Incommensurability and Trade

Abstract

Nir Eyal* and Emma Tieffenbach'This one standard which truly measures all things is demand. This includes all commutable things inasmuch as everything has a reference to human need. Articles are not valued according to dignity of their nature, otherwise a mouse, an animal endowed with sense, should be of greater value than a pearl, a thing without life. But they are priced according as man stands in need of them for his own use.-Aquinas (1964 [c. 1263], lecture 5, ch. 3, para. 981)INTRODUCTIONMany forms of trade-for example, trading for human organs, beaches, votes, and works of art-incur moral opposition.1 For some opponents, makes trade of these forms so morally wrong is incommensurability of relevant value bearers with they are traded for, e.g., money. Different commentators variably complain that goods or services exchanged are incommensurate, incomparable, unsubstitutable, nontradeable, inalienable, or irreplaceable. This is not only possible underlying complaint. Alternatively, one could explain that a market in votes, for example, is wrong because it undermines democracy, and not because of anything like incommensurability. Still, many thinkers anchor their condemnation of such exchanges in incommensurability (or incomparability, and so forth).For example, Margaret Jane Radin criticizes tort practice of paying victims of bodily injury in alleged compensation for they have suffered, because that conceives of harm to injured victim as commensurable with money, as if victim's interest in free of injury were same as or a fungible commodity she possessed (Radin 1993, 59). But, Radin says, the value to victim of freedom from pain and suffering be reduced to money (Radin 1993, 70).Radin opposes additional practices such as gestational surrogacy and prostitution on similar grounds. For her, things like sexuality, wisdom, character, work, and bodily integrity are to (1987). But when they are put on sale, they are conceived as being equivalent to a sum of money, and that can be alienated (1987, 1861). Their commodification, she says, is threatening to personhood because it detaches from person that which is integral to (1987, 1881). She concludes that personal attributes are market-inalienable, meaning that they should not be sold, priced, or even referred to in market terms.Similar thinking has been applied to additional areas of law:Legal theorists like Margaret Jane Radin, Cass Sunstein, and Richard Warner have argued that since merits of certain items-e.g. body parts, pristine beaches, and love relationships-cannot be measured by money, it follows that economic approaches to valuation such as cost-benefit analysis are inappropriate for these goods. (Chang 2001b, xvii)Earlier, legal thinker Joseph Raz asked is wrong with accepting a significant amount of in return for leaving one's spouse for a month. He answered that to do so would carry an undue symbolic significance, and what has symbolic significance is very judgment that companionship is incommensurable with money (Raz 1986,350).Such claims have been made by nonlegal philosophers as well. Michele MoodyAdams seems to ground her objection to surrogacy for pay in irreplaceability of babies with money:Surrogacy for pay requires couple to attempt to put a price on very entity which they believe to be beyond price [for no amount of will compensate them should they be deprived of child]; thus their own assumptions commit them to rejecting surrogacy for pay as morally indefensible. (Moody-Adams 1991, 188)Moody-Adams casts this consideration in Kantian terms: couple cannot consistently resist absolute prohibitions against treating persons as marketable commodities [that] are an important part of . …