Does an Identical Replacement Fully Compensate a Loss?

Suppose someone borrows an ordinary edition of a novel and carelessly destroys it. They buy a new copy of the same edition: the market price, printed words and reading function are identical. If the old copy had belonged to the owner's late father and carried years of marginal notes, however, the loss has plainly not been erased.

The new copy can replace the reading function and restore tradable property value. It cannot recreate a shared history, a chain of ownership or the particular traces left on those pages. Value pluralism resists assuming that every reason can be converted in advance into one common scale. Philosophical discussions of incommensurability are more careful than the claim that two things are simply “beyond comparison”: they may not fit a neat ordering of more, less or exactly equal.

Philosophers of tort law similarly note that money may purchase replacement property without enabling a harmed person to go on as though the wrong never occurred. Compensation therefore has at least three tasks: restoring function where possible, meeting calculable costs and acknowledging the loss that remains irreparable. This prevents the responsible party from using “I bought an identical one” to make the rest of the harm disappear.

My judgement is that fair compensation need not pretend that every kind of value is exchangeable. The new book should be provided, and an apology is also warranted. Any additional payment depends on the degree of carelessness, whether the object's significance could reasonably have been known, and whether the demand would create a new unfairness. Replacement can be an important part of compensation, but it is not proof that the loss has returned to zero.

https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/dynamic-choice/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/tort-theories/