Understanding Decisions About Foreign Policy Interventions to Save Lives

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The workshop examines, in a direct and intense way, issues of valuation, judgment, preference, and choice that have engaged humanity for centuries and, today, are at the heart of the modern intellectual enterprise known as "Behavioral Decision Theory." Two primary intellectual debates lie at the heart of this proposal. The first, involving economists, philosophers, and other students of choice, concerns the influence on decisions of expressed or stated values as compared to values that are revealed through choices. Previous research has shown that the values indicated by these two modes of assessment often differ. One explanation for such inconsistency has centered around the weighting of the various attributes or objectives of decision options and the evidence for systematic discrepancies in weighting associated with expressed and revealed preferences. In particular, we shall examine the hypothesis that objectives such as national security and economic security get relatively greater weight compared to humanitarian objectives when values are revealed through decisions as opposed to being explicitly stated. A second intellectual debate addressed by the workshop concerns how tradeoffs involving multiple dimensions of value "including such disparate concerns as lives, costs, national security, uncertainty, politics, and reputation" should be evaluated as part of difficult national policy choices. It is hard to imagine an issue that has broader significance than understanding the place of humanitarian objectives in national security decisions. Millions of lives and global security depend on these decisions. Do the political, social, economic, cultural, and humanitarian values that we assume should guide rational decision making actually exist in some coherent and consistent form? If so, what are these considered values and how do we ensure that our decisions, at the end of the day, are in accord with these values? This project addresses these vital questions within the framework of a workshop designed to clarify and address an apparent disconnect between stated humanitarian aspirations and values and subsequent lack of commensurate actions. Questions are asked of public and expert participants in a workshop setting to better understand the underlying reasons why expressed humanitarian values may collapse in the decision-making process. A second objective is to understand the thinking of decision makers with hands-on experience in decisions about whether to intervene in other countries for humanitarian reasons.