From a philosophy standpoint, I find incommensurability pretty implausible (at least to act upon) for a couple reasons:
If two values are incommensurable, for every action that you take, there is some probability that you are making a trade-off between these actions. Given some version of expected value to be correct (where some probability of value is equivalent to trading off some lower value itself), this would mean that every action one takes is making a choice between two incommensurable goods. This seems to lock you into a constant state of decision paralysis (where every action you take is trading off two incommensurable goods), which, I believe, should just make incommensurable goods a non-viable option. (See this paper for more discussion)
Imagine you have some credence in two things being incommensurable (thereby making it such that you have no reasons to act in either way). Even if this is the case, however, you should still have some non-zero credence in these values / actions being commensurable as it is a contingent proposition. If the credence of incommensurability gives you no reason to act and the credence of commensurability does give you reason to act, this makes incommensurability irrelevant, making it so that your actions should entirely be informed by the case conditional on commensurability.
Happy to chat more about this, if you think that you’d find that helpful.
From a philosophy standpoint, I find incommensurability pretty implausible (at least to act upon) for a couple reasons:
If two values are incommensurable, for every action that you take, there is some probability that you are making a trade-off between these actions. Given some version of expected value to be correct (where some probability of value is equivalent to trading off some lower value itself), this would mean that every action one takes is making a choice between two incommensurable goods. This seems to lock you into a constant state of decision paralysis (where every action you take is trading off two incommensurable goods), which, I believe, should just make incommensurable goods a non-viable option. (See this paper for more discussion)
Imagine you have some credence in two things being incommensurable (thereby making it such that you have no reasons to act in either way). Even if this is the case, however, you should still have some non-zero credence in these values / actions being commensurable as it is a contingent proposition. If the credence of incommensurability gives you no reason to act and the credence of commensurability does give you reason to act, this makes incommensurability irrelevant, making it so that your actions should entirely be informed by the case conditional on commensurability.
Happy to chat more about this, if you think that you’d find that helpful.