Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or they have different values. One of the things politicians say is "we are going to follow science" to avoid making a value decision. Science can tell you the risks/benefits/tradeoffs of a decision, but you have to ultimately make a value judgement about the best course of action. Science can tell us various things about what the wolf does and what its loss or population reduction is expected to do within a certain…
As you said, both sides can follow the science and make different value judgements. Unfortunately that rarely seems to be the case. For example, the pandemic, it seems most people agreed that shutdowns and masks were acceptable to save that many lives. However, politicians did not make the trade-off argument. They generally just challenged the science completely. First, that the pandemic was even real, then that it w…
The conservative argument on the danger of the virus is that it’s dangerous to old people and those with preexisting conditions, but not very dangerous to healthy people who are relatively younger. This is a valid subjective interpretation of the science. Whether something is safe or dangerous is a value judgement.
The CDC originally said don’t mask, that you can get it from surfaces, that it spreads through the air instead of droplets. For the lockdowns, the conservative argument was that they were too extreme given the costs, something like “destroying the global economy disproportionately hurts the people least affected by the virus: labor, small business owners, children, students, and so on, while having little effect on the relatively richer but more affected old”. The point was that lockdowns didn’t justify the costs.
I don’t agree with most of this, but you’re so far off the mark with the strawman of these arguments that I don’t think you’ve seriously understood them beyond immediate dismissal on partisan grounds.
If we did this pandemic over again, but it was a dem President going into an election year, I think Dems being anti lockdown would’ve been the most obvious outcome, because lockdowns hurt the exact people the party calls its constituents: lower classes, people of color, labor, young people, etc, while most benefiting the wealthier and older population.