The Stanford Philosophy Encyclopedia on Incommensurability
(still photo from The Meaning of Life)
When I was eleven years old (or so) and trying to figure out the world, the heavens, the existence of God, eternity and the theory of relativity along with the impedimentia of puberty -- then including garter belts, curlers, braces, nylons and the strange and frightening rituals of social class based upon the speed with which you were able to migrate from jacks and jump-rope to Seventeen Magazine -- I had a major ephiphany about what heaven was..
Being the major geek I was (and obviously still am) the answer was as follows:
Heaven Is Complete Knowledge; In Heaven, I'd Know and Understand Everything from the Origin of the Universe to Why My Dad Kept Getting Fired.
Little could I know that I was describing my own actual, nearly achievable Wikipedian, LinkedIn, Google-Knowledge-Based Future.
Today, courtesy of Concurring Opinions (and my fractured-rib housebound "might as well blog" state, I found Shaming Shirkers or Shunning the Sickest with a link to the Stanford Philsophy Encyclopedia online. More particularly, I found this essay on incommensurability, which I could have used while writing my masters thesis on The Subjective Meaning of Money.
Why should negotiators care about incommensurability? Because litigators and business people deal with it every day of the week, every week of the month and every month of the year.
The problem that most bedevils litigators the most when attempting to settle a lawsuit, for example, is how to value losses that cannot easily be measured in quantifiable terms. And more difficult than that -- how to convince a jury that they should reduce personal, emotional losses to monetary terms -- a task that many people find not just difficult, but odious and immoral.
The Incommensurability of Injuries for Which Parties Seek Monetary Compensation
As I note in my thesis:
Difficult as it may be to reach a verdict that finds the defendant liable or not liable for a negligently caused injury, it pales in comparison to the nearly impossible mental and emotional work of assigning monetary value to non-economic harms such as humiliation, unresolved physical or emotional pain, or the loss of a loved one.
When presented with that task, the idea of value itself begins to collapse under the weight of its own first principles. Why does anyone pay $1,000 for a pair of Jimmy Choo shoes? $10 million for an early Hockney? $10,000 for the fresh ova ‘harvested’ from the womb of an Ivy League college girl of suitable parentage and social class willing to trade her fertility for help with her tuition?
Such matters are generally considered incommensurable, i.e., one cannot be substituted for the other nor any two incommensurables treated as part of a single category to permit assignment of value and potential rational exchange.
Attempting to value incommensurables creates great discomfort and cognitive dissonance at a minimum and defies valuation at a maximum. Social, cultural, political, legal, artistic
and professional communities are often responsible for creating and defending boundaries between commensurables and incommensurables.These include
art critics and museum professionals who certify some objects are masterworks...; attending physicians who invoke clinical wisdom and professional privilege to designate some medical cases extraordinary...[;]intimate others [such as] the others and fathers of premature newborns...who are encouraged by hospital staff to name their babies, dress them in clothes brought from home, personalise their ward cribs with toys and photographs, and otherwise mark their infants as unique [; and,] organisations...that designate official historic sites, landmark neighbourhoods, nd wildlife habitats... Whether they are priceless artworks, national treasures, or precious children, incommensurable things are often regarded as somehow sacred, and like all sacred objects, their distinctiveness is defined through symbols and ritual [such as] the sequestering of certain cash…[that] define[s] it as money for distinctive purposes and thus incommensurable with other savings.
For the complete article, click here.
Stanford Wisdom on Incommensurabilty to the Rescue
The Stanford Encyclopedia entry directly addresses the difficulty of the law's project of compensating people for harms that are not readily reducable to quantative or monetary values:
Value incommensurability also has been considered with respect to the law. Matthew Adler discusses the variety of ways in which legal scholars have engaged the topic of value incommensurability. One question is whether the possibility of value incommensurability poses a problem for evaluating government policy options and laws, more generally. Some authors respond that it does not.
Cass Sunstein, for example, argues that recognition of value incommensurability helps “to reveal what is at stake in many areas of the law.” According to Sunstein, important commitments of a well-functioning legal system are reflected in recognizing value incommensurability.
More generally, a number of scholars have focused on the relation between value incommensurability and the structure of social and political institutions. John Finnis, for example, takes the open-endedness of social life to render it impossible to treat legal or policy choices as involving commensurable alternatives. Michael Walzer’s account of distributive justice also relates value incommensurability to the structure of social and political institutions.According to Walzer, different social goods occupy different “spheres,” each one governed by a distinct set of distributive norms. What is unjust is to convert the accumulation of goods in one sphere into the accumulation of goods in another sphere without regard for that second sphere’s distributive norms.
Underlying Walzer’s account, it seems, is a commitment to a kind of constitutive incommensurability. Given its connection to the possibility of plural and incompatible ways of life, the concept of value incommensurability also plays a role in many accounts of political liberalism, including Joseph Raz’s account and Isaiah Berlin’s account. It is the latter’s inquiry into the relation between incommensurable values and political institutions that can be credited with motivating much of the contemporary inquiry into value incommensurability.
How to accomplish this task (and understand these principles in lay terms) next week.
