Mon, 10 Oct 1994 15:39:53 -0700 for <socgrad@ucsd.edu>
Date: Mon, 10 Oct 94 18:39:46 EDT
From: David Gibson <dg41@columbia.edu>
To: socgrad@UCSD.EDU
Subject: RCT & preferences
Bob,

I'm not sure the problem of preferences is as acute for RCT as you
make it out to be. Or at least it doesn't need to be. "Preferences
come from a variety of sources, including eccentric personal
histories, biological drives, and socialization," you write. But
happily, when it comes to action in most political and economic
institutional contexts, the problem of the multifariousness of
preferences is resolved by the fact that the generalized resources
at stake in these arenas (power and money, most importantly) are
necessary means NO MATTER WHAT preferences one may have acquired
during the course of one's socialization, etc. Consequently, so
long as people can be assumed to *have* preferences of a
conventional variety (i.e., one is not suicidal and not an
anarchist), their derivative preference for generalized means to
those various ends can be taken for granted as a common orientation
of action. Marcuse aside, one doesn't need to make reference to the
preferences of consumerism to account for the submission of the
working class (see Cohen and Rogers, _On Democracy_, ch. 2), since
the way things are set up, regardless of what your preferences are
you need some source of income -- which means automatically that
you will prefer more income over less income ceteris paribus (or at
least that this will overwhelmingly be the case), and so on. Ergo,
we can go a long way assuming merely that individuals are
*purposive*, so long as what is needed for the pursuit of one
purpose is also needed for the pursuit of another.


David Gibson