Interesting stuff, the problem may be that so much effort is required to get peoples opinions

Don’t worry, most of what I write is devoid of correct terminology anyway 🙂

“I think outside of a vacuum, in reality where judgements have real consequences, that economists and sociologists would be best qualified to make value judgements that are going to affect the public, because they have studied and observed the results of previous decisions”

I think economists and sociologists have the best idea of causation – but when it comes to applying value to the variables that are shifting I think both disciplines are relatively useless.

Fundamentally, economics provides a frame, and it tells us that if A happens B will happen. However, economists aren’t the best at giving values to the benefits and costs associated with B – which is where philosophers may theoretically fit in, if they are the discipline that is best at forming value judgments.

I agree that philosophers won’t agree with each other – hell no-one really agrees when it comes to normative statements. However, in this case philosophers may be the best of a bad lot 😉 . Philosophers at least discuss normative issues in depth, economists hardly do at all (as we are a descriptive discipline), and I am uncertain as to whether sociologists do either (or if they truly separate positive and normative strains of thought when discussing issues).

Well essentially yes, I think they would be best qualified to make value judgements with no objective mechanism. They would be best equipped to rationalize their value judgements and defend them from attack, but they will still be personalized value judgements based on a supposition of what is to be valued. You could gain some interesting perspectives by engaging a philosopher when it comes to economic decisions, but as philosophers can’t even come to a consensus on what is valuable or good, they’ll only be offering up dubitable opinions.

I think outside of a vacuum, in reality where judgements have real consequences, that economists and sociologists would be best qualified to make value judgements that are going to affect the public, because they have studied and observed the results of previous decisions. An economist will also be better prepared to forsee the trade-offs that result from implementing their value judgements.

I guess thinking about it, a synthethis of combining philosophical and economic ideas regarding value judgements in relation to policy could have some benefits so long as you can avoid the quagmire of doubt and confusion that philosophy courts.

Also, from reading the linked article and thinking about the DPB example:
In the article it expresses the philosophical conclusion that “the most valueable things are useless”. So regarding the implementation of the DPB, it is solely a utility decision. The economic policy is only a vehicle to try and achieve value, which leads me to believe that the philospher is best equipped to try and make a judgement about whether any value can gained through a utility and then it is upto the economist to make a judgement on how best to implement the utility to achieve value (because the value must have already been defined by the philosopher). Heck, I’m starting to confuse myself now. See what happens…

I completely agree!

However, the question is, if someone has to make some value judgments – who is best placed to do it. If philosophers spend all day discussing value judgments – would that make them the group that is most able to create appropriate value judgments (where no objective mechanism is available to reveal what these judgments should be).

To me it sounds like a sure-fire way to confuse the issse. If you consult philosophers on this issue, they won’t be able to provide you with a list or a formula of good & bad, they can only offer their educated opinions – which will be incredibly broad and probably cover every conceivable economic policy from (using your example) free DPB to any and all mothers all the way to no DPB. You could make equally strong philosophical arguments for all forms (or no) welfare. We can see this just by a quick summary of noted philosophers. For example, if you consulted Friedrich Nietzsche, J. S. Mill and Karl Marx – would ever achieve any consensus on welfare?

So am I – that is why they are the experts and I’m not 😛

“Take the DPB for instance: I have a visual image of a strip with colors such that at one end we have cases who deserve and at the other end they don’t”

I would look at the issue this way. We can objectively say that in society a bunch of people will get the DPB, and some of them will deserve it and some won’t. We then have three assumptions to make:

1) What does “deserve it” entail,
2) What is the distribution,
3) What is the size of the costs and benefits associated with each person that receives it, and the opportunity cost of the dollar.

Once we’ve applied these assumptions, we get our result.

Now, if we are interested in designing a scheme, and we are trying to figure out how hard to make it to get the DPB, we just have to realise we are trading off between a cost to those that would receive a net social benefit, and a benefit to society by removing those who are a net social cost.

Furthermore, assume that for each increment of tightness we add to the scheme, the lost benefit increases and the prevented cost decreases.

Once we have plugged in whatever subjective judgments we need, we then know we should design the scheme such that the lost benefit is equal to the prevented cost – however, the value judgments we make will influence where we think this point should be.

As a result, in the above case we have already derived the economic model – now we just need someone to come along, give us some value judgments, and we can tell them how to make the DPB suit those.

“Making sure you understand all the effects of your policy right is much, much more important. So it’s vastly important to have competent, conscientious policy-makers, and to have them from a variety of backgrounds so that they think more broadly of consequences”

Understanding the impact of policy is no doubt a very important part of the process. However, is there not the potential to have someone specialise in making the normative judgments necessary to turn a description into a functional policy?

If economists specialise in description, and philosophers specialise in formulating value judgments, is their not scope to get each group to focus on the bit they are good at and get better policy?

“If we’re methodological individualists, we’re doing something wrong if we go to a panel of expert philosophers to decide on relative valuations rather than doing something like, oh, I don’t know, trying to estimate such valuations from actual individual choices”

Completely agreed – insofar as observed choices do reveal the preferences of individuals. However, isn’t there a number of cases where revealed preferences alone do not give us enough information to inform policy. In this case, we require someone to make value judgments – the question then is, who can provide us with “expert” value judgments.