There is growing support for the view that there can be cases of incommensurability, understood as cases in which two alternatives, X and Y, are such that X is not better than Y, Y is not better than X, and X and Y are not equally good. This paper assumes that alternatives can be incommensurable and explores the prominent idea that, insofar as choice situations that agents face qua rational agents involve options that are not rankable as one better than (...) the other or as equally good, the choice situations are, due to this _structural_ feature, _distinctively_ hard. It might seem like choosing between incommensurable alternatives is obviously distinctively hard because, _unlike in other cases_, in cases of incommensurability, one cannot proceed in a way that does justice to the value of each of the goods at stake by factoring their value into one’s decision. The reasoning in this paper suggests that this position is mistaken, not because there is no real challenge here, but because, insofar as a challenge has been identified, it is one that can make cases involving commensurable alternatives hard too. The paper’s reasoning also suggests that the challenge at issue can sometimes, even if not always, be overcome via effective choice over time. Although many of the illustrations focused on in the paper involve low-stakes intrapersonal cases of decisionmaking, the paper’s reasoning is, as is apparent by the end of the paper, relevant for high-stakes and population-level decision-making as well. (shrink)

This article articulates and defends a dissolution of the so-called repugnant conclusion, which focuses on the notion of life worth living figuring both in Parfit's formulation of the repugnant conclusion and in most responses to such a conclusion. The proposed dissolution demonstrates that the notion of life worth living is plagued by multiple ambiguities and that these ambiguities, in turn, hamper meaningful debate about both the issue of whether the repugnant conclusion can be avoided and the issue of whether the (...) repugnant conclusion is actually repugnant. This result does not exclude that some modified versions of the repugnant conclusion may yield valuable insights about the value of populations and the tenability of different axiological/ethical theories. Still, if the proposed dissolution is correct, then the repugnant conclusion rests on an ill-defined notion and we lack the information required to assess the merits of the repugnant conclusion. (shrink)

Claims (or the implicit assumption of the inherent worth of life) are pervasive and remain virtually unchallenged. I have already argued that these outright moral dictates are thinly veiled vestiges of theological ethics which, following the removal of their theological foundations, remain little more than nebulous claims supported only by fear of the consequences of a challenge. In my previous work, I rejected an a priori claim of an objective life’s worth, which is the worth that we should assign to (...) others’ lives, and elucidated a principled framework that gives rise to the said worth immediately, as a consequence of the experiences of its sentient environment. Herein, I address the complementary question of the value of one’s own life, which is the subjective value of life and, thus, Camus’s (in)famous view that “there is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide”. As before, I rejected the inherency of a life’s worth, showing it to be contradictio in adjecto, and instead show how this worth too can in large part be seen to emerge from sentient experiences of the subject. Many of these are innately linked to experiences of other sentient beings as objects, thus erecting a framework that is both principled and thoroughly humane with Schopenhauer’s ‘loving kindness’ running through it. Practically, my framework illuminates an understanding of suicide as a real-world phenomenon, helping those who remain living to understand a deceased one’s decision, and paving the way to answering questions, such as when there should be an attempt to prevent suicide, and what means of suicide prevention are ethically permissible. (shrink)

Ruth Chang and Joseph Raz have both drawn far-reaching consequences for agency from the phenomenon of incommensurability. After criticizing their arguments, I outline an alternative view: if incommensurability is vagueness, then there are no substantial implications for agency, except perhaps a limited form of naturalistic voluntarism if our reasons are provided by desires.

We argue that all comparative expressions in natural language obey a principle that we call Comparability: if x and y are at least as F as themselves, then either x is at least as F as y or y is at least as F as x. This principle has been widely rejected among philosophers, especially by ethicists, and its falsity has been claimed to have important normative implications. We argue that Comparability is needed to explain the goodness of several patterns (...) of inference that seem manifestly valid, that the purported failures of Comparability would have absurd consequences, and that the influential arguments against Comparability are less compelling than they may have initially seemed. (shrink)

A review of some major topics of debate in normative decision theory from circa 2007 to 2019. Topics discussed include the ongoing debate between causal and evidential decision theory, decision instability, risk-weighted expected utility theory, decision-making with incomplete preferences, and decision-making with imprecise credences.

