like, and they might use the word “pretty” for that. And do we mean the word “pretty” by that?

Agnes:

I mean they’re going to be pictures of flowers and butterflies. Those were your examples of pretty things. So I think that they’re what you mean by pretty.

Robin:

I mean, they are pretty to some— I mean, but again, so I imagine like in the background is somebody who disagrees with this claim, right?

Agnes:

It’s you, apparently!

Robin:

Well, I’m just perhaps reluctant to endorse it. I don’t necessarily disagree.

Agnes:

Okay.

Robin:

And I haven’t like disagreed with the claim, I’m just like, if you ask for my endorsement of the claim, and then I pause and I go like, What’s at stake here? And like… So, it—

Agnes:

I’m not actually asking for your endorsement. Actually, it’s not how we do philosophy. I’m actually asking for you to argue against it. I want you to argue against it. That’s what I seek. If you just endorse it that would be boring.

Robin:

So I mean, I think I made this point before, but I mean I guess I want to be clear, like, that in my world of experience making value claims is more controversial, and gets you into more trouble and more people are turned off, or put off, by trying to make value claims in arguments. And so I’m in the habit of, when possible, like turning a discussion into a discussion about something else if I can reach the same end in those other terms.
So we economists even have the standard practice of taking values as given by this; we assume that people value what they value, we’re not going to argue with them about their values, but we’re going to try to show them how to get more of their values through various institutional-decision choices. Right? And so that’s a concrete example of how we are wary.
And I think that’s also true: Like if you go to a restaurant, the waiter might try to advise you to— some of the dishes are good, right? And you know, if they say the broccoli fettuccine is especially good tonight, and you say, But I don’t like broccoli, they don’t then try to argue you out of the broccoli, right? They tend to think like they should find what you like, and then with respect to that give you an argument about why a particular dish would be the good dish for you, given your values. Even waiters and restaurants are reluctant to sort of try to directly change your values through argument, right?
There’s an example, I think, much more widely of advisors of all sorts tend to be wary of trying to tell you should change your values, and more— I mean, even at a dress store or something. Right? If they say, This looks like a really pretty dress, what do you think? And you say, you know, I don’t like pink and purple, they’re not going to bring the argument up and try to convince the person to like pink and purple. They’re going to find whatever colors they do think they like and try to give them things like that.

Agnes:

I mean I probably have more experience with people advising, re: dresses in dress stores, than you. So I can tell you that they do give you advice, and they will contravene you by saying like for instance that something that you think doesn’t look good on you, they might be like, It looks good on you.
Now some of these people are not trustworthy and they’ll just tell you that everything looks good on you. But a lot of these people know that if they do that, you’re suspicious. And so they might actually, like, you know—

Robin:

Randomly tell you a few things are bad…

Agnes:

Or honestly tell you! The good ones will be honest. Right? But they— and they’ll try to convince you. They’ll be like, Look, you think this looks good on you, but it doesn’t. You think it doesn’t look good on you, but it does. And they might get, you know, revert to features of it.
Similarly, with the broccoli, the guy might be like, Well, you know, you may have tried only ever steamed or boiled broccoli, but have you ever had oven-roasted broccoli rabe, or something? You know, it’s really quite special. It’s different than what you expect. I mean, I think people argue in these contexts all the time.

Robin:

But I still think it’s held to a higher standard. So I still think you need to be a more trusted advisor, and a higher-status advisor, in order to be able to make the value-advising move. And so the more that you are suspect as an advisor, or are not trusted, not high-status, then the more you will try to advise in terms of…
So for example if you have an auto repair person, you might trust them for the purpose of getting your car repaired. But if they want to suggest a new color fender or a new artistic feature to the car, you might say to yourself, you’re an auto repair person, not a car decorator, and I’m not going to listen to you about decoration advice. Because you have classified them as somebody who does not have good, you know, advice or knowledge about this artistic thing they’re trying to recommend about the car.

Agnes:

Right. But like, if they did have that, you know, then— So I mean, is it basically like economists have kind of relegated themselves to being low-status and not trusted? And so they’re only going to advise in these domains that are, you know, kind of appropriate for their station or something? But maybe philosophers are like higher up, they’re either higher status or more trusted or both, and so we feel comfortable arguing about values?

Robin:

In fact most people don’t really trust philosophers that much about values either.

