Interpersonal Value Comparisons

In Carroll vs. Harris: Quantifying Value - Part I Alonzo Fyfe challenges the claim that you cannot make interpersonal value comparisons. He makes several other points about Carroll's position that we cannot come up with a science of morality, such as that he seems to have ruled out any ways of doing this that didn't involve interpersonal value comparisons.

In any case I found his argument on the point of interpersonal value comparisons to be interesting, as I have held this position in the past. I searched for posts that I made that contained this claim. Oddly enough I can't find any. However, at the very least one of my two essays on utilitarianism contains this claim. The other comes up with a form of utilitarianism that doesn't involve interpersonal value comparisons. It takes the phrase greatest good for the greatest number to have a different meaning. We evaluate how the action effects different people and determine which would produce the greatest good. Then we find the one that does so for the greatest number.

Alonzo Fyfe retorts that we perform interpersonal value comparisons all the time. I'm not sure if this is true. He sites as an example a case where releasing either of two buttons will either cause a large number of people to die or a child to discover a $1 bill. I suspect that he was hasty in formulating this question. We need to be presented with causing a great deal of suffering and making someone a little worse off. He accidentally presented us with the choice of making the kid better off and making a large number of people a whole lot worse off. Obviously if we have a chance to make a kid one dollar richer and save millions of people, we would want to do it. The real choice is when we must decide to do one or the other.

However, it is not certain that in order to do this we need to make an interpersonal value comparison. It is less certain that we make decisions of this type all the time. I suspect that very few of us find ourselves confronted by evil scientists who would present us with this kind of dilemma. By choosing to save the millions of people rather than giving the boy an additional dollar I am applying a principle that every rational person, including the boy would want me to apply. If it came to the boy's attention that I was the sort of person who would allow millions of people to die in order to give him an additional dollar, he would be unlikely to respond with gratitude. It is even more certain that he should not. I would be applying a principle that would be likely to hurt him or people that he would care about.

Leaving those objections aside, Alonzo Fyfe does make a valid point that there is a big difference between having some lack of ability to make interpersonal value comparisons and complete and total ignorance in this respect. Further, while it might be that I am really applying a rule in the case above, it certainly seems as if i am making some type of interpersonal value comparison.

But let's look at another test case. Suppose there is a sadistic man who takes a hammer and proceeds to pound it against the outstretched hand of a ten year old boy. You will see this situation one way. Now suppose that you happen to know, as the sadist does not, that the boy has a handicap that prevents him from experiencing any pain. Does this change how you think about the situation? I don't think it would make most of us feel better about the sadist.

I suspect that even if we has some way of peering into people's heads to come up with a precise numerical measure of their pleasure or pain, if we were then able to aggregate this, it would not change our moral and ethical values all that much. If the information that we obtained gave us answers that varied greatly with our moral intuitions, then we would likely go with our moral intuitions.