According to Ruth Chang (2002, 2022), incommensurability in hard cases cannot be cases of vagueness. This is because vagueness, unlike hard cases, can always be resolved by arbitrary stipulation, leaving no resolutional remainder or substantive disagreement. Contrary to this, I argue that Chang’s argument fails because proponents of the vagueness view are in no way necessarily committed to the claim that vagueness always can be resolved by arbitrary stipulation. In fact, there seems to be no reason to assume that vagueness (...) could not accommodate our intuitions about resolutional remainder and substantive disagreements in a satisfying way. If we want a simple theory, and if at least some incommensurability is vagueness, this could then be a reason for understanding incommensurability as vagueness; and perhaps even rejecting parity. (shrink)

Priority setting in healthcare is a highly contentious area of public decision making, in which different values often support incompatible policy options and compromise can be elusive. One promising approach to resolving priority-setting conflicts divides the decision-making process into two steps. In the first, a set of eligible options is identified; in the second, one of those options is chosen by a deliberative process. This paper considers the first step, examining proposals for identifying a set of options eligible for deliberation. (...) It focuses on the approach proposed by Anders Herlitz, which limits deliberation to options that are on a par; neither better or worse than, nor strictly equal to the alternatives. Once these “maximal” options are identified, the choice among them is made though a deliberative process that acknowledges the difficult tradeoffs which must be made. While parity and kindred notions are clearly useful in resolving some priority-setting conflicts, this paper argues that the conflicts that arise in setting priorities make it as difficult to decide which options are on a par as it is to decide among those options. The paper draws on priority-setting debates that occurred during the recent pandemic to illustrate the challenges in identifying eligible options: There may be sharp disagreement about how to understand and individuate relevant values; about whether certain values are relevant in a priority-setting context; about how to establish parity between “consequential” and “deontic” options, and about whether one option remains on a par with others after it is modified in various ways. (shrink)