Agnes:

Then why do we feel so comfortable? Like—

Robin:

Because it’s, you picked your thing, right?

Agnes:

Uh huh.

Robin:

So you know, all of these things are basically a coordination game of a profession or an area trying to sort of create a habit of what they do, and a brand about what they do, so that they can present that brand to the world and like sort of reliably meet the brand promise. And you know, find people continuing to want to come back to them. So certainly the economics brand is not about advising on values.
The philosophy brand is more about advising on values, but in some sense that’s part of why, like, philosophers aren’t in, you know, presidential board meetings so often, right? It is in fact the economists’ reputation for being, you know— A neutral advisor will help you achieve your values, that gives the economists more entree into, you know, corporate board meetings, into policy-wonk discussions, into, you know, Congressional advisories. That’s part of what it does.

Agnes:

You can have more influence if you’ve relegated yourself to allowing yourself to be used to someone else’s ends. Like you’re— In effect you make your mind into a tool that someone else can in effect better achieve their goals using. Is that—

Robin:

Well, I mean all advisors are trying to help the advisee, right? So for all advisors you need to create the impression in the advisee that the advisee will be helped, right? So that that’s just generically true for advisors—if the advisee does not believe that you will be helpful then you have lost, you know, their trust or interest in you as an advisor. So that doesn’t necessarily make you, you know, only a slave to their interest. But it means you had to convince them that you would further their interest sufficiently in order for them to select you as an advisor.

Agnes:

Right. But there’s— One question is like, Why would you want to advise them? Like why would you want to advise the president? Why would you want to advise— whatever. And one reason is it might be that like you share some of their goals, right, and you want those goals to be achieved. Maybe you don’t share all their goals, right, only some.
Now, if you only share some of their goals, I guess you have to sort of trick them into thinking that you share more— Like because you might be pushing, in effect, your agenda, right? Or you might just really like advising people. Like you just might want to be influential, that might be good enough for you. And so you’re willing to advise them how to achieve their goals, so long as you can be sort of useful to them. That’s good enough for you, right?

Robin:

Well, if I imagine myself as different kinds of advisors and economists, then I might think up different answers to the question. But I’m used to being an economist. So I’m used to the answer that I give as an economist, which may not generalize very well to other kinds of roles.

Agnes:

Okay.

Robin:

But we economists have this framing where we like describe different people as having preferences and things they want, and then we think about institutions that would help all of them get more of what they want. And that we try to present ourselves as people who just follow that system consistently, just— There’s a general system of giving people generically what they want, whatever it is they want. And our system doesn’t very much depend on what particular thing they want. It’s just a general way to give them more of whatever it is they want.
And that— Working at that level of abstraction we can, you know, basically promise people that we will in general find potential deals for you to make that will give all of the people involved in this deal more of whatever it is they want, and that our strategies are not very tuned toward what we want, or in particular things you might want—they’re more generically to give you all whatever it is you want.

Agnes:

Why do you want to give other people whatever it is they want, irrespective of what they want?

Robin:

So I mean, that’s a sort of way in which we, in common with many philosophers even, frame our prosociality. We think that yes, in general, if I help you get what you want, and you help me get what I want, then we together get more of what we want, and then we are all better off, and I approve of that. That is, I approve of people making deals together to get more of what they want, because then they all get whatever, and then it just looks good for everybody.

Agnes:

So like, you know, if the economist is advising the president or whatever and they’re helping other people get what they want, it’s because they think that they’ll get more stuff? They, the advisor, the economist, will also be getting stuff out of that? More of what they want, which might be independent—

Robin:

Right, but this is a standard business question, right? And I could be— If people say, What’s the secret to riches in business? Well, you know a common thing, which is quite correct, is find a way to give value to people. Find a way that you can give more value to them than they’re getting out of their competitors, and that’s the secret to riches in business. Right?
First ask, What do your customers want? What aren’t they getting that they want? Can you find a way to give that to them? And if you can find a way to give your customers something they want that they aren’t getting from other people, then they will like you, and they will want to do business with you. And that’s how you get rich.

Agnes:

So, like—

Robin:

You can make the same argument for economists, right? To be a valued advisor you have to be giving value to the people you’re advising, and the more you give them value the more they will value your advice. And you can both get rich in some sense and be doing good for the world.

