Problems of Incommensurability

DPhil University of Oxford , 2007

This dissertation investigates the possible implications of incommensurability of values for practical reason and distributive justice. Under certain conditions incommensurability of values causes ‘incomplete comparability’ of options. Incomplete comparability may lead to rational undecidability, incomplete rational justification of a choice and incapability of rationally assigning determinate relative weights to conflicting valuable alternatives. The results of the research suggest that incomplete comparability prevents a complete ordering of conflicting demands of distributive justice and renders a principled and theoretical solution unattainable.

Cleveland State Law Review, 1990

My comments in this paper are directed to just one argument, or rather one cluster of arguments, deployed by John Finnis in just three pages of Natural Law and Legal Reasoning.' This may seem like too narrow a mandate; but I hope that Finnis's readers will agree with me that this argument is of vital importance, not just to Finnis's own position, or even to natural law theory alone, but to the deepest ambitions of moral philosophy. I am referring to Finnis's argument that the goods and bads at stake in legal, moral and political choice are incommensurable, and to the conclusions he draws from this argument. Finnis believes that this incommensurability thesis implies that no nonmoral grounds exist sufficient to compel every rational agent to prefer one such good to another. Unique rational decision among incommensurable goods is impossible. (Call this the "nondecidability thesis". 2) He does believe, however, that rational grounds exist for rejecting the intentional imposition of "bads," and that these grounds "must be respected unless some reason for that action is rationally preferable [to refraining from that act]. ' 3 But (Finnis argues) the nondecidability thesis tells us that no reason for that action is rationally preferable to refraining from it. From this Finnis concludes that "there are moral absolutes, excluding intentional killing, intentional injury to the person, deliberate deception for the sake of securing desired results, enslavement which treats a human person as an object of a lower rank of being than the autonomous human subject." ' 4 These absolutes, I take it, will yield part of the content of substantive natural law, and so Finnis's argument is of vital importance for the claim that natural law has content. Moreover, Finnis concludes by pointing out that if the incommensurability thesis is true, any approach to legal theory that relies on commensuration of goods-the economic analysis of law is a paradigm of such an approach-must be abandoned. Obviously, then, much turns on Finnis's arguments for incommensurability, for the nondecidability thesis, and for moral absolutes. I shall be criticizing these arguments. Let me make clear, however, that though I disbelieve the arguments and some conclusions Finnis draws from them, I don't think that this affects the fundamental claim that there is a natural law, nor many claims Finnis makes about it in his great book Natural Law and Natural Rights 5 (such as his defense of the maxim that unjust

Compromises in Democracy , 2020

In the chapter I discuss compromises in ethical conflict and disagreement with respect to public decisions between conflicting incommensurable valuable alternatives. I argue that in some cases incommensurability prevents a principled compromise, which is defined as a rational way to achieve a trade-off or balance between conflicting values. Incommensurable values, which are usually at stake in the pursuit of a compromise, lack an equivalence relation, which prevents a determinate trade-off or balance between them. This is especially problematic with respect to the pursuit of compromises in ethical conflicts, including conflicts of justice, where we need a rational and ethical justification for the final decision. I will show how a deliberative democratic procedure can make the final decision legitimate but that, in the relevant cases, it cannot avoid an ethical deficit.

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, Vol. 15, Issue 1, pp. 57-70, 2012

Two competing accounts of value incomparability have been put forward in the recent literature. According to the standard account, developed most famously by Joseph Raz, 'incomparability' means determinate failure of the three classic value relations (better than, worse than, and equally good): two value-bearers are incomparable with respect to a value V if and only if (i) it is false that x is better than y with respect to V, (ii) it is false that x is worse than y with respect to V and (iii) it is false that x and y are equally good with respect to V. Most philosophers have followed Raz in adopting this account of incomparability. Recently, however, John Broome has advocated an alternative view, on which value incomparability is explained in terms of vagueness or indeterminacy. In this paper I aim to further Broome's view in two ways. Firstly, I want to supply independent reasons for thinking that the phenomenon of value incomparability is indeed a matter of the indeterminacy inherent in our comparative predicates. Secondly, I attempt to defend Broome's account by warding off several objections that worry him, due mainly to Erik Carlson and Ruth Chang.

Philosophical Studies, 2008

Many recent attacks on consequentialism and several defenses of pluralism have relied on arguments for the incommensurability of value. Such arguments have, generally, turned on empirical appeals to aspects of our everyday experience of value conflict. My intention, largely, is to bypass these arguments and turn instead to a discussion of the conceptual apparatus needed to make the claim that values are incommensurable. After delineating what it would mean for values to be incommensurable, I give an a priori argument that such is impossible. It is widely accepted that value is conceptually tied to desire. I argue that, more specifically, it is proportional to merited desire strength. This connection gives one a metric of all value if there is any such thing. This metric entails that value is a complete ordering over all states of affairs, or, in other words, that value is commensurable.

