50481. A Response
- Author:
- Tom Farer
- Publication Date:
- 01-2009
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Human Rights and Human Welfare - Review Essays
- Institution:
- Josef Korbel Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver
- Abstract:
- All thinking about neuralgic issues of public policy is work in infinite progress. Lacking inductive or deductive means for achieving certainty about cause and effect, our diagnoses and prescriptions are, by their nature, hypotheses shaped by a highly subjective (partially unconscious) interpretation of history and by an intuitively normative (or perhaps it is more akin to aesthetic) preference. Even if, despite being blinkered by unavoidable preconceptions, we manage through a feat of imaginative analysis, to assemble all of the relevant parts of a problem, there is no protocol for assigning relative weights to them. After all the plodding cerebration come leaps of intuition.