CHAPTER 2-1 TASTES, PREFERENCES, WANTS, AND VALUES What matters to you? Your family? Your car? The human species? Chocolate rather than vanilla? The environment? A religion? Our values and our other wants constitute one of the two elements of the goals we set. (Our capacities constitute the other element). Satisfying one or more of our desires is the benefit part of cost-benefit analysis of alternatives. Therefore, we now turn to the task of clarifying our institutional and personal values, as well as our more mundane needs and desires. The difference between what are called "values" and and our other desires is chiefly a difference in their importance to ourselves and to others. By values I mean the desires that are intertwined with or most basic beliefs, such as the belief that humanity should progress, or that children should grow up in decent homes rather than on the street. In contrast, tastes -- say your taste for chocolate ice cream and your distaste for snakes, or even your visceral reaction to the sight of blood -- are not the products of deep thought but instead seem to stem from some combination of instinct and experience. This is not to say that these tastes are unimportant. Indeed, you might run away from an accident where there is blood even though you have a strong value to provide help in a disaster. But you are not likely to say that avoiding the sight of blood is important to you.1 We must also distinguish between values and goals, which will be discussed in Chapter 2-3. I recognize that I value my children being healthy more highly than almost any other value. Then I think about ways to achieve this value which is then a goal. That is, goals imply initiating actions whereas values imply setting priorities. The goals follow from the values, and from our capacities to achieve goals. Let us begin by taking note of two basic facts. First, each of us has many desires which may conflict with each other, as discussed in Chapter 1-6. Conflict may arise because satisfying one desire means not satisfying the other, as the desire to smoke is incompatible with the desire to be fit. Or conflict may arise because the desires are inconsistent with each other, as the value for equal treatment of all people is inconsistent with the desire that your own ethnic group be given special preferment. Second, our desires differ in their immediacy and in their different relationships to our biological needs. That is, the need to void one's bladder is more "primitive" and more pressing than the desire to arrange the greeting cards on the mantelpiece. We can think of our "higher" desires as being caused more by learning and less by instinct than our "lower" desires. And the higher desires come more into play as our skills and wealth enable us to satisfy our lower wants. Though the higher wants are built on the lower desires, they eventually develop existences of their own. In the words of Gordon Allport, the higher desires become "functionally autonomous" of the lower desires. Abraham Maslow formalized this idea into a hierarchy of wants, with the biological needs at the bottom and what he called the "self-actualization" desires for creative activity at the top. The place in the hierarchy corresponds to the distance from the purest biological needs of food, shelter, and so on, rather than to the importance of the needs. Despite the pyramidal image of a hierarchy, there is seldom a single goal atop the hierarchy that rules the others uncontested. Trying to determine which is the emperor goal is a fruitless pursuit which can cause confusion and distress. The question "Who am I?" usually makes sense only if you translate it into "What do I want?" Looking for a single dominant want seems to follow from searching for the unique essence of "I". I recommend that you do neither. Asking yourself the fundamental question "What do I want?" is an example of a suggestion that comes up in several apparently- unrelated sections of this book. In general, when you don't know which way to go, ask yourself a "What do I...?" question. When you are working in scientific research and you feel stumped, ask "What am I trying to find out?" When you are writing an essay or an advertisement and you just find yourself staring at the blank wall, ask "What do I want to say?" When you are running around in circles doing a million things and cannot decide what to do next, ask "What am I trying to do?" (Finding the similarity in these questions is one of the benefits of discussing many different kinds of thinking in a single book such as this one.) Guidance often seems to appear as if by magic when you step back and ask yourself the basic "What do I...?" question. Even though it seldom makes sense to think of a single over-riding desire, many of our other desires can usefully be viewed as related to the enhancement of the sense of oneself, -- that is, to one's own and others' judgments about how "good" a person you are. An unusually-strong desire for money often makes sense in this connection. Why would a person want much more purchasing power than the person could conceivably use for almost any utilitarian purpose? Often a likely answer is: To show that one is successful, and deserves honor for that success. Why do people drive expensive cars and live in palatial houses? The unusual esthetics and creature comforts seldom are a persuasive explanation. Indeed, the very economists who are thought to view people as economically motivated -- especially Adam Smith, and before him Bernard Mandeville -- knew that a person's standing in the community was usually a deeper goal once the person satisfies the necessities. Mandeville put it this way: The meanest wretch puts an inestimable value upon himself, and the highest wish of the ambitious man is to have all the world, as to that particular, of his opinion: so that the most insatiable thirst after fame that ever hero was inspired with was never more than an ungovernable greediness to engross the esteem and admiration of others in future ages as well as his own; and (what mortification soever this truth might be to the second thoughts of an Alexander or a Caesar) the great recompense in view, for which the most exalted minds have with so much alacrity sacrificed their quiet, health, sensual