Thinking and Deciding

DISCOVERING VALUES 343
why people care about sea otters or anything else. We do not need to measure values
just to have a way of making decisions. We already have legislatures, courts, regulatory
officials, doctors, deans, our spouses, and our own intuition for that. If methods
of utility measurement have any special status compared to these other institutions,
it would seem to have something to do with their ability to measure fundamental
values.
The problem may sometimes be reduced by providing respondents with summaries
of expert opinion. DeKay and McClelland (1996) provided respondents with
summaries of various dimensions of ecological importance of endangered species.
They found a shift away from more superficial attributes such as similarity to humans,
which, they argued, were being used as heuristics in the absence of information
about ecological effects, which was the main concern. In general, correcting
people’s false beliefs, when this is possible, can help them evaluate what they are
asked about in terms of what they care about.
It may also be helpful to make explicit diagrams of the relation between means
values and fundamental values ( Keeney, 1992). I give an example of this in the next
section.
Discovering values
The first and most important step in any real application of MAUT is to discover the
values to consider. Ralph Kenney, in his book called Value-Focused Thinking, argues
that this step often leads to solutions to practical problems. Discovery of values
is what I have called search for goals. Chapter 12 presented evidence that people
sometimes focus single-mindedly on one goal, ignoring others. The conscious search
for other relevant goals can avoid this error.
Particularly important is the distinction between means values and more fundamental
values. We think we value the means, but when we ask why we care about
something we find a deeper goal that is actually easier to achieve. U.S. Senator
Daniel Patrick Moynihan tells the story of an apparent impasse between the goal of
auto-accident prevention and the goal of minimizing restrictions on drivers (Moynihan,
1996). The critical insight came when it was understood that accident prevention
was not the fundamental goal. Rather, the main purpose of accident prevention
was to prevent death and injury to people. With this realization, emphasis shifted
from traffic laws and their enforcement to seat-belt laws and the safe design of cars.
A diagram of values (objectives) in terms of means-ends relationships is called a
means-ends objectives hierarchy.
We may also find it useful to break our values down into components, so that
we can discover means to the achievement of each. Safe design of cars can be decomposed
into ease of control, protection of occupants in a crash, and perhaps other
subattributes. A diagram of fundamental values or objective, broken down this way,
is called a fundamental objectives hierarchy.