Quantification of "values"

["Ari Belenkiy" <belenka@mail.biu.ac.il>]

> It is not because something is not quantifiable that it does 
> not exist. Limiting one's vision to the quantifiable must 
> create a very restricted, not to say impoverished, vision of 
> human activities indeed. There is a famous passage in Saint 
> Exupery's Little Prince about this point.
>
> How do you quantify your love for your significant other? By 
> calculating the energy for each caress, counting the number of 
> caresses and then calculating the amount of oil needed to 
> produce this energy at the current price? Good luck in your 
> relationship...
>
> To put it yet another way, value for civilization does not 
> limit itself to economic value. If kids somewhere are touched 
> because they understand a poem better through a piece of 
> literary criticism, and if that kid's life is then to be 
> changed in subtle and beautiful ways because of that reading, I 
> believe that constitutes value for civilization and I believe 
> no price can be assigned to it. But if that reading prevents 
> this kid later to turn into a suicide bomber, that piece of 
> literary criticism could have the value of the Twin Towers.
>
> Number fetishists and market fundamentalists, as we can see all 
> around us, are destroying a lot of value all around us. Value 
> quantified in the trillions. How inspiring!
>
> jean-claude Guedon

This is a kind of manifesto of those who opposes precision in the 
relationships and life in general, who hides behind general smart 
fictions like "values" etc.

If some things are quite difficult to quantify - no question that 
the goal is to find the way - or at least to seek the way.

It is more or less clear how to quantify "love" for another - 
"how much" you did for another and "how much" you refused to do 
for yourself for the sake of another. (Those who observe the 
couple from aside always know almost precisely whether each 
partner loves another.)

It is clear that the "artists" - those who hide behind such 
manifestos - lost the competittion to scientists and these are 
their "rear-guard battles". In fact, they lost all the previous.

As an history example I recall such a fact: there was a public 
"rivalry" between physicists and poets in the USSR in 1960s. 
What do we see 40-50 years later? Classical poetry virually 
disappeared, it mimicries, it seeks new forms, it tries to 
astonish for a second to be noticed...

Between the lines hides an outright rejection of scientists' 
claim to be ethical and moral and their ability to decide what is 
the "value".  Funny, the "artists" even dare to reject for 
scientists a "vision"!

"Artisits" want to decide on their own what is moral in this 
world, judjing from their own "intuition" or just their "whims". 
To be accepted within the "narrow circle", one just needs to cite 
Saint Exupery at the right moment.

The idleless talk about the Twin Towers tragedy just ignores the 
problem of religion - which (via estimating violence embeded into 
it) also can be quantified and evaluated by means of statistics 
this or that way.

Ari Belenkiy
Bar-Ilan University