Agnes:

And like when I give advice, you know, it’s mostly in the context of students. When I give advice it’s mostly to undergraduate students, right? And they might want to know things like, you know, How should I learn ancient Greek? Right?—and this is maybe a student who’s been in one of my classes—And should I take a summer class? Should I try to take a regular class? Do I even need to learn Greek?
You know, do I— Should I go to graduate school? Should I, you know— Lots of questions like that. The students who I know, right, and I try to help them talk through the situation. And I don’t think that I do that with a view to what I’m going to be getting out of this. Like that they will then as a result like give me something as a…

Robin:

Not directly. But could you just be trying to help them from their point of view?

Agnes:

Sure. I mean I think of their goals as good, right? And so I don’t want to help them get everything that they want. Like quite often they’ll come to me with a set of things that they want, and I’ll say of some of those things, I don’t that those things are very good, you shouldn’t be— Go for those ones. Here’s how to get the other ones, though. Those ones are good, right? I feel perfectly comfortable saying that.
And I mean, I wouldn’t say here’s how to get it, because it’s hard to get it. But here’s some thoughts, and here’s some thoughts on why those those other ones that you want aren’t so good. And so like I feel it would be very weird for me to approach a student who wants a set of things, and some of the wants I might think are misguided, but to in some sense shield that from my judgment of its being misguided, and just tell them how to get anything that is that they want, I guess then I would want something back

Robin:

You are shielding it as long as you make it— the conditionality clear enough, right? As long as you say, Well, for the things you want, these would be the right mechanisms. But for these other things I think you should want, you might consider focusing more on this. As long as they can separate out like how to correct for what you want from them from what they want, then they don’t mind this little sermon once in a while on what they should want.

Agnes:

Yeah, but I don’t see what incentive I would have for saying the first thing at all. Like, I— Why would I tell someone how to get things that I don’t think they should be getting?

Robin:

I mean, the most usual thing is just, almost everything everybody wants is okay, it’s just about the weighting of them. So almost all disagreements about value are usually like just how— about the relative importance of different things. And so almost all the things that they want, you’ll agree aren’t terrible things to want. You’ll just might not think that they should get the priority they’re putting on them. And so that’s really where the disagreement comes, about the right priority to put things.

Agnes:

Right. But I’m happy to talk about that too, and what they should be prioritizing.

Robin:

Right. So there’s not so much a risk of them, like, getting bad things. It’s the risk of getting too much of the wrong good things.

Agnes:

Right. I mean like, here’s the situation: Students are often coming to me, How can I manage to fit in a double major or triple major. Okay, and many times my thought is, Don’t major in so many things, you know? Pick one thing, major in that thing, and you can still take classes in the other field. But there is an illusion that you’re getting more credentialization by having more majors, right?
And so I may be trying to persuade the student out of pursuing this thing that they came to me for advice about how to get, right? But if I saw myself as having to just give them advice—how to get your triple major—like I would then want to know what are they paying me for this? Like I want money or something, because I’m not achieving a good by just giving them advice.

Robin:

Well you are— I mean, you have a job there, and this is part of your job. So you can certainly just think that a certain degree of responsiveness to students asking questions, that’s just part of your job.

Agnes:

Fair enough. Yes.

Robin:

And you shouldn’t like demand that they entertain you in particular with their question before you answer it. I mean they might just think that you need to put up with a bit of questioning even if it’s not so much fun for you, just because it’s part of your job to answer their questions.

Agnes:

That’s true, but like I give advice to students who are not even University of Chicago students, and I’m happy to do it. And high school students come to me. But I would not feel fine with that if I’m giving them, you know…

Robin:

So there’s two levels here: We can say like you have a particular brand for your style of answering questions which you’re describing here. It might not be a very widely known brand. So many people who come to ask you might be just reacting to sort of the overall average brand of, say, university professors, and how they respond to advice.
And so there could be this question of, What do we want, collectively, the brand of university professors’ advice to be? And I would say that we—with respect to students—we are high-enough status, and you know, know enough things relative to these key classroom value choices, that they might well defer to us on those choices.
But if you were to ask— if they were— you know, if you were to offer them advice about who to date, or even where to eat, they might think you were moving past your legitimate area that they would accept your advice for, but you still might offer it.
But you know, large professional economics, you know, we have a question: Are we just generic people that you can come ask for advice and we’ll just tell you things? Or do we do— you know, how much of a brand have we agreed on? We apparently have agreed on more of a brand where we separate out the value part of our advice.

