Making value judgements objectively: how do we decide what’s preferable when creating scenarios for the future?

A little history

One of the first people to really write and describe future scenarios were the utopian writers like the classical greek philosophers like Aristophanes, Xenophanes, Hesiod, Plato and other 18th century writers like Condorcet, Engels, Adam Smith, Thomas More, Rousseau, Kant, Hume, Marx, Engels ad so many others. Each and every one of these writers ans philosophers had underlying moral values that guided their thought of what a utopia should be. For example, Marx's underlying theory was that exploitation amounts to cheating the workers and it should be judged as morally wrong. Rousseau shifted the foundations of morality first, from God to nature, and then beyond nature to society itself. Thomas More used the values of christian humanism to justify his value judgements. In his book Utopia, God is the ultimate source of evaluation.

What are we actually doing when constructing preferable scenarios?

As I discussed in a previous article, to actually know the future is impossible. What we are doing is just using what we know in the present and projecting that knowledge into the future, filling the gaps with what we think might happen given actual tendencies of the market (strong or weak signals…