Distinguish Factual vs Value Differences

6. Civic Knowledge and Skills

This introductory article was written by ChatGPT at the direction of Heidi Burgess, who reviewed, edited, and approved the final content.
For more information

June 24, 2026

One of the most important distinctions in constructive conflict work is the difference between factual disagreements and value disagreements. Factual questions are about what is, what happened, what causes what, or what is likely to happen under different conditions. Value questions are about what matters, what is fair, what risks are acceptable, what rights should be protected, and what kind of society people want to build. These two kinds of questions are often tangled together in public controversies. But they cannot be resolved in the same way, and confusing them makes good decision making much harder.

Science and other forms of disciplined inquiry are designed to help answer factual questions. They can help determine whether a vaccine reduces disease, whether a river is being polluted, whether a policing strategy reduces crime, whether a tax policy affects employment, or whether a proposed development would increase traffic. Such answers are rarely perfect. They often come with uncertainty, competing models, incomplete data, and legitimate expert disagreement. Still, factual inquiry can greatly improve public debate by narrowing what is plausibly true and by identifying the likely consequences of different choices.The BI essays on distinguishing facts from values and joint fact-finding emphasize that many factual disputes can be addressed through better evidence and more trusted processes for gathering it.

Value questions are different. These are questions about what is good and bad, better and worse, moral or immoral. Evidence can inform them, but it cannot settle them by itself. Science can estimate the cost of a regulation, the number of people likely to benefit, the risks of inaction, or the probability of unintended consequences. It cannot tell a community how much economic sacrifice is justified to protect health, how to balance liberty against security, how much inequality is morally acceptable, or which harms should receive priority when not all harms can be avoided. Those are ethical and political judgments. They require public deliberation, moral reasoning, and democratic choice. The National Academies' work on using science as evidence in public policy makes this point in practical terms: evidence can support policy, but evidence does not remove the need for judgment.

Many conflicts become more bitter when people disguise value arguments as factual ones. A person may say, "The evidence proves this policy is right," when the evidence only shows that the policy would have certain effects. Another may reject a factual finding because accepting it would make a preferred moral or political position harder to defend. In both cases, the debate becomes confused. People argue about the facts when the deeper disagreement is about values, or they argue about values while refusing to acknowledge inconvenient facts. A more constructive approach asks two questions separately: "What do we know, and how well do we know it?" and "Given what we know, what should we do?"

This distinction does not mean that facts and values are completely separate in real life. Values often influence which questions people think are worth asking, which risks they find most alarming, and which tradeoffs they consider acceptable. Factual findings can also change value judgments by revealing harms or benefits that people had not understood. The point is not to pretend that facts are value-free in every respect. The point is to keep the two kinds of reasoning clear enough that each can be handled honestly. Communities need trustworthy analysis to clarify factual claims. They also need inclusive deliberation to address the value choices that remain after the facts are better understood.

In practical conflict resolution, distinguishing factual from value differences can reveal where progress is possible. If people disagree about a factual claim, joint fact-finding, independent analysis, transparent data, or expert review may help. If they disagree about values, the task is different: they may need dialogue to understand why others value things differently, and then a fair democratic process to design an outcome that protects everyone's values as much as possible, and uses a legitimate process for chosing between values when hard choice must be made.

Many public conflicts involve both kinds of disagreement. Constructive decision making therefore requires asking which parts of the conflict can be clarified by evidence, which parts require moral or political judgment, and how the two can be brought together without pretending that one can replace the other. The Burgesses Common Ground Exercise does exactly that.

—————————

This page was created by ChatGPT in response to this prompt. It was then reviewed, edited, supplemented and approved by Heidi Burgess. More information about how and why we are using AI in this way, and about the growing number of ways in which Beyond Intractability is using ChatGPT, Claude and other AI systems to generate content and build out the BI system, is available on our BI/AI Overview Page.