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The battle between pluralism and purity
Purity and perfection are alluring, but when they come into conflict with the messiness of pluralism, compromising becomes difficult and we may end up with unintended consequences
People are choosing machines. All day long, we make choices. We choose when to get up, what to wear, what to have for breakfast, how to travel to work, where to do our shopping, and what TV programmes to watch in the evening. Some choices are not so frequent, but they are momentous: we choose where to live, what to do for a living, and who to work for. That is a lot of choosing. How do we manage it all?
Do we somehow rate the various options before us on a scale, and pick the one that scores the highest? That would not be hard to do, if we only had to rate one characteristic that was easy to quantify. But in practice, we often have to choose between options that have many and diverse features. Take, for example, the simple purchase of a packet of biscuits. Milk chocolate or plain? Or no chocolate at all? What about the fat and sugar content? What brand? How much?
Inevitable compromises
If we want to evaluate options like these on a single scale, we would need a clear equivalence between the…