Agnes:

Okay, but I want to use— Since we’re, we just have like a little bit of time left, I want to go back to our central question about the prettiest colors. First of all, it just occurs to me that it’s possible that we want to add like silver and gold. I think those figure largely in like that sphere as well.

Robin:

I picture white. I picture all of these things in the background with a lot of white.

Agnes:

Yes. So you need the white to make them stand out.

Robin:

Yeah.

Agnes:

But it’s not one of the pretty colors. I mean, it’s one of the—

Robin:

Well, but it’s necessary for the prettiness!

Agnes:

It’s necessary, yes. But there’s a wonderful line in the Phaedo: Imagine not being able to tell the difference between something’s being necessary for something else and like the point of that thing, right? So like the example is like, why Socrates—okay, so Socrates is in his a jail cell, he’s about to be executed—you know, Why did you not run away? He was offered an opportunity to pay the jailers and run off, and he’s like, Someone could say, Well, it’s my bones that are, you know, like, are here.
And like, but he’s like, But you know, these same bones could be off in some other country if I had decided to do something else. So my bones are like a necessary condition of me being here as opposed to somewhere else, but they don’t explain— The reason why I’m not there is that I thought it was right to stay here. Right? So I think similarly, white is a necessary condition for the prettiness of purple and pink and silver and gold, but the thing that it exists for the sake of in that context is going to be the pretty colors, and the pretty things that the colors make up.

Robin:

So we have a language of preferences, you know, as I mentioned, economists use.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

And we also have a language of values. And in some sense they’re redundant languages, and that we can describe the same things using either language. And that seems to be a key choice in using those two languages. And it seems to me like the language of preferences is often a choice which has the subtext, “And let’s not argue about values,” right?
If we just say, I like strawberry and you like vanilla, and we call those preferences, part of that is to say, Let’s just accept that we like different things here, and like go on from there. Whereas if we call it, I have a fundamental value for strawberry, I’m more making the move that I think you should share my value for strawberry.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

And that we need to have a discussion about this, if you seem to like vanilla.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

And that’s an interesting move.

Agnes:

Right. And as an economist, you don’t have a view about which move is better, right? Because that’s itself a value claim, like whether it’s better to…

Robin:

Well it might be— One might be better for some other instrumental reason—

Agnes:

Okay.

Robin:

—and not a value reason, right?

Agnes:

Fair enough, fair enough! We’ve achieved our…

Robin:

And we can have a fundamental value preference over these two things, but it wouldn’t be a value choice, right?

Agnes:

Okay, right.

Robin:

So we might ask just, Why do people make this move in the different ways they do in various circumstances? That might give us a clue to sort of this hesitancy I might have, and other people might have, to always make the value move as opposed to the preference move, right? Sometimes— I mean it seems to be on the surface that we use this preference language as a way to sort of agree to disagree, if you like.

Agnes:

But I think in many contexts we do not use the preference language, and we use the value language. I think when it comes to musical value, literary value, etc., we are happy to say that, so to speak, the preferences of a group of specialists dictate that domain of value. And I wonder whether the reason we are not willing to do that here is just simple snobbery. Like we’re just not willing to admit that the population that could be an expert in something could be like young people.

Robin:

No, but we could turn it around and say, That observation may well be, you know, valid, but what we say is, The context in which we want to go with value descriptions rather than preference descriptions are exactly where there’s a status rank, and we are going to show our status by having the proper values. And we want to assert that we have high-status values. And therefore we want to assert that we— It’s not just a matter of preference, it is a matter of absolutes, and we are taking that stance. And that might be, exactly— explain a lot of the variance in using preferences versus values as a label.

