How the Values We Rank Shape What We Call the Right Answer
I have a riddle I sometimes use in therapy.
You have ten very hungry people and two cheeseburgers.
What is the most efficient way of solving the problem?
I have learned that the wording matters. I am not asking for the fairest solution. I am not asking for the most compassionate solution. I am not even asking for the most ethical solution.
I am asking for the most efficient way of solving the problem.
Recently, I happened to ask this question to two different people on the same day.
The first person is someone whose mind naturally gravitates toward efficiency. He is exceptionally intelligent, highly analytical, and remarkably good at identifying the shortest distance between a problem and its solution.
I asked him the question.
Almost immediately, he answered:
“Kill eight people.”
Correct.
If the problem we have been given is hunger, and efficiency is the only criterion we are using to evaluate the solution, eight people no longer being hungry is considerably easier than somehow producing eight additional cheeseburgers.
Later that day, I asked someone else the same question.
She works in a helping profession. Much of her life is oriented around service, compassion, equality, and the wellbeing of other people. Like many people in helping professions, she has occasionally even tolerated significant personal costs in order to remain congruent with those values. She is objectively one of the most intelligent people I know = there are no major aptitude differences between the two people.
I gave her exactly the same riddle.
She looked uncomfortable.
“I feel like this is a trick question.”
I assured her that it wasn’t.
Eventually she said, “Cut each cheeseburger into five equal pieces.”
I smiled.
“Does that solve the hunger?”
She thought about it again.
She still couldn’t get there.
Eventually I told her the answer.
“Kill eight people.”
Her response was essentially: What? No.
What fascinated me was not that these two people had different answers.
It was how difficult it was for the second person to even briefly step inside the value system the question required. Her mind automatically introduced additional variables: fairness, compassion, equality, the preservation of life. The question had asked only about efficiency, but her operating system would not allow efficiency to operate alone.
And neither response tells us anything particularly troubling about either person.
The first person does not actually advocate murdering hungry people.
The second person is perfectly capable of understanding efficiency.
What the riddle accidentally became was something of a Rorschach test.
It revealed what each mind instinctively brought into the room.
We Don’t Just Have Values. We Rank Them.
Most of us probably agree that efficiency is good.
We probably also agree that fairness is good.
Freedom is good. Security is good. Compassion is good. Responsibility is good. Equality is good. Stability is good. Progress is good. Individual rights are good. Collective wellbeing is good.
The interesting disagreements begin when we cannot maximize all of them at once.
Because we don’t simply have values.
We weight them.
And those weightings form a kind of subjective operating system through which we evaluate the world.
Consider another hypothetical.
A community needs to build a train between two cities.
There are two possible routes.
The first is considerably cheaper, faster, and more efficient, but building it will require displacing 2,000 people from their homes.
The second route goes around those communities. Nobody is displaced, but construction costs considerably more, the community has to absorb that cost, and the resulting route is less efficient.
Which one should we build?
Now we have a problem.
Not necessarily because we disagree about the facts.
We might agree completely about the facts.
We can agree about the number of people displaced. We can agree about the additional cost. We can agree about the difference in travel time. We could commission studies, hire engineers, calculate economic consequences, and arrive at remarkably accurate numbers.
And then we could still disagree about what to do.
Because underneath the apparent disagreement about the train is another question:
How much weight should each of those things carry?
That question cannot be solved by another spreadsheet.
The Subjective Hiding Inside the Objective
We seem to understand this intuitively in other areas of life.
Put a photorealistic painting next to an impressionistic one and ask ten people which is better.
One person might be stunned by the technical precision required to reproduce reality with such accuracy.
Another might be relatively unmoved by technical replication and captivated by the imagination required to represent reality differently.
We generally don’t become furious with each other about this.
We get curious.
Really? That’s the one you like? What do you like about it?
We understand that “better” secretly means something more like:
Better according to the qualities I value most.
Political disagreement becomes much more combustible because we often forget that same qualification.