12 Law, Probability, and Risk (2013) 259-74

""At least in some cases, the values confronted in legal decision-making appear to be incommensurable. Some legal theorists resist incommensurability because they fear that this presents an overwhelming obstacle to rational decision-making. By offering a close analysis of proportionality and, more particularly, measures of proportional value satisfaction, I show that this fear is unfounded. Comparative measures of proportional value satisfaction do not require the values to be commensurable. However, assuming incommensurability presents us with the problem of public significance in the proportional satisfaction of values. When two values are commensurable, this public significance is provided by the mediating effects of the overarching third value that provides the common measure of the values. However, when this common measure is removed, then the public significance of value satisfaction must be otherwise achieved. This is why I propose an equal proportional value satisfaction as the most appropriate proportionality maximand. Under equal proportional value satisfaction, the proportional satisfaction of any one value has significance for each and every other value. This kind of public significance is interpersonal rather than impersonal (or second-personal rather than third-personal in the terms recently made popular by Stephen Darwall). The paper then shows that the legal process that is most appropriate to equal proportionality is a process that implements defeasible legal rules. Keywords: rules and principles, balancing, pluralism and incommensurability, rational decision-making, proportionality, defeasibility Now Published in 12 Law, Probability, and Risk (2013) 259-74""

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2014

We claim that there are important cases of "incommensurability" in public policymaking, in which all relevant reasons are not always comparable on a common scale as better, worse, or equally good. Courts often fail to confront this. We are by no means the first to contend that incommensurability exists. Yet incommensurability's proponents have failed to sway the courts mainly because they overlook the fact that there are two types of incommensurability. The first ("incompleteness incommensurability") consists of the lack of any appropriate metric for making the comparison. We argue that this type of incommensurability is relatively unproblematic in that courts are well-positioned to construct such a metric if necessary. In contrast, the second ("comparison-excluding incommensurability") consists of a commitment that blocks comparison on a common scale, even if such a scale does exist. Incommensurability of this sort has not been widely acknowledged and does raise deep problems for judicial decision-making. When facing comparison-excluding incommensurability, the courts should not always disregard such commitments, but should acknowledge them in case such commitments are justified in a procedural manner. In this sense, comparison-exclusion incommensurability plays a key constitutive role in the construction of both individual identities and collective identities.

Politics, Philosophy, and Economics 13: 237-268 , 2014

Some theorists believe that there is a plurality of values, and that in many circumstances these values are incommensurable, or at least incomparable. Others believe that all values are reducible to a single super-value, or that even if there is a plurality of irreducible values these values are commensurable. But I will argue that both sides have got it wrong. Values are neither commensurable nor incommensurable, at least not in the way most people think. We are free to believe in incommensurability or not, depending on what particular conception of morality we want to embrace. Incommensurability is accordingly not a theory about value. It is a presupposition that provides a necessary background condition for a certain kind of value to exist. It is therefore not the kind of view that can be morally true or false. As a presupposition, it can only be accepted or rejected on grounds that do not presuppose that morality already exists. Incommensurability is, like the rejection of hard determinism, one of the presuppositions on which morality as we know it happens to be based.

Ratio, 2005

I consider the implications of incommensurability for the assumption, in rational choice theory, that a rational agent's preferences are complete. I argue that, contrary to appearances, the completeness assumption and the existence of incommensurability are compatible. Indeed, reflection on incommensurability suggests that one's preferences should be complete over even the incommensurable alternatives one faces. 1 This conception of incommensurability appears in (Raz 1986, 323) and (Broome 2000, 26). For some subtle points concerning the connection between vagueness and this conception of incommensurability, see . 2 Compare, for example, and in Incommensurability, Incomparability and Value, edited by Ruth Chang.

Oxford Handbook of Value Theory, 2014

This introductory article describes the phenomena of incommensurability and incomparability, how they are related, and why they are important. Since incomparability is the more significant phenomenon, the paper takes that as its focus. It gives a detailed account of what incomparability is, investigates the relation between the incomparability of values and the incomparability of alternatives for choice, distinguishes incomparability from the related phenomena of parity, indeterminacy, and noncomparability, and, finally, defends a view about practical justification that vindicates the importance of incomparability — assuming it exists — for practical reason.