Agnes:

So I think a lot of like philosophers, the way they might view that what you just said is like, Well, no, no, these are actual values, like the things really are valuable, and we’re track— We may not— We may go wrong, right? But we’re tracking it. Right? And I would sort of expect that the person who would be in a bad position, the anti-specialist, for figuring out whether the value language is tracking something distinctive or whether it’s simply a way of like recapitulating status or something, the person who would be worse at that would be the economist, right?
Because they’ve already gotten themselves out of that game, right? They’re just inclined to flatten everything out in terms of preferences. So that if you wanted someone to tell you, Look, is there genuinely a domain of aesthetic value in which these little girls are specialists? Or, No, these are just— little girls prefer pink and purple to other colors, but that’s just one preference among many and other people might prefer otherwise—You would not want to turn to an economist, right? You’d want to turn to somebody who’d—

Robin:

I don’t think that's quite fair. So again we have these two different ways of framing. We’re trying to ask which is the better way of framing—you can’t say that one group who uses one way of framing therefore isn’t any good at preparing these ways of framing if some of the other group is also just as specialized in their way of framing, right? So if there’s a frame A and a frame B, and some people almost always use A, and some people always use B, and now our question is, What’s the better frame? If we go to the people who always use A, they’re no better than the people who always use B.

Agnes:

I think that’s true. But I don’t— You yourself describe the economist as saying that they want to put the values to the side, but I don’t accept the description that philosophers want to put the pref— I want preferences and values.

Robin:

But what is the difference then? I mean, you have—

Agnes:

Yeah, so I think that—

Robin:

It’s just a matter of convenient labeling, or like, what—

Agnes:

No, no. So I think a value— To value something is to be in a dispositional state that is like a nexus of a set of attitudes. So one of them is desires or preferences, right? So you have desires or preferences towards that thing. Another is beliefs about the goodness of that thing—and articulately split up the good of the thing—and the third is an emotional disposition to, for instance, feel bad if the thing is threatened or whatever, right? And so you— a valuational response is a coordinated cognitive, conative, and affective response to something. So it’s not a mere preference.

Robin:

So, say I prefer strawberry. I believe that I prefer strawberry. I would be sad if strawberry went away from the menu. That doesn’t qualify as a value to get?

Agnes:

No, because believing that you— That’s not the relevant kind of belief. So the kind of belief that I’m talking about is the belief that strawberry is good, say.

Robin:

I do believe strawberry is good! But that’s not the same as saying I prefer it.

Agnes:

And so like you might value straw— I mean, some people actually, I think, do sort of get to that point, right? If there’s a certain level of attachment and you’re like, No really, it’s the best flavor. And you know—

Robin:

But that just seems like the difference between… Basically, the key difference between preferences and values is values is this claim that gets a universal value and the preference is, it’s a per person value, right? It’s similar to issues about whether morality is absolute or whether it’s relative to a culture or a person, right? It’s about, you know, you have a predicate or something, and just how many— how much context-dependence is allowed in it? Right?

Agnes:

Well I think that’s part of it, but the definition I gave had three parts, and I actually don’t think that universal bit is sufficient. I also think you need the affective attachment. So that’s the emotional aspect of it. I think you could imagine something where everybody believes that—

Robin:

Well people can easily have an effective attachment to preferences. That’s very common.

Agnes:

Sure. I mean, sometimes they do—

Robin:

So that seems like the key difference here.

Agnes:

Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. I mean that is, you know, quite often I might not get my preference in many ways, but I don’t— I do not feel emotionally wounded. I don’t feel sad. I don’t feel angry.

Robin:

That just seems to mean it’s a big value, I would say, or a big preference, right? Something that’s very small, you can’t be bothered to have an emotional reaction. It all just passes quickly in the periphery of your vision and…

Agnes:

I mean sometimes I can have a small and quick emotional reaction to something. So I mean, I guess I think maybe you’re using the word “big” now to mean what I would say is like value, which is fine. But I do think that a value response is a coordinated psychological response on a couple of different fronts.

Robin:

I might, you know, I might just say, People socially pay a lot of attention to— So say there is only preferences, right? Then we could construct this idea of value out of preferences. This is the kind of move an economist might make, right? We might say, Well, people have preferences but they also do care about how much they share preferences with other people, and that sometimes they want to like make a commitment to a preference, and they even want to like have a shared commitment to a preference.
And they might want to make sure they know and see a shared commitment to a preference. And— especially if it’s important to them. And so they might want to, for example, have ways they check people to see if they share this preference or not, and to shame them if they don’t, or praise them if they do. And it might just be important that they share it.
So for example, in a law-abiding society we might think some people around like to be criminal and violent. And we might want to know if any one person we’re dealing with is such a person, they would not share a preference for peace and politeness, but they have a preference for violence. And then—

Agnes:

You as an economist would want to try to satisfy that preference, right, insofar as it could be satisfied.