We begin believing there is simply a correct answer.
And, of course, from inside our own value system, there is.
The Answer That Feels Obviously Right
This may be one reason political disagreement can feel so bewildering.
If fairness carries enormous weight in my internal system, a solution that appears profoundly unfair may seem obviously wrong.
If efficiency carries enormous weight in yours, a solution that seems unnecessarily expensive, cumbersome, or ineffective may seem obviously wrong.
Neither of us experiences our conclusion as arbitrary.
It follows quite logically from the values we prioritized.
This doesn’t mean facts don’t matter. They matter enormously. It also doesn’t mean every argument is subjective, that every value system is equally coherent, or that there are no moral boundaries worth defending.
It means something narrower:
Facts cannot determine how much we should value the competing consequences those facts reveal.
And politics is filled with precisely these kinds of collisions.
Efficiency versus perceived fairness.
Freedom versus security.
Individual autonomy versus collective responsibility.
Stability versus change.
Equality versus individual differentiation.
Ends versus means.
We often argue furiously about the answer without realizing that the disagreement began much earlier, in how we weighted the variables.
Ends, Means, and Leadership
I can see this clearly in my own political preferences.
When I evaluate leadership, I tend to place considerable weight on the means through which someone pursues an outcome.
Character matters to me.
Humility matters to me.
How power is exercised matters to me.
How opponents are treated matters to me.
So if someone tells me they support a political leader because they strongly support that leader’s policies, I may instinctively be evaluating something different.
They may be saying:
Look at the outcome.
And I may be saying:
Look at the way the outcome is being pursued.
Neither of us necessarily misunderstood the other person’s argument.
We may simply be grading the same leader using different rubrics.
Recognizing this doesn’t require me to abandon my rubric.
Understanding subjectivity does not require neutrality.
I am allowed to believe that the means matter enormously. Someone else is allowed to place considerably more weight on whether a leader effectively accomplishes the desired policy outcome.
The useful question becomes less:
Which one of us has correctly perceived reality?
And more:
What are each of us prioritizing when we decide what good leadership means?
Dialectic Maturity
In my work, I have increasingly become comfortable championing one value regardless of someone’s political orientation:
dialectic maturity.
By this I mean our capacity to hold competing realities long enough to understand the legitimacy, limitations, and consequences of each.
It does not mean refusing to take positions.
It does not mean finding some bland middle ground between every disagreement.
And it certainly doesn’t mean pretending every argument is equally sound.
Sometimes we examine competing positions carefully and become even more confident in the position we started with.
But dialectic maturity asks us to understand the paradox before resolving it.
If I champion efficiency, what happens when efficiency becomes unconstrained by fairness?
If I champion fairness, what happens when my pursuit of fairness makes a system prohibitively expensive or functionally ineffective?
If I champion freedom, what responsibilities am I willing to accept for the consequences of that freedom?
If I champion security, how much freedom am I willing to surrender to obtain it?
Every value becomes easier to defend when we pretend it exists alone.
Reality rarely affords us that luxury.
Curiosity Before Certainty
There is something psychologically seductive about believing our political opponents simply don’t understand.
If they knew what I knew, surely they would arrive where I arrived.
Sometimes that is true. People can be misinformed. They can reason poorly. They can ignore evidence. They can defend contradictions because those contradictions protect identity, belonging, power, or fear.
But sometimes the person across from us understands the situation perfectly well.
They simply weight the variables differently.
That possibility creates room for a different kind of conversation.
Instead of:
How can you possibly believe that?
We might become curious:
What matters most to you here?
What are you trying to protect?
What cost seems most unacceptable to you?
What are you willing to sacrifice to preserve the thing you value most?
What would happen if the value you are championing became absolute?
Those questions do not erase disagreement.
They reveal it more accurately.
Perhaps we would discover that beneath many of our supposedly objective disagreements are two people looking at the same ten hungry people and the same two cheeseburgers.
We see the same problem.
We understand the same facts.
We simply brought different scales to weigh them.