pleasures, and every inch of themselves, has never been anything else but the breath of man, the aerial coin of praise. (Fable of the Bees, p. 48.) The desire for money is extraordinarily powerful simply because money purchases so many other goods, including honor (even titles of royalty, and public office) and power over other people. It is this drive for "honor" that leads people to be so touchy and defensive about errors, and to be so unwilling to admit that they are in the wrong. This also accounts for many refusals to listen to good ideas, lest the hearer feel compelled to honor another person and thereby seemingly to place her/himself in a less honored position. And of course this desire extends to honor or dishonor reflected from one's family and one's community. The aim of this chapter is to determine which desires are most important for you, or for an institution. My useful advice is short: 1. Do the job systematically, devoting a block of time to it, rather than just doing it hit-or-miss. 2. Write down your thoughts, rather than just mulling them in your mind. Writing with a computer is even better than using paper and pencil because the chapter makes it easy to revise the items on your list. 3. Do not exclude from your original list desires that you think are unattainable. There will be time later on to put your wants into their proper perspective. With pen (or computer) in hand, begin your exploration of your own mind. You might first try the straightforward approach of writing down your desires in a list, then attaching a priority weight to each desire -- say, a number between 1 and 5. Or, you can try imagining some stories that illustrate a conflict between desires, and ask yourself how you would like the story to come out; from that story you can draw a conclusion about your priorities. Or you can get outside of your own perspective and pretend you are someone else, and then ask what you (the other person) think your own desires are. Exercises for school kids under the label "values clarification" purport to help young people sort out the importance of (say) animal rights versus having soft drinks in aluminum containers. Or you may be able to dream up another way of grilling yourself about what is important to you. It can be very instructive to look at the choices you actually make, because they may reveal that a desire is stronger or weaker than you are willing to admit to yourself. Done one way or another, this activity adds up a a process of serious introspection. The process of investigating your wants requires effort. It also requires the courage to see yourself as you are, to admit to yourself truths that may not seem flattering. For example, you may come to realize that you really like very much to take life quite easy, to sit by the sea and look into the distance, though you have always believed that this is not an acceptable way of life. Put this desire on your list. Later you can sort out the conflict between that desire and the desire to live in ways that are more acceptable to the community, or according to some of your other values about hard work and contribution to society. Much the same sorting-out process is appropriate for non-profit organizations. What are the desires of the various groups with a stake in the organization -- the beneficiaries of the organization's activities, the staff, the donors of funds, the community at large? Here the heart of the process is to thrash out and reach some consensus about what should be considered the "desires" of the institution. Those "desires" or "values" can then be combined with ideas about the capacities of the organization in order to set goals for the organization. Listing all the desires before weeding them out is especially important for organizations. In discussions of which policies to pursue, there is a tendency to exclude options from consideration on grounds that they are not politically viable. This often means that the most imaginative and basic changes are ruled out from the start. It is usually better not to exclude possibilities on political grounds until after the first stage of list preparation is complete. After preparing your list, inspect it for incompatibilities among your wants -- between leisure and making a lot of money, perhaps, or between deepening your personal education and getting ahead on the job. When you ask and answer which wants are more important to you, you have information to improve your priorities. After organizations successfully fulfill their original missions there arises the interesting question of what the organization should do with itself. Examples include the March of Dimes after a vaccine was found for polio (infantile paralysis), and the U. S. Department of Energy after it became clear that the supposed "energy crisis" of the 1970's was no crisis at all. And an army tends to remain larger after a war than it was before the war. An organization that has attained its mission could simply disband, of course. But there is a strong tendency not to disband, one important reason being that the staff develop stakes in their jobs. At that time the organization must develop a new organizational "desire" and aim. The new aim is likely be related to the previous mission in order to take advantage of the organization's sunk cost (about which see Chapter 1-3) in acquiring knowledge relevant to that sort of mission. In some cases the value of the existing organization may be sufficiently great that society at large benefits if the group finds a new purpose rather than disbanding. Usually, however, continuing to exist is simply a wasteful boondoggle for the benefit of the people involved with the organization. A similar problem arises for individuals after they have satisfied important wants. For example, people often find themselves at loose ends after they have achieved retirement, or after they have finished a demanding educational program, or after they have found a marriage partner. Then the problem may go beyond determining one's existing wants, and may instead become a matter of developing new wants. Indeed, economist-philosopher Frank Knight remarked that people usually do not want their wants satisfied; rather, they want bigger and better wants. We can form