Motherhood and apple pie: Politicians and Values

Selecting for values

I talked in the last post about how one of the functions of politicians is to act for proxies of us in parliament and we partially select them to make the right decision and judge them on perceived competence. However not all issues are right and wrong and competence isn’t the only the criteria we use to select politicians. The other criteria we use to select politicians is values. We want politicians to support projects which are in accordance with our values and not support projects which are in violation of our values. We are not aware of every current policy or every potential future policy responding to situations that arise but we hope that a politician with the right values will support the right policy. 

There seems to be two main ways that politicians show they share our values. First they highlight which policies they support and explain how this shows they have value X or Y. Second just go straight ahead and tell us what their values are either by saying “I love motherhood and apple pie” or by making judgements on cases “Bob is wrong to steal all the apple pie in the world”.

Values that don’t need selecting for
The odd thing is that most of the time when talking about values politicians talk about values that pretty much everyone has. Everyone thinks that hard work is a good thing. Everyone thinks that the neediest people in society should be helped. Everyone likes families. There is not a rogue politician out there who is trying to outlaw families. Nor is there a politician that thinks poor disabled people should be crapped on.  Politicians and campaigners talk about these values in order to make you think that their opponent does not value this thing. But as soon as you think about this for more than a second and realise that everyone in politics is a human being it is clear that this isn’t the case.

Right wingers don’t want to hurt disabled people. They genuinely think that removing state support in certain cases will help people help themselves. Left wingers don’t think that unemployed people should sit around living off the dole. They genuinely think that removing state support will make people less likely to get a job. Both have arguments to support their case. These issues actually boil down to competency and not values. But more often than not they politicians use them as evidence of their values.

Prioritising values
Aside from a few outliers politicians actually share most of their values. Where they differ is that they value one thing more than another. Whilst everyone likes motherhood and apple pie but not everyone wants to sell their mother for an apple pie. For example it could be argued that they value families more than hard work in their support for a redistributive system that takes money from earners (who work hard) and giving it to families. But no one does say this instead left wingers describe it as them supporting families (and implying or directly saying that right wingers don’t like families). Right wingers describe the same policy as not supporting hard work.

Value questions in politics are all about tradeoffs otherwise they are not value questions but instead competency questions. The two types of questions should be discussed differently. Questions of competence should be answered in a debate on evidence of what works and what doesn’t. Questions of values should be about tradeoffs. They obviously overlap often but the distinction is still important.  

Too often questions which are simply ones of competence are portrayed as ones of values. Other politicians are accused of not valuing the right things when in fact they are simply not achieving what they aimed to achieve. This happens to all governments, policies do not always achieve what they aimed to achieve. Often it is simply a politician being making an incompetent decision and not realising rather than being evil.  Political debate would be so much better off if we realised that rather than continuing the values confusion.