Interpretive Justice in Heteromorphic Value Conversion: Toward a Generative Relational Theory of Legitimate Value Conversion Nomos

A polity that recognizes several official languages must maintain an apparatus of translation, and the apparatus is an institution with a politics of its own. This paper takes that arrangement as a model for a wider condition. Where the values held within a polity are generated in different relational settings, they acquire different semantics, different conditions of production, and different histories, so that collective decision requires their conversion into terms admitting of comparison. The framework performing that conversion is treated here as a translation regime for values, and the paper asks what makes such a regime legitimate. The survey concedes that the descriptive half of this subject is occupied: the sociology of commensuration has established that conversion frameworks are interpretive, institutionalized, and productive of power, and the sociology of worth has mapped the plural orders across which conversion must operate. What appears to remain open is a normative account of the legitimacy of a conversion framework considered as an institution. The paper proposes such an account in three parts: a distinction between the justice of a framework's formation and the justice of the framework itself; six meta-principles by which a framework may be assessed, five of them inherited from existing traditions and attributed accordingly; and a criterion under which a framework is assessed by whether it preserves the capacity of the relations it orders to generate a further determination of the equivalences it fixes. The account supplies no procedure for measuring that capacity, it does not resolve the trade-off between the cost of translation and the reach of a polity, and its central propositions are entered as hypotheses. The closing questions are held to be the more valuable half of what is offered.