On the strategy of social planning

Social planning deals centrally with human values—values which are important even though they do not appear as explicit factors in the classical problems of social welfare.The philosophical question as to whether facts can provide a logical basis for values need not be considered by the planner. He focuses, rather, on the specific interplay of values and facts in the concrete context of his concern.In the analysis of this interplay we can distinguish a number ofprinciples, criteria for the specification of social ends; for instance, the maximin principle, that improvements in a value distribution consisting in cutting off the bottom of the distribution have priority over raising the top.Social ends, in turn, are analysable intoideals, goals, andobjectives—directions, regions and points, respectively, in the value space.Cutting across these are the desiredqualities of the experience of pursuing those ends, qualities allowing for the assessment of planned alternatives by configurational judgment, rather than by a presumed summation of component values.A report submitted to the Social Planning Group of the Planning Board of Puerto Rico in 1958, not previously published.