Robin:

You mean to be a person who doesn’t want violence?

Agnes:

No, one of the people that’s asking you for advice is the person who likes violence. Right?

Robin:

Right. Sure.

Agnes:

You’d be trying to give them advice, how they can get more violence.

Robin:

Right. Yeah. But in this context, we’re just saying that like people might not just have a preference for nonviolence, they might want to know who else shares their preference for nonviolence, and then they might want to create a process that would shame people and unveil them if they didn’t have this desired, shared preference. And then they might feel emotional about this shared preference they have, and threatened emotionally by people who might violate it, or the prospect of that. That sounds a lot like a value. And I might just say, That’s what a value means in the context of people who have preferences.

Agnes:

Yeah, I mean I guess I think, you know, I can imagine… I think we could call that a value. But then like some of those cases are going to be— So that those, they’re going to include claims, like claims about goodness and stuff. And those could be incorrect, right? So in some cases the person is making a mistake, and they shouldn’t be doing any of that, right?
And so that’s important like from my point of view about value, that it actually makes claims that are truth-evaluable. Right? So you could imagine people coordinating in just that way over slavery: Like how slavery is a good thing, and I want to make sure— I want to coordinate with other people who—

Robin:

And those people would naturally speak of sharing the value of slavery. And…

Agnes:

Right, they would speak in that way. And so it’s possible to speak in all of those ways, and to have all the framework, and to not see from the inside that the thing that you take to be a value isn’t actually valuable. That’s like a thing that could happen with values, whereas it’s different with preferences. I don’t think— or it’s anyway rare to think it’s just—

Robin:

But that’s just about the predicate and how many arguments it has, really. I mean again, you know, we could have all these same people having all these same preferences, and they would act all the same except in one scenario, you would say, But they have the wrong preference. In the other scenario you would say they have the right preference. And so from their point of view, explaining social behavior, whether it’s right or wrong, wouldn’t much affect what they’re doing. It might affect your approval or not with what they’re doing. But you know…

Agnes:

So I don’t really think it makes sense to speak of right and wrong preferences, I guess. That is, as I see it, preference is like a motivational condition. And it doesn’t make a claim—

Robin:

But in this translation, it would be—

Agnes:

But there could be ones that I don’t like, right? But I can imagine that there’s people who don’t like the slavery thing—maybe they make less money if there’s slavery than if there isn’t slavery, okay? And so they dislike it and they try to change it or whatever. And that’s like one attitude, but a different and distinct attitude that’s different from just, I’m only going to make it go away because it’s disadvantaging me. It’s thinking it’s wrong or incorrect.

Robin:

So I mean this is a common issue with morality, etc., you know, and we’re about out of time here. But you know, just hold it up for next time, perhaps.

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

You know, if we’re just trying to explain human behavior then we— It doesn’t look like we ever need to know which things people want to do, or want, are right or wrong or good or bad. We just need to know what they choose and what they want. It’s only when we want to do this overall evaluation of what they’re doing that we need to invoke this other concept. And many social scientists, even myself, often wonder whether we even need this concept of what’s really valuable in order to think ourselves about what we want to do and what we want other people to do. It may be extraneous.
And similarly, like in philosophy of mind where we say, Do we really need qualia evidence? Do we really need sort of this extra consciousness thing that people often invoke? We asked, What if we tried to do without that? You know, could we do pretty much everything that you want to do without it? And you know, a common intellectual attitude is often, you had a thing you thought was central, but it figures—it turns out you can do without, maybe you should do without.

Agnes:

If I could have the last word—

Robin:

You could! [Laughs]

Agnes:

I think we do need it in all different sorts of ways. But interestingly, I think we even need it in the explanation of behavior. So that, you know, I tried to argue for that in my book—essentially what I say is, Here’s this phenomenon, aspiration. And in order to apply it as an explanatory concept—to say, Hey, this person was aspiring—you need to have reason to believe that the thing that they’re aspiring towards is in fact good. So it’s an explanatory concept that only applies in certain normative contexts. So you could think that’s wrong but that’s like, that’s at least a possibility. Yes, go ahead.

Robin:

I’m planning at the moment to disagree with that, but you have the last word.

Agnes:

[Laughs] Okay! All right. Thanks.

Robin:

All right.