Can grading love and care (and other
goods) be an injustice?
It is a
widespread intuition that some things in life cannot and should not be
measured. For example, quantifying our love for a partner seems problematic. We
do not want to rate our affection on a scale of 0-100.* It is an important question, though, whether
we can have a complaint of justice about measuring certain goods. Here I consider
two lines of argument for thinking that measuring certain things in
quantifiable terms can be objectionable.
The first is
indirect. It concerns unjust effects of things being measured that were not
measured previously. An example is the measurement of the willingness to pay
for parking spaces, which Joshua Kopstein recently discussed. Some start-up
companies have developed apps through which people bid for spare parking
spaces. Kopstein suggests that this system turns
a public good into a private good that is allocated according to
willingness and ability to pay, thus privileging the rich. This example does
suggest that certain kinds of measurement can lead to complaints of justice, if
they introduce an allocation mechanism that is not appropriate for the good.
But in such cases it is the possibility of wrongful use, not the measuring
itself, that can be criticized.
The second
way in which measuring could raise complaints of injustice is more direct. Consider
a stylized example. Assume that elderly relatives have a legitimate claim to
receive some acts of love and care from younger family members. Assume that a
start-up company develops an app that evaluates family members, on a score from
0 to 100, on how well their acts deliver care to elderly relatives. And assume
that using the app becomes a social trend, such that most people start using it.
This might have some beneficial effects. For example, it might become easier to
share knowledge about how to cheer up grandma “efficiently” when she is gloomy.
But could it also mean that what the elderly relatives receive are not, any longer,
acts of love and care, but something else: acts calculated to enhance the
wellbeing of elderly relatives? If this is the case, it seems that they could
raise a claim of justice. They are denied what they have a legitimate claim to
receive. Schematically put, they have a legitimate claim to good X (love and
care), but what they receive is good Y (acts that will efficiently enhance
wellbeing), because by measuring and quantifying X, it is transformed into Y.
One problem
here is whether we can specify a sufficiently clear and plausible account of
what good X is and why good Y is different from it.** One possible issue might
be that good X is a complex and multi-dimensional good, but by measuring it, we
necessarily reduce it to fewer dimensions. Although modern technologies offer
increasingly sophisticated ways of measuring things, they still cannot capture
all the dimensions of what it means, for example, to have a trusting and loving
relationship with someone. Another issue could be that offering good X requires
openness to new challenges or a certain degree of spontaneity. Again, these
cannot be easily captured in quantitative terms and are, thus, likely to be excluded
if one tried to measure X. For example, an important aspect of a loving
relationship is that one is sensitive to subtle changes in the other person’s
situation, and maybe even that one understands such changes before the person
herself fully understands them. It is therefore unclear how they could be
included in quantitative measures.
Certain
forms of measurement may be simply dysfunctional. In finance, there is Goodhart’s law:
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
This might also hold for other areas and make it simply unwise to try to utilise
measurements there. But in additional to dysfunctionality, we should not
exclude the possibility that measuring certain things may be an
injustice. At least in the case of care and love, it seems there is
reason to believe that that is the case.
*In Dave Egger’s The
Circle there is an episode in which one of the
protagonist’s lovers asks for an evaluation of his qualities, on a scale from 0
to 100, directly after the sexual act. The protagonist is somewhat startled,
and then resorts to a white lie.
**Aspects of this
question have been explored in the debate about limits of the market, where one
concern is whether the socially defined “meaning” of goods can be a basis for not
measuring goods in market terms. See for example Debra Satz’s discussion of
Elizabeth Anderson’s approach in her Why
Some Things Should Not Be For Sale.
