External Resources

A number of authors have argued that practical reason has available to it the resources to accommodate value incommensurability in ways that would appear to address the concern raised by Regan.
Charles Taylor outlines two such sets of resources. First, we are able to appeal to “constitutive goods that lie behind the life goods” our sense of which is “fleshed out, and passed on, in a whole range of media: stories, legends, portraits of exemplary figures and their actions and passions, as well as in artistic works, music, dance, ritual, modes of worship, and so on” (1997, 179). Second, we cannot escape the need to live an integrated life or to have this, at a minimum, as an aspiration (1997, 180). Given that a life is finite, leading a life involves an articulation of how different goods fit into it relative to one another. More generally, our lives take on a certain “shape” and this shape provides guidance in making choices in the face of value incommensurability (1997, 183). Michael Stocker similarly points out that alternatives are rarely considered in the abstract (1997). Instead, they are usually considered in concrete ways in which they are valuable—for example, as part of one’s life. Once considered in such concrete contexts, there are considerations according to which alternatives can be evaluated for purposes of justified choice. In his analysis of incommensurability, Fred D’Agostino discusses the role of social institutions in resolving value conflicts (2003).
Another resource that has been invoked is morality. Recall Elizabeth Anderson’s discussion of the example of the choice between saving the life of one’s mother and maintaining a close friendship. Anderson regards the attempt to invoke a comparison of values as incoherent from the perspective of practical reason. Instead, ordinary moral thinking focuses on the obligations one has to one’s mother and one’s friends. In turn, Anderson suggests that the obligations themselves will provide guidance (1997, 106). The availability of such resources to reason is independent of her theories of value and rationality. John Finnis also points to principles of morality as guiding reason in a way that does not depend upon comparing incommensurable values (1997). It remains an open question as to how wide a range of cases it is in which morality can provide such guidance.
One worry that may arise in appealing to such external resources is that they address the problem of value incommensurability by simply denying it. The shape of one’s life or the “constitutive goods that lie behind the life goods,” for example, would appear to be sources of value. Insofar as they provide a value against which to resolve the initial value conflict, it might be said that there was no problem of value incommensurability in the first place.
Two responses to this worry can be given. First, even if these external resources are a source of commensurating value, it does not follow that they provide a systematic resolution to value conflicts. Insofar as the shapes of people’s lives differ, the way in which two individuals resolve the same value conflict may be different. The fact that it may be consistent with reason to resolve the same value conflict in different ways points to the possibility of value incommensurability.
Second, in the case of moral considerations, there may not be any denial of value incommensurability. Moral considerations may provide guidance without comparing alternative courses of action with respect to a common measure (Finnis 1997, 225-226). Furthermore, some philosophers argue that the moral wrongness of certain actions is intelligible only in virtue of the incommensurability of values. For example, Alan Strudler argues that to deliberate about the permissibility of lying in terms of commensurable values is to misunderstand the wrong in lying (1998, 1561-1564).

4.5 Non-Maximizing Choice

Recall that value incommensurability was thought to pose a problem for justified choice in part because it gives rise to the possibility of incomparability among alternatives. In this light, it would appear that conceptions of justified choice that do not rely on comparisons avoid the problems posed by value incommensurability. Stocker aims to provide one such account of justified choice (1990; 1997). Two features help to distinguish his account. First, he argues for evaluating alternatives as “the best” in an absolute, rather than a relative, sense. Optimization and maximization rely on choosing “the best” in a relative sense: given the relevant comparison class, there is no better alternative. To be “the best” in an absolute sense, an alternative “must be, of its kind, excellent—satisfying, or coming close to, ideals and standards” (1997, 206). This is the sense, for example, in which a person can be the best of friends even if we may have even better friends. More generally, an alternative can be absolutely best even if there are better alternatives, and even if an alternative is relatively best, it may not be absolutely best. The second distinctive feature of Stocker’s account is his appeal to a good life, for example, or part of a good life or project. This appeal does not require the alternative to be the best for that life or project. Instead, the alternative need only be good enough for that life or project to qualify as a justified choice.
Stocker’s account of justified choice differs from the concept of “satisficing” as used in the economics and rational choice literature. Introduced into the economics literature by Herbert Simon (1955), satisficing is the process of choosing in which it is rational to stop seeking alternatives when the agent finds one that is “good enough” (Byron 2004). Where satisficing differs from Stocker’s account is that satisficing is instrumentally rational in virtue of a more general maximizing account of choice. In situations in which finding the best alternative is prohibitively costly or impossible, for example, satisficing becomes rational. In contrast, on Stocker’s account, choosing the alternative that is “good enough” is non-instrumentally rational (Stocker 2004).
Objections discussed in previous sections may be raised with respect to Stocker’s account. Suppose two alternatives are both good in an absolute sense and incommensurable. According to Stocker’s account, insofar as both alternatives are good enough for an agent’s life, the choice of either alternative appears justified. As discussed in subsection 4.2, Regan and others may object that the choice of either alternative is not intelligible to the agent. Also, the appeal to a good life may raise the worry discussed in subsection 4.4 that Stocker’s account addresses the problem of value incommensurability by simply denying it.

