Setting measurement thresholds is a normative judgment about who deserves support.

Evidence

Standardization can easily have a normative dimension. This is related to the idea of thresholds in the literature on poverty. Moving the threshold up or down is making an assessment about the individual and probably whether they deserve some kind of public support. “Low values” should be determined by policy and normative goals and not just the distribution of the data. Those goals, for example policy targets, have clear normative underpinnings and dimensions. This is yet another reason why using the distribution of the data to standardize is implicitly a normative choice. — Gary Goertz, Social Science Concepts and Measurement, 903

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the poverty-line and deprivation-threshold debates in development economics and welfare policy.
• SEED: Essay angle: ‘The Number That Decides Who Eats’ — how seemingly technical poverty thresholds encode moral verdicts about deservingness.
• CANDY: The punchy version: drawing the poverty line is a moral act disguised as arithmetic.