Value choices

It would be preferable, of course, if individually and collectively, scientists were more forthcoming with explanations and justifications of their choices of values. But it is difficult to advance strong arguments against their choices if research is practiced only as the asymptotic pursuit of "pure truth" and if the choices are not misrepresented as objective and scientific. However, as it is funded and practiced currently, scientifc research deals almost exclusively with societally important study systems and therefore has practical as well as "purely scientific" objectives. Thus, it is proper to require that decision rules be adequately explained and justified in their societal context and even to look with a jaundiced eye at misrepresentations of value choices as "objective" or "scientific" for whatever reason and in any research context. 

These policy problems will not be resolved through more scientific investigation. "Better" science can only reduce statistical variance. Once that is accomplished, disagreements about value choices still remain. The next two chapters discuss how those disagreements might be resolved, first for private exposures and then for public ones. 

Essential Value Choice Is About Personal Responsibility... 

The choice between liabilities also involves value choices about individual responsibility. Advocating no liability or the negligence rule is consistent with the belief that people individually should be responsible for thinking about their choices and risks and whether to insure against them. Advocating strict liability is consistent with different beliefs. 

The efficient resolution of chemical harms clearly requires infor-mafion about exposure levels and their health consequences, but the assignment of costs for acquiring this information is less a matter of efficiency than proponents of sfricf liability maintain. Even if one believes it would not be efficient for individuals to be responsible for the risks involved in the thousands of choices they make and that firms are the least-cost providers of knowledge about damage prevention, the issue of whefher people should pay firms or other agents to think about risk is a value choice about property rights ownership. 

The decision about which error is more important is not a scientific question that can be resolved through technical analysis. It is a value choice. Of course, better scientific knowledge reduces the probability of making incorrect inferences abouf healfh effects. But even in situations of high certainty, the choice between false-positive and false-negative errors remains. And people invariably weigh the trade-offs differenfly. 

So markets can disseminate information about the health consequences of exposure. But that information leaves undecided many basic value choices. 

In contrast to people in other advanced nations, people in the U.S. value choice, competition, individual and family accountability, and volxmteerism, and are skeptical of the government. As in other nations, political and economic forces have further shaped the U.S. health system, specifically the system of health insurance. As a result, people in the U.S. tolerate a three-tiered system of coverage those with private health insurance, those with public insurance, and those without any coverage. Any reforms are likely to reflect the core values of individual accountability, voluntary participation, and a level of confidence in market forces. 

Note, the inclusion of a fixed value choice in this formula to avoid the singularity in the Error function for small values of its argument. 

Many customers do not consciously evaluate whether one product has this particular competitive priority or that competitive priority. Customers do evaluate the value a product has for them. They may do this consciously or unconsciously, but they are making a value choice when they purchase a product. A very important point about value is that it is the customer s perception that determines the value of the product. Melnyk and Denzler (1996) describe this using the following Value Equation. ... 

He also gave an alternate dollar value choice where property was damaged, but no one was hurt. As dollar values change, we will ignore that here. 

Thus one resorts to contour maps or isosurface plots to represent them. Unfortunately, they show only a part of the information contained in the function, since they depend on the contour (or isosurface) value choice one decides to plot. In order to have a more imambiguous way to analyze a three-dimensional (or higher dimension) function, one could use the framework of the topological analysis. In theoretical chemistiy, this has already been done in the pioneer works of Bader, which originated the Quantum Theory of Atoms in Molecules (QTAIM) [1]. Later this topological analysis was applied to interpret the Electron Localization Function [2-4], and lately it has been applied to the study of the Fukui function [5-7], which is namely the object of this chapter. 

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