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Plagiarism, however, may not be the most serious breach that could concern BJSM readers. Let us illustrate with an example from an editorial not accused of plagiarism, ‘When to retire after concussion?’3 In this 2001 editorial, McCrory fundamentally changed a quote from sports medicine pioneer Thorndike, in an egregious warping of Thorndike’s published words.3

Consider any choice that affects some social policy. A decision that considers evidence will, at its heart, contain some kind of explicit or implicit “because” statement: “We are doing X because the evidence says Y.” But can evidence ever truly speak for itself, in the sense of being reducible to objective utterances that are either correct or in need of correction? Before answering, consider what you'd prefer. Would you rather receive evidence that was free of any value judgments imposed by human actors, that was laden with value judgments that you agree with, or laden with value judgments that you disagree with? The central assertion of this essay is that, throughout policy analysis but especially in assessments of the costs and benefits of regulating versus encouraging new technologies (cost‐benefit analysis, or CBA), the first possibility above is a mirage, and the second and third are self‐contradictory. Instead, we are overwhelmingly confronted with a fourth possibility: we receive evidence that appears to be (or is deliberately touted as) value neutral but is suffused with hidden value judgments. In the second part of this essay, entitled “A Guided Tour through Inevitable Value Judgments,” I identify in a systematic way approximately sixty‐five value judgments that are routinely (in some cases, invariably) made in CBA, but that are kept hidden. For each judgment, I discuss its genesis as it is most commonly invoked in CBA, explain how it is hidden in plain sight, and offer one or more value judgments that could be made instead of or in addition to the conventional one. The alternative judgments highlight the width of the spectrum of reasonable conclusions an analyst could reach merely by substituting other judgments for the ones currently embedded. Bringing hidden value judgments to light is doubly valuable. First, it allows discussion to ensue on a level playing field; instead of conclusory statements about what the evidence says, transparency permits statements taking the form of “when channeled through these value judgments, the evidence says this.” Perhaps more importantly, transparency about value judgments permits participants in the discussions to offer interpretations of evidence contingent on there being different value judgments chosen at one or more points in the analysis, interpretations that may suggest that alternative course(s) of action are preferable to the one being championed.

Why might the U.S. EPA and its stakeholders be spending so much effort refining allometric scaling procedures, dialing back the estimation of exposure to the maximally exposed individual, and positing sophisticated nonlinear modes of action, while continuing to make the unscientific assertion that we are all equally susceptible to carcinogenesis? I observe that the first three improvements tend to result in lower estimated risk and less environmental protection, whereas shining a light on human variation in cancer susceptibility would tend to have the opposite effect on risk estimates.

Regulatory decisions on environmental issues often entail comparing a proposed regulation’s benefits to its costs, usually presuming that the rule should be adopted only if benefits justify costs. Conventional benefits estimation usually defines benefits of a human-mortality-reducing regulation as the product of the number of lives expected to be prolonged and the “value of a statistical life,” usually estimated by averaging citizens’ responses when asked their willingness to pay for a specified small reduction in the probability of their own death. A novel approach to estimating life-prolonging benefits elicits stated preference tradeoffs between national benefits and national costs, a method more compatible with actual regulatory decisions (Finkel and Johnson Environ Law 48:453–476, 2018). All national-tradeoff studies to date presented subjects with only one magnitude, thus not testing within-person scope sensitivity. A U.S. experiment (n = 600) presented ascending or descending sequences of national regulatory benefits (a hypothetical regulation prolongs 10, 100, or 1000 lives) or national regulatory costs ( $100 million, $ 1 billion, or $10 billion). The former yielded decreasing, the latter increasing, values per life when magnitudes increased, without within-frame order effects. Willingness to trade off benefits and costs generally rose or fell less than tenfold overall with a tenfold benefit/cost change, although strict proportionality and super-proportionality also occurred in various sub-groups. Averaged across frames, the implicit value per life prolonged increased with regulatory initiative size, contradicting the premise of invariant life value. Trimmed results mostly matched values of a statistical life used by U.S. federal regulatory agencies. This novel method could expand regulators’ benefit-valuing repertoire.