In 1997 John Broome presented the Collapsing Argument that was meant to establish that non-conventional comparative relations cannot exist. Broome's argument has faced a lot of scrutiny and a certain type of counterexample has been used to undermine it. Most of the counterexamples focus on the Collapsing Principle which plays a central role in Broome's argument. In this article we will take a closer look at the most common type of counterexample and propose how to adjust the Collapsing Principle in (...) order to avoid objections based on these counterexamples. We argue that a weaker version of the Collapsing Principle is not susceptible to the classical counterexamples. Furthermore, after an explorative discussion about the intuitions behind the original principle, we show that this weaker formulation is at least as intuitive as the principle suggested by Broome. (shrink)

The Rachels–Temkin spectrum arguments against the transitivity of better than involve good or bad experiences, lives, or outcomes that vary along multiple dimensions—e.g., duration and intensity of pleasure or pain. This paper presents variations on these arguments involving combinations of good and bad experiences, which have even more radical implications than the violation of transitivity. These variations force opponents of transitivity to conclude that something good is worse than something that isn’t good, on pain of rejecting the good altogether. That (...) is impossible, so we must reject the spectrum arguments. (shrink)

According to the fitting-attitude analysis of value , to be valuable is to be a fitting object of a pro-attitude. In earlier publications, setting off from this format of analysis, I proposed a modelling of value relations which makes room for incommensurability in value. In this paper, I first recapitulate the value modelling and then move on to suggest adopting a structurally similar analysis of probability. Indeed, many probability theorists from Poisson onwards did adopt an analysis of this kind. This (...) move allows to formally model probability and probability relations in essentially the same way as value and value relations. One of the advantages of the model is that we get a new account of Keynesian incommensurable probabilities, which goes beyond Keynes in distinguishing between different types of incommensurability. It also becomes possible to draw a clear distinction between incommensurability and vagueness in probability comparisons. (shrink)

According to a standard account of incomparability, two value bearers are incomparable if it is false that there holds a positive value relation between them. Due to the vagueness of the comparative predicates it may also be indeterminate as to which relation that holds - for each relation it is neither true nor false that it holds. John Broome has argued that indeterminacy cannot coexist with incomparability and since there seems to exist indeterminacy there cannot exist incomparability. At the core (...) of his argument lies the collapsing principle. There are several arguments against this principle; Erik Carlson has advanced most of these. In this paper two strategies in dealing with these arguments are discussed. One strategy is to deny the existence of a certain kind of properties; another strategy that has been advanced by Christian Constantinescu is to restrict the collapsing principle. In the paper it is argued that the first of these strategies is the most promising strategy. A novel argument in favour of this strategy is presented and several objections to the strategy are rebutted. Finally it is concluded that, even though this strategy deals with most objections, without a better argument in favour of the principle the debate seems to run into a stalemate. (shrink)

The vagueness view holds that when evaluative comparisons are hard, there is indeterminacy about which comparative relation holds. It is sceptical about whether there are any incommensurate items (in some domain). The sceptical element of John Broome’s version of this view rests on a controversial principle. Robert Sugden advances a similar view which does not depend on this principle. Sugden’s argument fails as a vagueness view because it assumes rather than shows that there are no incommensurate items (in some domain). (...) Nonetheless, I argue that an interpretation of his argument constitutes a defensible vagueness view which is supported by intuition about examples. On this interpretation Sugden’s view can be mapped onto Broome’s application of a supervaluationist view of vagueness. It is also (on this reading) a close relative of James Griffin’s ‘rough equality’ view when this is interpreted in terms of vagueness. On an alternative interpretation Sugden’s view is not sceptical about incommensurateness. On this interpretation he does not defend a vagueness view and is ‘sceptical’ about the contribution of the philosophical literature to our understanding of rational choice. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that the small-improvement argument fails since some of the comparisons involved in the argument might be indeterminate. I defend this view from two objections by Ruth Chang, namely the argument from phenomenology and the argument from perplexity. There are some other objections to the small-improvement argument that also hinge on claims about indeterminacy. John Broome argues that alleged cases of value incomparability are merely examples of indeterminacy in the betterness relation. The main premise of his (...) argument is the much-discussed collapsing principle. I offer a new counterexample to this principle and argue that Broome's defence of the principle is not cogent. On the other hand, Nicolas Espinoza argues that the small-improvement argument fails as a result of the mere possibility of evaluative indeterminacy. I argue that his objection is unsuccessful. (shrink)

Items are incommensurate if it is false that one is better than the other or that they are exactly as or equally good. John Broome claims that there are no incommensurate items (in some domain), but that there is vagueness. Wlodek Rabinowicz casts doubt on this claim because he rejects a principle which Broome adopts in advancing it. I argue that Robert Sugden's discussion can be interpreted as advancing a version of this claim which does not depend on the relevant (...) principle and which can respond to certain objections. (shrink)

