The incommensurability of values problem

Journal of Nationalism, Memory, & Language Politics, 2019

This paper starts with arguing that the main reason why value pluralism has become conflictual is that it challenges people's socio-cultural identity. The next section gives a summary of recent sociological research on socio-cultural tensions and conflicts in the Netherlands and Europe. They are closely linked to "globalization issues," such as cosmopolitism, immigration, and cultural integration. This shows that the prediction of the modernization theory, according to which substantial socio-cultural values would be replaced by a universalist, procedural ethics, has not come true. The third section discusses the philosophical reasons of the potentially conflictual character of today's value pluralism: the fragility of socio-cultural identity, the spread of the culture of expressive individualism and the ethics of authenticity, and the influence of the (politics of) recognition of socio-cultural differences. The fourth section discusses two philosophical responses to the conflictual character of value pluralism. First, there is Taylor's plea for a broadening of our socio-cultural horizon and a transformation of our common standards of (value-)judgments, based on his idea of a fusion of cultural horizons. In spite of its obvious merits, Taylor underestimates the degree of cultural distance that characterizes many instances of value pluralism. Second, there is an idea of cultural hospitality, which is an application of Ricoeur's idea of linguistic hospitality to the cultural sphere. It is more modest than Taylor's proposal, since it recognizes the unbridgeable gap that separates different cultures and their values. Another even more modest suggestion to diminish the conflictual character of value pluralism is the virtue of tolerance, which combines the idea that I have good reasons for my value attachments with the recognition that my values are not the completion of the ideal of human existence.

Acta Analytica, 2023

Value pluralism is the metaphysical thesis that there is a plurality of values at the fundamental level of the evaluative domain. Value monism, on the other hand, is the claim that there is just one fundamental value. Pluralists, it is commonly argued, have an edge over monists when it comes to accounting for the conspicuous heterogeneity of the evaluative domain and the rationality of regretting well-justified decisions. Monists, in turn, seem to provide a far more plausible account of rational evaluative decision-making. I argue that the impression of a theoretical stalemate, which is suggested by the exchange of those arguments, is premature. An assessment of the sub-positions in both camps, in conjunction with an analysis of value fundamentality based on the notion of grounding, reveals that certain versions of pluralism and monism-which I call moderate positions-can counter the respective objections. Thus, moderate value pluralism and moderate value monism emerge as the strongest positions in both camps. I conclude that the further debate should center around those two positions.

Acta Analytica, 2023

Value pluralism is the metaphysical thesis that there is a plurality of values at the fundamental level of the evaluative domain. Value monism, on the other hand, is the claim that there is just one fundamental value. Pluralists, it is commonly argued, have an edge over monists when it comes to accounting for the conspicuous heterogeneity of the evaluative domain and the rationality of regretting well-justified decisions. Monists, in turn, seem to provide a far more plausible account of rational evaluative decision-making. I argue that the impression of a theoretical stalemate, which is suggested by the exchange of those arguments, is premature. An assessment of the sub-positions in both camps, in conjunction with an analysis of value fundamentality based on the notion of grounding, reveals that certain versions of pluralism and monism-which I call moderate positions-can counter the respective objections. Thus, moderate value pluralism and moderate value monism emerge as the strongest positions in both camps. I conclude that the further debate should center around those two positions.

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.

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.

In this article, I examine a recent turn in the paradigm debate towards the incommensurability thesis and the proposed possibility of adjudication between theories from different paradigms. In particular, I argue that McKelvey and Baum’s views (among others) appear to be based on a desire to reduce paradigmatic pluralism and, in turn, reduce uncertainty about what is the empirically valid view among competing theories. By contrast, I make the case that an incommensurability of values still permeates any attempt to engage in theory-adjudication. Such values, I assert, will stall any attempt to adjudicate between theories from different paradigms. In the face of widespread cognitive bias, confi rmation bias and belief perseverance, we cannot, I conclude, hope to deal with this issue in any satisfactory way.

Contemporary Political Theory, 2006

Some theorists have argued recently that Berlinian value pluralism points not to liberalism, as Berlin supposed, but, in effect, to some form of communitarianism. To what extent is this true, and, to the extent that it is true, what kind of communitarianism fits best with the pluralist outlook? I argue that pluralists should acknowledge community as an important source of value and as a substantial value in itself, but they should also be prepared to question traditions and to respect values other than community. In particular, pluralism points to personal autonomy as playing a special role when we must choose among incommensurable goods in conflict. Consequently, the pluralist outlook is at odds with conservative communitarianisms that tend to place existing traditions beyond question, and with radical variants of communitarianism, such as Marxism and classical anarchism, which look forward to future communities in which the need to cope with hard public choices has largely been eliminated. Rather, Berlinian pluralism fits best with a liberal or moderate kind of communitarianism that balances community with other goods, especially personal autonomy.

Journal of Philosophical Research, 2017

In this paper I challenge the claim that each party in the original position will have a first-ranked preference for an identical set of principles of justice. I maintain, by contrast, that the original position allows parties to choose on the basis of different conceptions of rationality, which in turn may lead to a reasonable disagreement concerning the principles of justice selected. I then argue that this reasonable disagreement should not lead us to abandon contractualism, but rather to reconstruct it in the form of a two-stage process, where parties first build individual preference rankings for alternative conceptions of justice and then work towards a reconciliation of the divergent conceptions that are chosen in the first stage. Finally, I claim that threshold prioritarianism is a strong candidate for selection in this reconciliatory stage, since it manages to address both the legitimate complaints of parties that would prefer a conception of justice focused on the most disadvantaged positions in society and the legitimate complaints of parties that would prefer a conception of justice in which less or no special weight is assigned to the worst-off positions.

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.

Inspired by Michael Trebilcock’s commitment to pluralism, this paper analyses the balancing and accommodating of competing values, often a central task in the making of legal judgments. The first section of the paper shows why it is so difficult to resist being utilitarian in one’s approach to this problem. Using the methods of social choice theory, the argument shows that some seemingly reasonable conditions ineluctably lead to the utilitarian result where the different values are suitably weighted and summed. However, the second section demonstrates that the utilitarian approach is less compelling than it appears. An alternative method for the aggregation of values, namely, the product rule proposed by John Nash, is also available. The product rule recommends different results than the utilitarian summation rule and does so in a way that does less violence to the genuine pluralism of very different values. The final section of the paper relates these different results to the law’s commitment to proportionality and to sequenced and bilateral processes of adjudication. Keywords: proportionality, pluralism, incommensurability, utilitarian addition rule, Nash product rule, path dependence, sequenced adjudication