Politics, unlike evolution, isn’t really a factual matter. Take abortion, for instance: some people have the goal of reducing abortions, some people have the goal of reducing the population, some people have the goal of maximizing women’s reproductive choices, and some people have the goal of maximizing fathers’ control over whether or not they have kids. Which goal you have depends on your personal preferences and values, though you may have to bite the appropriate bullet for whichever goal you accept.
And even if two people or groups agree on the goal, there isn’t enough information for us to know what the most efficient way of getting to that goal. We might have different ethical or pragmatic constraints as we work towards that goal (for instance, not wanting to give the government too much power on our way there). Even if we agree on the probabilities of success for each legislative choice, say, we may have different tolerances for the risk we as a society assume in getting there. The world of politics and legislation is vague enough that there’s not always only one right answer (though there may be definite wrong ones).
I think it’s probably true that some political disagreements come down to differing preferences and values. It doesn’t strike me that the majority of policy debates which account for much of the noise that passes for ‘political discourse’ can be seen as debates over fundamental values and preferences however.
A significant amount of political debate seems to revolve around what at least appear to be questions of fact about how to best achieve certain broadly agreed upon aims. I tend to think that a lot of politics and political debate is best understood not as a search for truth but as serving other goals not related to the surface appearance but the more thoughtful and better intentioned participants in the debate do generally seem to believe that they are to some extent debating a factual matter, albeit one that is not as clearly settled by the available evidence as the question of evolution.
Politics, unlike evolution, isn’t really a factual matter. Take abortion, for instance: some people have the goal of reducing abortions, some people have the goal of reducing the population, some people have the goal of maximizing women’s reproductive choices, and some people have the goal of maximizing fathers’ control over whether or not they have kids. Which goal you have depends on your personal preferences and values, though you may have to bite the appropriate bullet for whichever goal you accept.
And even if two people or groups agree on the goal, there isn’t enough information for us to know what the most efficient way of getting to that goal. We might have different ethical or pragmatic constraints as we work towards that goal (for instance, not wanting to give the government too much power on our way there). Even if we agree on the probabilities of success for each legislative choice, say, we may have different tolerances for the risk we as a society assume in getting there. The world of politics and legislation is vague enough that there’s not always only one right answer (though there may be definite wrong ones).
I think it’s probably true that some political disagreements come down to differing preferences and values. It doesn’t strike me that the majority of policy debates which account for much of the noise that passes for ‘political discourse’ can be seen as debates over fundamental values and preferences however.
A significant amount of political debate seems to revolve around what at least appear to be questions of fact about how to best achieve certain broadly agreed upon aims. I tend to think that a lot of politics and political debate is best understood not as a search for truth but as serving other goals not related to the surface appearance but the more thoughtful and better intentioned participants in the debate do generally seem to believe that they are to some extent debating a factual matter, albeit one that is not as clearly settled by the available evidence as the question of evolution.