Imagine that you’re part of a committee that’s making a decision about whether to award an assistant professor tenure. Suppose there are two qualifications that she needs to have: 1) she has to be a good teacher and 2) she needs to have written a few good journal articles. One third of the committee members think that she is a good teacher but has not written good articles, one third think that she has written good articles but is not a good teacher, and one third think that she meets both qualifications. What decision do you think the committee should make?
That’s an example of what in the literature is known as a ‘discursive dilemma’.
Here’s a different kind of case. Suppose the lounge at your workplace is being renovated. Employees are asked for their opinions on what colours they want for the carpet and the walls. The options for carpet colours are burgundy, white, and cream. The options for the walls are white, ecru, and lavender. (In case you’re wondering, Erin came up with these colours — I thought I was reasonably good with colours, at least by male standards, but I had no idea what ecru was.) One quarter of the employees want burgundy for the carpet and white for the walls, one quarter want burgundy and ecru, one quarter white and lavender, and one quarter want cream and lavender. So, at the meeting called to decide these matters, the results of the votes are as follows:
Carpet colour:
burgundy – 50%
white – 25%
cream – 25%
Wall colour:
lavender – 50%
white – 25%
ecru – 25%
So it seems clear what should be done: install burgundy carpet and paint the walls lavender.
But, alas, burgundy and lavender clash horribly, as all the employees knew perfectly well. After all, notice that none of them wanted that particular combination.
So what should be done?
Sydney
Alan Schmierer
Don’t ask any of the employees for their opinions. Not everything has to be democratic. 🙂 Ecru is such a classy color too… the fact that no one voted for it leads me to deduce they don’t have any sense of interior decoration.
OK, but from a practical standpoint, I would have them vote on which is more important — the wall color, or the carpet color. If the largest portion picked carpet, then I would have everyone vote on which color they liked best to go with the carpet. Then, if they still picked awful colors, I would tell them that my voting powers include a veto, which I can exercise at my discretion… but mainly for instances of wretched taste.
I don’t know, but since when is being a good teacher on equal grounds with publishing records?
–a cynical sociologist
P.S. ask David sometime how one of his favorite colors became ‘burn sienna.’
Just as a note: had I known these colors were for an office I wouldn’t have thought white carpet a viable option!
Erin
As to the Assistant professorship, it appears that two thirds of the committee had some question as to her being qualified. That they didn’t agree on what that was isn’t all that important. Of course, tell them that…
Heidi’s proposed solution to the colours case strikes me as a sensible one. Of course, in some situations multiple votes is not a feasible option, so that kind of case still leaves some questions for large-scale democratic decision-making.
The tenure case is harder to resolve. If we had a faculty vote on the question of whether she is qualified for the professorship, two-thirds would say ‘no’. But suppose instead that we gave all the faculty members an evaluation sheet on which they are asked to evaluate the candidate along different criteria (i.e., teaching ability and research skills). Note that if we tally these results, it turns out that the majority of people think she is a good teacher and the majority of people think she is a good researcher. So why shouldn’t she get the job?
As far as I know, there is no consensus on which approach is the better approach. It’s hard to see what non-arbitrary reason one could have for choosing one over the other, yet the different methods result in very different conclusions.
And this isn’t just an idle contrived example to pique the interest of philosophers. We have every reason to think that there are lots of actual political issues on which we will get different results depending on which method we pick.
I knew there was a reason for why I’ve always doubted the merits of democracy …
Sydney
In negotiations, we call this multiple issues differently valued. Its not nearly as fancy as discursive dilemma, but then again, we usually approach this from a different standpoint.
I don’t know how articulately I stated my solution, but really I was trying to suggest that you need the employees to articulate which quality they value more, and then consider each successive trait with a corresponding weight. But Sydney’s right, that’s not always possible nor always feesible in all situations.
Also, this is incredibly relevant and we discuss this all the time when we talk about settlements and negotiations. In terms of politics… I love answering political phone polls. They are always trying to covertly get you to rank which issues are more important, so some anonymous candidate knows what to emphasize in their speeches to make the greatest impact in the voting booth while sacrificing the least in terms of their positions.