 Richardson acknowledges that the moral considerations underlying Sophie’s dilemma are not incommensurable. Nonetheless, he takes value incommensurability to be essential to understanding the tragedy of the dilemma that Sophie encounters. “It is a distinguishing feature of love, including parental love,” he writes, “that it cherishes the particular and unique features of the beloved” (115). He concludes, “the fact that she cannot adequately represent each child’s value on a single scale is what makes the choosing tragic” (116). By locating the incommensurability of values at the level of what is valuable about each of her children, Richardson argues that the tragedy of the dilemma points to incomparability.