In collective harm cases, bad consequences follow if enough people act in a certain way even though no such individual act makes a difference for the worse. Global warming, overfishing and Derek Parfit’s famous case of the harmless torturers are some examples of such harm. Shelly Kagan argues that there is a threshold such that one single act might trigger harm in all collective harm cases. Julia Nefsky points to serious shortcomings in Kagan’s argument, but does not show that his (...) conclusion is incorrect. I argue that our best theories of vagueness (the epistemic view of vagueness, three-valued logic, and supervaluationism) entail that there is a threshold in all collective harm cases. However, my analysis points to another problem with Kagan’s argument: the thresholds are not necessarily perceptible. Given the assumption that only perceptible differences matter morally, passing such a threshold does not necessarily trigger morally relevant harm, pace Kagan. Last, I consider two variants of Kagan’s argument and find both problematic. One controversially assumes that observational relations like ‘cannot perceive the difference between’ are transitive. The other problematically assumes that so called triangulation always is possible. (shrink)

In the recent literature across philosophy, medicine and public health policy, many influential arguments have been put forward to support the use of randomization procedures to allocate scarce life-saving resources. In this paper, I provide a systematic categorization and a critical evaluation of these arguments. I shall argue that those arguments justify using RAND to allocate SLSR in fewer cases than their proponents maintain and that the relevant decision-makers should typically allocate SLSR directly to the individuals with the strongest claims (...) to these resources rather than use RAND to allocate such resources. (shrink)

How should one understand comparisons in which neither of two alternatives is at least as good as the other? Much recent literature on comparability problems focuses on what the appropriate explanation of the phenomenon is. Is it due to vagueness or the possibility of non-conventional comparative relations such as parity? This paper argues that the discussions on how to best explain comparability problems has reached an impasse at which it is hard to make any progress. To advance the discussion we (...) suggest a new classification of comparability problems that focuses on the problems they cause for practical reasoning. (shrink)

In her ground-breaking and highly influential book Transformative Experience, L.A. Paul makes two claims: (1) one cannot evaluate and compare certain experiential outcomes (e.g. being a parent and being a non-parent) unless one can grasp what these outcomes are like; and (2) one can evaluate and compare certain intuitively horrible outcomes (e.g. being eaten alive by sharks) as bad and worse than certain other outcomes even if one cannot grasp what these intuitively horrible outcomes are like. We argue that the (...) conjunction of these two claims leads to an implausible discontinuity in the evaluability of outcomes. One implication of positing such a discontinuity is that evaluative comparisons of outcomes will not be proportionally sensitive to variation in the underlying features of these outcomes. This puts pressure on Paul to abandon either (1) or (2). But (1) is central to her view and (2) is very hard to deny. We call this the Shark Problem. (shrink)

In Rabinowicz (2008), I considered how value relations can best be analysed in terms of fitting pro-attitudes. In the formal model of that paper, fitting pro-attitudes are represented by the class of permissible preference orderings on a domain of items that are being compared. As it turns out, this approach opens up for a multiplicity of different types of value relationships, along with the standard relations of ‘better’, ‘worse’, ‘equally as good as’ and ‘incomparable in value’. Unfortunately, the approach is (...) vulnerable to a number of objections. I believe these objections can be avoided if one re-interprets the underlying notion of preference: instead of treating preference as a ‘dyadic’ attitude directed towards a pair of items, we can think of it as a difference of degree between ‘monadic’ attitudes of favouring. Each such monadic attitude has just one item as its object. Given this re-interpretation, permissible preferences can be modelled by the class of permissible assignments of degrees of favouring to items in the domain. From this construction, we can then recover the old modelling in terms of the class of permissible preference orderings, but the previous objections to that model no longer apply. (shrink)

In an alleged counter-example to the completeness of rational preferences, a career as a clarinettist is compared with a career in law. It seems reasonable to neither want to judge that the law career is at least as preferred as the clarinet career nor want to judge that the clarinet career is at least as preferred as the law career. The two standard interpretations of examples of this kind are, first, that the examples show that preferences are rationally permitted to (...) be incomplete and, second, that the examples show that preferences are rationally permitted to be indeterminate. In this paper, I shall argue that the difference between these interpretations is crucial for the money-pump argument for transitivity, which is the standard argument that rational preferences are transitive. I shall argue that the money-pump argument for transitivity fails if preferences are rationally permitted to be incomplete but that it works if preferences are rationally permitted to be indeterminate and rationally required to be complete. (shrink)

After putting forward a formal account of value disagreement via imprecise measures, I develop a logic of value attribution and of agreement based on truthmaker semantics.

