The following description of this class is paraphrased from the introductory lecture  (1/13/98) given by Professor Terry Daniel.

This was a loosely tructured, exploratory, seminar-type class that required significant contributions from the class with weekly written assignments and a major term paper.
The class focused on the inter-relationships of these topics or viewpoints:

Philosophy.   A reading from William James, Essays in Pragmatism,  "The
  moral philosophy and the moral life," was the foundation for examining
  varying views of values and preferences.
Economics
Formal Decision/Policy Analysis
Marketing/Advertising (huge amounts of literature here)
Persuasive Communication (a spill over with advertising) (anti-smoking campaigns as  opposed to selling cereal)
Public health domain and medical ethics
Psychology
  Attitudes/Beliefs from social psychology
  Decision making (in the context of individuals making choices among
    options; often referred to as "rational")
  Evolution-based models
  Cognitive vs. Affective (modularity issues)
  Psychophysiology of values and preferences

An example of the practical uses of looking at values and preferences and of the complications in using the information gathered was demonstrated in this example from environmental issues research.

Environmentalists have spent some time looking at values and the way we make our choices or define our preferences, and they have come up with five general ethical categories of perception which relate roughly to political levels and income levels.

The first says that nature is a threat to human survival and that it is evil.  In the analyses of question sets provided in research, those who considered human survival the absolute most important fell into a category defined as, "anti-environment."

The next group of "benign indifference" includes people who rate that people as a valuable store house of raw materials.  Humans are created as fundamentally different than the rest of nature.  This group believes that the ability to think  makes humans fundamentally different from and above the rest of nature.

Larger proportion of people fit into the third, "utilitarian conservation category."  It follows these lines:  If you believe that human cruelty toward animals is wrong because it may lead to cruelty toward humans, or humans should manage nature efficiently as possible, protecting ecological resources, this is where you fit.  You think in line of, "it serves us, is useful to us, and so we should manage it. "

The fourth, a growing group, is "stewardship".  In this group go people who believe it is our religious or spiritual duty to take care of nature; that it should be protected for future generations; that it should be protected  because it is God's creation or because it is sacred.  Those statements are the basic notion that whether it is founded on religious belief or ecology, humans have a responsibility to take care of nature.  We are morally required to do so.  But, it's important to note that this view point still puts us in charge of nature.

Last ethical category is "radical environmentalism".  Humans should not cause needless pain and suffering to animals and nature should be protected because all things are interconnected.  All living things have a spirit.  Nature should be protected because all living things have a right to exist.

However, you can take a group of people, test and categorize them with a set of ethical categories like this and still not be able to make an accurate prediction as to what they will choose.  Because if you make the question as personal as, "we're going to dam up Sabino Canyon to make it a CAP reservoir," those questions and categories fail as predictors because specificity and concreteness are factors in what people prefer to do.

There is a lot of indication that the part of your psyche that stands on a picket line or signs a petition may not be the same part of your psyche that answers one of these surveys.  Verbal statements and answers may be from one aspect of your psychology, and the actions you take in your daily living may be independent of the verbal one.  We may be very modular psychologically.
 
Taught Spring of 1998 by
Terry C. Daniel, Ph.D.
Professor, Psychology
 University of Arizona
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