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>The engineering approach would try and decompose the problem without judgement. The whole point of the existence of poilitical economy and sociology is th at
by claudiawerner 7y ago
>The engineering approach would try and decompose the problem without judgement.
The whole point of the existence of poilitical economy and sociology is th at this kind of decomposition is very hard, if not impossible - without judgement implies that those who practice this kind of thinking, or engineering, are able to adopt a view from nowhere, but the fact is that these people belong to groups in society, they are personally affected by the outcome, and absolutely already have pre-existing interests. Furthermore, you automatically figure this as a kind of balancing game with weights, but this implies that the weighting can be done (how do you weigh two qualitative choices?) and further the utilitarian view that all that matters is the maximum weight. Both of these problems are why there is intense debate in moral theory regarding instrumental reason and consequentialism.
- zimbatm 7y agoWeighting is certainly a difficult exercise. Even for engineers where the problems are more concrete, it often relies on building some sort of shared vision that is used to infer a future prediction. In fact most of the disagreements I see is when two engineers have a different view of the future. For sure, both quantitative and qualitative approaches are necessary to build a proper model. Anyways, my point was that by looking at every argument by first placing it on a left vs right scale removes the interesting nuances that could be discussed. I don't know that the engineering approach is necessarily the best tool to solve social inequalities as this is not my topic at all.