Abstract
In 1991 an internal memo from the World Bank’s Chief Economist Lawrence Summers was leaked to the world’s press.2 Uproar followed, for in the memo Summers made certain policy recommendations concerning pollution based entirely on monetary considerations. In itself this might not be thought objectionable, but Summers was talking about the morbidity and mortality associated with high levels of pollution; the third world was under polluted and so he suggested that such pollution be exported to the less developed world where human life was ‘cheaper’ than in more developed nations. As he pointed out, people in the less developed world did not tend to live as long or earn as much as those in the developed world. In money terms the loss, and particularly the early loss, of a productive life in the developed world far outweighed the same loss in the less developed world. True, levels of morbidity and mortality would certainly increase in less developed nations as they became the repository for the world’s toxins, but such increases would hardly matter given the low monetary value of lives in these regions, and they would certainly be far outweighed by the monetary gains from healthier, longer lived peonle from developed nations.
…. a sentimentalist is a man who sees an absurd value in everything and doesn’t know the market price o f any single thing.
Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan’
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Notes
O. Wilde, ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan’, in Oscar Wilde’s Plays, Writings and Poems (London: Dent, 1970), Act III, p. 329. This line is spoken by the alleged cynic Cecil Graham.
See D.M. Hausman and M.S. McPherson, Economic Analysis and Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 9–10.
For a useful critical discussion, see E. Anderson, ‘Cost-Benefit Analysis, Safety and Environmental Quality’, Value in Ethics and Economics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).
See G. Becker, A Treatise on the Family (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981);
and R. Posner, Economic Analysis of Law, 2nd edition (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977).
See E.J. Mishan, Cost-Benefit Analysis: An Informal Introduction (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1971), pp. 6–8.
See, for instance, J. Burgess, J. Clark and C. Harrison, Valuing Nature: What Lies Behind Responses to Contingent Valuations (London: University College London, 1995).
See E. Anderson, Value in Ethics and Economics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 190–195.
A. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Vol. 1, R.H. Campbell and A.S. Skinner (General Editors), A. Todd (Textual Editor) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 44–45.
St. Augustine, City of God, Bk. XI, Ch. 16, trans. H. Bettenson (Harmondsworth, Middl.: Penguin Books, 1972), pp. 447–448.
See O. Langholm, Price and Value in the Aristotelian Tradition (Bergen: Universitetsforlaget, 1979), pp. 86–87.
Michael Fogarty notes: ‘The Scholastic Writers borrow freely from one another, including the examples which they use to drive their points home. A Worthy Mouse scuttles through several hundred years of chapters on Value: the mouse who is worth in terms of “natural” value than an inanimate thing such as a loaf of bread, but does not have the “use” value that is relevant to justice in the market. The coarser early scholastics talked instead about a louse’, ‘Appendix: The Scholastic Theory of the Just Wage’, M. Fogarty, The Just Wage (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1961), p. 257.
See J. Eatwell, M. Milgate and P. Newman (eds), The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, Vol. 3 (London: Macmillan, 1987), pp. 107–113. For a more detailed discussion,
see R.L. Meek, Studies in the Labour Theory of Value, 2nd edition (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1973).
H. Landreth, History of Economic Theory: Scope, Method and Content (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), pp. 53–54.
J.E. Stiglitz, Economics, 2nd edition (New York: W.W. Norton and Co, 1993).
R. Cooter and P. Rappaport, ‘Were the Ordinalists Wrong about Welfare Economics?’, Journal of Economic Literature, June 1984, XXII, pp. 507–530.
John Broome argues that the things we rank are options rather than values or goods. He may well be correct, but there are times where it seems more natural, from the point of view of ordinary language, to talk of either values or goods and so we shall persist with the use of all of the three (where appropriate) in our discussion. For our purposes herein little hangs on it. See J. Broome, Ethics out of Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 146.
See J. Aldred, ‘Cost-Benefit Analysis, Incommensurability and Rough Equal-ity’, Environmental Values, 2002, 11, pp. 27–47.
J. Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 346–347.
J. O’Neill, ‘Cost-Benefit Analysis, Rationality and the Plurality of Values’, The Ecologist, 1996, 26, no. 3, pp. 98–103. It seems that James Griffin was the first to coin the phrase: in Well-Being: Its Meaning, Measurement, and Moral Importance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), he writes that’ [T]here is no single substantive supervalue’ (p. 89). Griffin makes the further point that we do not need a supervalue in order to have a scale.
C.R. Sunstein, ‘Incommensurability and Valuation in Law’, Michigan Law Review, February 1994, 92, no. 4, p. 779.
See also M. Adler, ‘Incommensu-rability and Cost-Benefit Analysis’, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, June 1998, 146, no. 5, p. 1371.
See J. Burke (ed.), Jowitt’s Dictionary of English Law, Vol. 2, 2nd edition (London: Sweet and Maxwell, 1977), p. 1683.
For useful surveys of these issues, see John Broome, ‘Incommensurable Values’, Ethics out of Economics, pp. 145–161; and R. Chang (ed.), Incommensurability, Incomparability and Practical Reason (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).
Here the idea of lexical priority is modelled on the relationship that Rawls ascribes to his two principles of justice. See J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, revised edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 37–38, 53–54.
K. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1954), p. 97.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Sir D. Ross (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), Bk. V, 5, [1133b3–1133b20], p. 120.
See S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. J. Strachey (New York: Avon Books, 1965), Section IV.
See also J. Church, ‘Morality and Its Internalized Other’, in J. Neu (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Freud (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 209–223.
For useful discussions of the difficulties of determining the grounds of irreplaceability claims, see J.N. Martin, ‘The Concept of the Irreplaceable’, Environmental Ethics, Spring, 1979, 1, no. 1, pp. 31–48;
and R. Goodin, ‘The Ethics of Destroying Irreplaceable Assets’, International Journal of Environmental Studies, 1983, 21, pp. 55–66.
For another example, consider John Foster’s discussion of cost-benefit analysis of environmental goods. J. Foster (ed.), ‘Environment and Cre-ative Value’, Valuing Nature? Economics, Ethics and Environment (London: Routledge, 1997). Foster notes (pp. 233–234) that single-axis cost-benefit analysis, as commonly employed, cannot appropriately represent the different values we bring to choice. Although we do engage in weightings of different values in everyday choice, the existence of this practice only provides grounds for what he calls ‘weak commensurability’ rather than ‘strong commensurability’ (which involves a single-axis of value). But significantly, he notes of this weak commensurability that it does not mean that the different values so arrayed are substitutable for one another. Again, although the case is described using the language of incommensurability, it is the notion of non-substitutability that does the moral work.
C. Fell, Women in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), p. 83.
W.S. Jevons, The Theory of Political Economy (London: Macmillan, 1871), p. 157.
See, for instance, P. Samuelson, Economics, 10th edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976), pp. 437–438.
Cf. M. Sagoff, Price, Principle and the Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 2004). Sagoff argues that economic theory cannot measure the value of environmental goods. The intrinsic value of environmental goods is distinct from the value provided by the market.
G. Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, 2nd edition (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1990), p. 256.
F.H. Knight, The Ethics of Competition and Other Essays (New York: Harper, 1935), p. 56.
See A. Walsh and T. Lynch, ‘The Development of Price Formation Theory and Subjectivism about Ultimate Values’, Journal of Applied Philosophy, 2003, 20, no. 3, p. 275.
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Walsh, A., Lynch, T. (2008). Money-Measurement as the Moral Problem. In: The Morality of Money. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230227804_7
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