Values you can be held to
Most values statements list leanings. A leaning forbids nothing, so a wall of them guides nothing.
This is how to build something else — and how to put it where people can check it.
Name one decision this value would have forbidden
A real value is a thing you can bump into. It rules something out. It costs you something you would otherwise have taken.
If there is no situation where it says no, it was never a value. It was a mood.
Evidence does not remove the need for a foundation. It isolates it.
You can know everything there is to know about a river and it will still not tell you whether to dam it. That turns on what you care about, and caring is not a fact you can look up.
Good analysis leaves the hard part standing alone
- Strip out every disagreement that was really about facts.
- What remains is what to prefer when two good things cannot both be had.
- That is exactly where evidence has nothing to say.
Most statements only carry the first
- A leaning — what you are inclined to favour. On every wall.
- A handed-down rule — what your people taught you. Rarely.
- A test of what is rightful — what makes a decision legitimate rather than popular. Almost never.
Say how you will manage plurality, not how you will average it
Liberty and equality both matter and pull against each other. There is no master value that ranks them once and for all, and no amount of better reasoning dissolves the clash.
Averaging publishes a position nobody holds
- Name the collisions in the document itself.
- Record what was set aside — say what lost.
- Carry dissent up attributed and intact, never summarised away.
A room built for exactly this kind of decision
Chosen by lot, an assembly has no career riding on the outcome. It can hold a genuine collision open long enough to decide it rather than duck it.
Most assemblies are run to produce one tidy recommendation — which quietly reintroduces averaging at the last step, and throws away the best thing the room made.
"Follow the evidence" assumes it speaks with one voice
- Where experts disagree, publish the disagreement rather than the midpoint.
- Check whether the disagreement is about values in disguise.
- A discount rate is a moral position wearing a decimal point.
The past supplies content. Your naming supplies authority.
A decision earns the word legitimate when it honoured what the group said mattered — which means the group has to have said it, out loud, and settled it before the deciding began.
Four moves, and the grade shown beside them
- Inherited, interpreted, committed, enforced — in that order, every time.
- Mark what backs each commitment: enforced, partly, or nothing yet.
- Attach an intention to every gap. A gap left hanging works against you.
A document of this kind is credible in roughly the proportion that it contains things which would have been easier to leave out.