Brief Notices 3

There's a fair-sized philosophical literature on the possibility of incommensurable values. According to some accounts of what it would mean for a value to be incommensurable, such values would represent a failure of a common currency.

Joseph Raz, for example, says two values (or bearers of value) are incommensurable if it is false that “either one is better than the other or they are of equal value” (Raz, 1986, The Morality of Freedom, p. 342).

I'm not - for now - taking a position on whether there are indeed incommensurable values. It's just useful, either way, to have some philosophical work clarifying what it might mean for values to be incommensurable at all, and considering some arguments against and in favour of the possibility. I'll say more about some of the arguments in the future.

If you want to look at a clear overview of the issues, then Nien-hê Hsieh has written an entry on Incommensurable Values for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Brief Notices 2

Here are two passing mentions of a 'common currency' in slightly unusual settings:

Carotenoids Are Cornerstone Of Bird's Vitality

This piece reports on research suggesting that carotenoids don't merely contribute to the bright pigments that play a role in sexual selection in some birds, but also play a role in colour perception, and have other nutritional benefits. One of the researchers describes the emerging view as follows:

"We are proposing a positive fitness feedback loop for these 'self-loving molecules,' given how high carotenoid accumulation can improve one's state and one's interest in selecting carotenoid richness in mates and food. This provides a window into how major sexual selection models, such as sensory biases and assortative mating, may be explained by a common, nutritional and narcissistic currency".

Now this doesn't sound like a common currency in the full sense that I'm interested in it, but presumably the claim made is still relevant: the net benefit (nutritional and narcissistic) of carotenoids is suppose to be a component of the fitness value, which in turn is one of the things that many behavioural ecologists take to determine a common currency that it is part of the job of scientists to describe. So some parts of a full 'currency for fitness' might map onto the factors described here.

The human machine: probing the mechanics

This is a cool notice of some recent work on cellular energy metabolism, and in particular conversion of electron to proton currents. I don't know enough molecular biology to give much of a gloss of the content, but it's a lively and interesting read. It also refers to Adenosine triphosphate (ATP) as "the single energy currency of the cell".

This might seem like an irrelevant use of the same term ('currency') but there's reason not to rush to this conclusion. But as I noted elsewhere on this blog, "Since any behavior has some energy cost (or gain), and any allocation of metabolic resources has an opportunity cost (in actions rendered unavailable, or made possible) it’s plausible to think that in a highly aggregated way, ATP represents an important overall budgetary bottom line."

You can get the actual article on the Nature website here (possibly behind a paywall): Crystal structure of the entire respiratory complex I.

Brief notices 1

I’ve decided to post periodic brief notices about things relating to the Common Currency topic, but where I’ve not yet developed a more detailed response. (So in most cases the idea is that in some future posts I’ll say something more comprehensive.)

First, here’s an interesting and recent review article (in an Open Access journal) by Peter Shizgal:

Shizgal P (2012) Scarce means with alternative uses: Robbins’ definition of economics and its extension to the behavioral and neurobiological study of animal decision making. Front. Neurosci. 6:20. [Journal link - open access] [doi: 10.3389/fnins.2012.00020]

Few have done more than Peter Shizgal to make a certain part of the empirical case that some species exhibit patterns of choice for which a central and unified value representation (that is, a Common Currency) is a good, or perhaps the only, explanation. I’ll discuss some of his empirical work at more length in the future. In this review article he makes the case for using Robbins’ definition of economics to inform the study of animal decision-making.

Second, I read an interesting op-ed piece by Scott Atran in Foreign Policy [Access may be subject to annoying pop-ups].

The main point of the article is to argue that immanent cuts to social science funding threaten national security. In the course of making this point, he glosses some of his current work relating to sacred values and human conflict. The first passage that specifically struck my eye was this one:

“Humans process these identities as moral rules, duties, and obligations that defy the utilitarian and instrumental calculations of realpolitik or the marketplace. Simply put, people defending a sacred value will not trade its incarnation (Israel's settlements, Iran's nuclear fuel rods, America's guns) for any number of iPads, or even for peace.”

Shortly after that, he makes clear that he both knows and means what he’s saying here:

“The sacred values of "devoted actors," it turns out, generate actions independent of calculated risks, costs, and consequences -- a direct contradiction of prevailing "rational actor" models of politics and economics, which focus on material interests. Devoted actors, in contrast, act because they sincerely and deeply believe "it's the right thing to do," regardless of risks or rewards.” [emphasis added.]

I’m not decided yet whether this interpretation of his evidence is the best one. But there is indeed a growing body of evidence (both from his work, and that of other social scientists). You can see some of his related papers here. All I want to note for now is that this looks like prima facie documentation of decision problems that suggest there is not a single common currency. That is, the alleged impossibility of paying some people to act contrary to their sacred values, or the ways that their actions in service of those values are insensitive to risk and reward, suggest that those values just don’t appear on the same scale as other things they will work for.