and indulge our preferences for entertainments, say, and our tastes for types of restaurants or when to sleep and wake, solely with regard to ourselves and those close to us. But the choice of one's basic values must also depend upon the human consensus, because values are (by definition) intertwined with our basic beliefs about humanity and human life. Some values are better than others, just as values should have a higher priority than tastes and other preferences, according to one's hierarchy of beliefs. (This is analogous to the hierarchy of laws in a society, starting at the bottom with local ordinances -- about, say, garbage collection -- and proceeding upwards to the overarching Constitution and its concern with the most fundamental issues of the governance of society.) Though you ought to give some weight to the values of other persons and groups when choosing your own values, there are still major choices to be made, because there always is far from perfect consensus in any community. Some criteria may be useful in making these choices. I suggest the following criteria, though noting that the criteria reflect my own values: the extent of universality throughout humanity, as the value for the preservation of life and the sanction against murder are universal; the enduringness quality of those values which persist throughout human history; and the breadth of application of values, that is, some (but not equal) concern for the larger group as well as for the people close to you, a fundamental tension that is discussed in the chapter on loyalties. There will be conflicts among your values and other wants, of course. Rare, indeed, is the person who is so integrated that there is no pulling and tugging among her/his desires. We constantly want to eat the cake and stay thin, too. Struggling with the conflicts helps you better understand your values, however. And responding to several values at once requires the sorts of techniques discussed in Chapter 1-6 on dealing with multiple goals. Often we deal with conflicts in desires by not examining them closely, or by closing our eyes to the conflicts while we act. And indeed, this may be the only practical way of getting on with your life. Demanding perfect clarity of yourself would lead you into an infinite regress with ever-finer analysis of your desires but with ever-worse paralysis of action. I once heard Herbert Simon, who knows as much about decision-making as any living person, refer to the ultimate decision-making tool -- and then took a coin out of his pocket and flipped it. TASTES ARE SLIPPERY2 So far I have talked about tastes as if they are as solid and as easy to determine as your social-security number. But it just ain't so. Here are some of the difficulties. You don't know what you want, or what will satisfy you. There is no necessary equivalence between what you say you now want, and what will give you satisfaction.3 Indeed, one of the most famous curses is to wish upon a person that she/he gets what s/he has asked for. The wish to be a soldier in battle is a classic example. Winning the lottery sometimes makes people wish they had never bought the ticket. Tastes change with time. In the case of an individual, the subjective value of money changes with your circumstances; a dollar means less to you as you get richer. Goals of making money will therefore change as your circumstances change. To some extent you can even forecast the change, and plan accordingly. When you are young and penniless you can predict that later in life you will earn much more, and a given sum will then mean less to you than at present. This may affect your current decisions about borrowing, and it may affect your planning with respect to the goals of earning additional income and doing community service three decades hence. Biological changes predictably alter your psychic states. The simplest example is the hormonal differences between a young male of 18 and an old male of 88. (This is not to say that all men's interests in sex follow the same trajectory; indeed, men probably differ much more in their sex interest at 58 than they do at 18.) In other cases the change in taste may be unpredictable, such as the change consequent on a financial debacle in the future, or an unexpected biological change due to disease. Such unpredictable changes in taste obviously make long-run planning difficult. You can change your tastes. By choosing to take a college course in classical music you can alter your musical tastes, perhaps to the extent that you develop the goal of becoming a concert promoter. The young man described in the Introduction to Part 1 who analysed his woman-friend as a potential spouse found that his values changed as a result of his close inspection of those values during the cost-benefit study. Others can change your tastes. Advertising attempts to change your tastes, though it seldom is able to do so with respect to major matters (even politics); rather, it does so mainly with respect to such minor matters as which brand of beer to buy. (Trust me on this, both as a one-time advertising man and as a one-time researcher in the field.). Preachers can alter your tastes concerning basic morals and values. You may wish to increase your desires rather than satisfy them. To be without desires is not usually desirable, except perhaps in a situation (such as that sort of suffering discussed by the Buddha) in which you must get rid of desires in order to get rid of pain. Desires provide interest and zest to life, as a fresh love affair or a new interest in music might enliven a retiree. Remember, Knight's remark that what people want is not to have their wants satisfied, but rather to have bigger and better wants. (This view did not fit easily with the received theory of economics, however.) FOOTNOTES 1 J: See sociology or psych books on definitions. Or encyc or dictionaries of those subjects. 2 For a more detailed and scholarly view of this subject, with different emphasis, see the masterly article by James G. March, "Bounded Rationality, Ambiguity, and the Engineering of Choice", in Bell et. al., 1988, 33-57] 3 For more information about the confusion in economic theory about the utility concept, see Simon (196x). Page # thinking value21% 3-3-4d