This thesis explores whether the three standard value relations, “better than”, “worse than” and “equally as good”, exhaust the possibilities in which things can relate with respect to their value. Or more precisely, whether there are examples in which one of these relations is not instantiated. There are cases in which it is not obvious that one of these relations does obtain; these are referred to as “hard cases of comparison”. These hard cases of comparison become interesting, since if it (...) not the case that the standard three value relations obtains in these cases then the three standard relations do not exhaust the possibility of instantiated value relations. It is argued that for some of the hard cases of comparison, the standard relations determinately obtain. For some it is indeterminate, due to vagueness, which of the three relations obtains, but it is determinate that one of them obtains. Thereafter it is argued that the influential Collapsing Argument fails in ruling out other accounts of the hard cases of comparison. Since one cannot depend on the Collapsing Argument in order to conclude that all items are related by the standard three relations, the investigation continues. It is argued that none of the hard cases of comparison are cases of incomparability. Furthermore, none of them are cases of a fourth basic positive value relation such as “parity”. Consequently, for all the hard cases of comparison one of the standard value relations holds, although sometimes we do not know which one and sometimes it is indeterminate which one holds. This means that there is no reason to assume that one of the standard three value relations does not hold between items we are comparing. This is followed by a brief discussion about the normative consequences of this result. The thesis ends with four different appendices in which related topics are discussed. (shrink)

This paper defines and analyses the concept of a 'ranking problem'. In a ranking problem, a set of objects, each of which possesses some common property P to some degree, are ranked by P-ness. I argue that every eligible answer to a ranking problem can be expressed as a complete and transitive 'is at least as P as' relation. Vagueness is expressed as a multiplicity of eligible rankings. Incommensurability, properly understood, is the absence of a common property P. Trying to (...) analyse incommensurability in the same framework as ranking problems causes unnecessary confusion. (shrink)

The spectrum argument purports to show that the better-than relation is not transitive, and consequently that orthodox value theory is built on dubious foundations. The argument works by constructing a sequence of increasingly less painful but more drawn-out experiences, such that each experience in the spectrum is worse than the previous one, yet the final experience is better than the experience with which the spectrum began. Hence the betterness relation admits cycles, threatening either transitivity or asymmetry of the relation. This (...) paper examines recent attempts to block the spectrum argument, using the idea that it is a mistake to affirm that every experience in the spectrum is worse than its predecessor: an alternative hypothesis is that adjacent experiences may be incommensurable in value, or that due to vagueness in the underlying concepts, it is indeterminate which is better. While these attempts formally succeed as responses to the spectrum argument, they have additional, as yet unacknowledged costs that are significant. In order to effectively block the argument in its most typical form, in which the first element is radically inferior to the last, it is necessary to suppose that the incommensurability is particularly acute: what might be called radical incommensurability. We explain these costs, and draw some general lessons about the plausibility of the available options for those who wish to save orthodox axiology from the spectrum argument. (shrink)

John Broome has argued that incomparability and vagueness cannot coexist in a given betterness order. His argument essentially hinges on an assumption he calls the ‘collapsing principle’. In an earlier article I criticized this principle, but Broome has recently expressed doubts about the cogency of my criticism. Moreover, Cristian Constantinescu has defended Broome’s view from my objection. In this paper, I present further arguments against the collapsing principle, and try to show that Constantinescu’s defence of Broome’s position fails.

Why are hard decisions hard? According to the incomparabilists, hard choices are hard because the options cannot be compared. Proponents of parity hold that hard choices are hard because the options can be compared but only in terms of a fourth value relation—parity—in addition to the three standard relations: better, worse, and equally good. Others claim that hard choices are hard because it is vague (or indeterminate) how the options relate in terms of the three standard relations. Lastly, there is (...) the epistemicist. For the epistemicist, hard choices are hard because one is irresolvably ignorant about how the options compare. In the debate about hard choices, epistemicism is often mentioned but rarely defended. The present paper is a contribution to closing this gap. (shrink)

On parity views of mere addition if someone is added to the world at a range of well-being levels – or ‘neutral range’ – leaving existing people unaffected, addition is on a par with the initial situation. Two distinct parity views – ‘rough equality’ and fittingattitudes views – defend the ‘intuition of neutrality’. The first can be interpreted or adjusted so that it can rebut John Broome’s objection that the neutral range is wide. The two views respond in distinct ways (...) to two of Broome’s other objections. Both views can, nonetheless, be plausibly defended against these objections. (shrink)

According to Ruth Chang the three standard positive value relations: “better than”, “worse than” and “equally good” do not fully exhaust the conceptual space for positive value relations. According to her, there is room for a fourth positive value relation, which she calls “parity”. Her argument for parity comes in three parts. First, she argues that there are items that are not related by the standard three value relations. Second, that these items are not incomparable, and third, that the phenomena (...) she has focused on are not due to the vagueness of the comparative predicates. This paper focuses on the second part of the argument and an objection is presented. By assuming the Small Unidimensional Difference Principle, which is a key premise for the second part of the argument, Chang’s argument could be accused of begging the question. More so, by assuming this principle, the space for incomparability gets severely limited. If these worries are justified, then Chang’s argument for parity as a fourth form of comparability is unsuccessful. (shrink)