PDF versions of these papers and books are available here
Week 1 — What are Values?
This book, Values-Based Data Science & Design, builds on a notion of values derived mainly from the work of Charles Taylor and Ruth Chang. David Velleman has best description of why values would naturally arise as part of society and individual self-understanding. James Gibson’s theories of information pickup and affordances gets at why values can be considered as attentional policies.
Charles Taylor, What is Human Agency? (1977)
Charles Taylor, the Diversity of Goods (1982)
Ruth Chang, Putting Together Morality and Wellbeing (2004)
Ruth Chang, All Things Considered (2004)
David Velleman, Practical Reflection (1989) BOOK
James J Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (1966) BOOK
Week 2 — Problems w. Revealed Preferences in measuring benefit and in social choice
Nobel-prize winning economist Amartya Sen clearly articulated how revealed preference is inadequate for (a) measuring benefit (e.g., in product success metrics of measures of welfare), (b) as an information basis for making group decisions (in econ this is called “social choice functions”); or (c) as a description of how people make rational choices.
Amartya Sen, Rational Fools
Amartya Sen, Behavior and the Concept of Preference
Sen, Equality of What
Week 3 — Transaction Costs, Funnels, Tubes, and Spaces
Coase, …
Week 4 — Mathematical Structure of Values and Choice
Ruth Chang, Incomparability and Practical Reason (1997) BOOK
Isaac Levi, Hard Choices (1986) BOOK
Week 5 — Value Realism
Richard Boyd, How to Be a Moral Realist
Week 6 — Evolution of Norms
Axelrod
Charles Taylor, The Language Animal
Week 7 — Intellectual History, Theory of Ideological Spread & Social Imaginaries
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self