4.6 Deliberation about Ends

The topic of value incommensurability also arises in accounts that concern deliberation about ends. This section discusses two accounts.
The first account is by Henry Richardson (1994). Richardson argues for the possibility of rational deliberation about ends. According to Richardson, if value commensurability is a prerequisite for rational choice, choices involving conflicting values could be made rationally if each of the values were expressed in terms of their contribution to furthering some common end. This conception of choice treats this common end as the one final end relevant for the choice. According to Richardson, the idea that value commensurability is a prerequisite for rational choice seems to rule out rational deliberation about ends (1994, 15).
Richardson defends an account of rational deliberation about ends that does not depend upon value commensurability. In his account, rational deliberation involves achieving coherence among one’s ends. Briefly, coherence is “a matter of finding or constructing intelligible connections or links or mutual support among them and of removing relations of opposition or conflict” (Richardson 1994, 144). For Richardson, coherence among ends need not result in their being commensurable (1994, 180).
The second account is by Elijah Millgram (1997). Like Richardson, Millgram argues that value commensurability is not a prerequisite for deliberation. However, in contrast to Richardson, Millgram argues that practical deliberation results in the commensurability of ends (1997, 151). By this he means that through deliberation, one develops a coherent conception of what matters and a “background against which one can judge not only that one consideration is more important than another, but how much more important” (1997, 163). For Millgram, commensurating one’s ends is a “central part of attaining unified agency” (1997, 162).
Millgram proposes two ways in which deliberation results in the commensurability of ends. The first proposal is that one can learn what is important and how it is important through experience (1997, 161). The second proposal is that deliberation about ends is “something like the construction by the agent of a conception of what matters … out of raw materials such as desires, ends, preferences, and reflexes” (1997, 168). Millgram identifies an objection to each proposal and briefly responds to each.
The objection to the first proposal is this. If the incommensurability of ends can be resolved by experience, this suggests that the judgment of incommensurability reflects incomplete knowledge about the values expressed in these ends. In other words, experience seems to help only if the values expressed in these ends are themselves commensurable (1997, 168). Millgram responds as follows. The agent who uses her experience to develop a coherent conception of what matters is like the painter who uses her experience to paint a picture that is not a copy of an existing image. Even if the ends are commensurable in her conception of what matters, the values they reflect need not be commensurable just as the painting need not be an exact copy of an existing image.
The objection to the second proposal is this. The second proposal suggests that deliberation is not driven by experience, which places it in tension with the first proposal. Millgram responds by continuing the analogy with the painter. Imagine a painter who paints a picture that is not a copy of an existing image. Just because the painting is not a copy of an existing image does not mean there is no source of correction and constraint on it. Similarly, deliberation may involve the construction by the agent of a conception of what matters, but this does not imply that it is not informed or constrained by experience (1997, 168-169).
This discussion points to two areas of further inquiry that bear on the topic of incommensurability. First, does coherence among ends entail their commensurability? Second, leaving aside the issue of the commensurability of ends, more needs to be said about what is required to deliberate rationally about what matters when that deliberation involves incommensurable values.

5. Social Choices and Institutions

As discussed above, social practices and institutions play a role in the inquiry into value incommensurability. They are claimed by some philosophers to ground the possibility of value incommensurability, as in the case of constitutive incommensurability (subsection 3.2), and to help resolve value conflicts, as in the case of providing external resources for practical reason (subsection 4.4). This section discusses additional areas in which considerations about social institutions intersect with the inquiry into value incommensurability.
To begin, some philosophers have pointed to a structural similarity between a single individual trying to choose in the face of incommensurable values and the process of incorporating the varied interests and preferences of the members of society into a single decision. The preferences of different individuals, for example, may be taken to reflect differing evaluative judgments about alternatives so that combining these different preferences into a single decision becomes analogous to resolving value conflicts in the individual case. Given this analogy, Fred D’Agostino has applied methods of decision-making at the social level from social choice theory and political theory to consider the resolution of value conflicts at the individual level (2003).
At the same time, Richard Pildes and Elizabeth Anderson caution against wholeheartedly adopting this analogy. The analogy, according to them, assumes that individuals already have rationally ordered preferences. Given value incommensurability, however, there is no reason to make such an assumption. In turn, Pildes and Anderson argue that “individuals need to participate actively in democratic institutions to enable them to achieve a rational ordering of their preferences for collective choices” (1990, 2177).
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 (1998). 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” (1994, 780). 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 (1997, 221-222). Michael Walzer’s account of distributive justice also relates value incommensurability to the structure of social and political institutions. According to Walzer (1983), 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 (1986) and Isaiah Berlin’s account (1969). 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.

External Resources

4.5 Non-Maximizing Choice

4.6 Deliberation about Ends

5. Social Choices and Institutions

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