The modes of value

Philosophical Studies

Volumn 104, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 33-46

  Hansson, Sven Ove ^a  

^a ROYAL INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY   (Sweden)

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EID: 21244441407     PISSN: 00318116     EISSN: 15730883     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1010308714135     Document Type: Article

References (33)

1. Jean Hampton, "Does Hume Have an Instrumental Conception of Practical Reason", Hume Studies 21: 57-74, 1995.
2. Elijah Millgram, "Was Hume a Humean?", Hume Studies 21: 75-93, 1995.
3. I take talk about ends (goals, aims, objectives etc.) to be, for our present purposes, translatable into talk about preferences. Leaving out the fine details, an end is a property of options such that, ceteris paribus, an option is preferred to another if it has more of that property.
4. The notion of "collective preference" is as unclear as it is common. Preferences are mental states, whereas choices are actions. Contrary to actions, mental states cannot be collective. See Sven Ove Hansson, "A Procedural Model of Voting", Theory and Decision 32: 269-301, 1992.
5. The term "basic preferences" derives from Christoph Lumer, "Which preferences shall be the basis of rational decision?", pp. 33-56 in Christoph Fehige and Ulla Wessels, Preferences, de Gruyter 1998. In order to uncover underlying basic preferences, decision theorists often make inferences in the reverse direction, i.e. from preferences over complex objects to preferences over basic objects. Prominent examples can be found in the works of Ramsey and Savage. These inferences are part of a procedure of discovery or reconstruction that is external to the agent, and the premises used in them do not acquire primary or basic status in the agent's system of preferences.
6. Stuart S. Nagel, "Efficiency, effectiveness and equity in public policy evaluation", Policy Studies Review 6: 99-120, 1986.
7. Christine H. Rosseil, "Using Multiple Criteria to Evaluate Public Policies", American Politics Quarterly 21: 155-184, 1993.
8. Julian Le Grand, "Equity versus Efficiency: The Elusive Trade-off", Ethics 100: 554-568, 1990, esp. p. 559.
9. S.J.D. Green "Competitive Equality of Opportunity: A Defense", Ethics 100: 5-32, 1989.
10. E.g.: John Greedy, "Comparing Tax and Transfer Systems: Poverty, Inequality and Target Efficiency", Economica 63: S163-S174, 1996.
11. Similarly, efficiency in law enforcement refers to the achievement of equity. "Depending on the definition of equity, different law enforcement practices will be inefficient or efficient." Lester C. Thurow, "Equity versus efficiency in law enforcement", Public Policy 18:451-462, 1970, p. 451.
12. The first use of the term "core predicate" seems to have been in Romane Clark, "Concerning the Logic of Predicate Modifiers", Nous 4: 311-335, 1970.
13. Admittedly, the difference between "defeat the enemy" and "fight the enemy" can be described in terms of the modifier "successfully", that may be included among the attainment modes. Similarly, the different between "educable" and "educated", like that between "corruptible" and "corrupt", may be described in terms of a possibility mode. These are not, however, the attainment and possibility modes that we normally encounter in decision theory.
14. As was pointed out to me by an anonymous referee, it would be more difficult to imagine a language that contained no word for "death" but only a word for "50% chance of death". It would be much more difficult to define "death" from "50 % chance of death" than the other way around.
15. Amartya Sen, On Ethics and Economics, Blackwell 1987.
16. Mark Sagoff, "Values and Preferences", Ethics 96: 301-316, 1986, p. 309.
17. Julian Le Grand, "Equity versus Efficiency: The Elusive Trade-off", Ethics 100:554-568, 1990, p. 560.
18. On the meaning of intrinsicality, see Don E. Marietta Jr., "Thoughts on the taxonomy and semantics of value terms", Journal of Value Inquiry 25: 43-53 1991.
19. Denny Vågerö, "Equity and Efficiency in Health Reform. A European perspective", Social Science & Medicine 39: 1203-1210, 1994, pp. 1203 and 1205.
20. One reason why equity and equality may seem to have independent value is that we tend to apply them only when the resulting composite value object has positive value.
21. Efficiency with respect to a given set of goals has (uncontroversial) positive value to the extent that (1) each of these goals has (uncontroversial) positive value, and (2) there is (uncontroversially) no negative coupling between the goals. By a negative coupling is meant that increased satisfaction of one goal leads to decreased satisfaction of another. In the case of Pareto efficiency, the second condition may be violated if there are positional goods. When this is not the case, however, Pareto efficiency appears to be a clear case of efficiency with a positive value.
22. Kenneth J. Arrow, "Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care", American Economic Review 53: 941-973, 1963, p. 942.
23. This terminology is somewhat misleading, since outcomes are involved in both cases. Strictly speaking, the distinction is between "equality of outcome" and "equality of opportunity to outcome".
24. In a different historical and political context, Immanuel Kant accepted the division of society into active (enfranchised) and passive (voteless) citizens, but advocated "a reasonable equality for everyone in the people to work his way up from the passive to the active condition". Die Metaphysik der Sitten, part I (Rechtslehre) [1797], par. 46.
25. Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons, Oxford University Press 1984, Appendix F.
26. Sven Ove Hansson, "Semi-Revision", Journal of Applied Non-Classical Logic 7: 151-175, 1997.
27. Erik J. Olsson, Coherence. Studies in Epistemology and Belief Revision, PhD thesis, Uppsala University, 1997.
28. Cf. the debate on whether or not a full decision-theoretic apparatus can be used in arguments about basic issues in preference logic: Sven Ove Hansson, "Decision-Theoretic Foundations for Axioms of Rational Preference", Synthese 109: 401-412, 1997.
29. Jordan Howard Sobel, "Cyclical Preferences and World Bayesianism", Philosophy of Science 64: 42-73, 1997, pp. 69-70.
30. Sven Ove Hansson, The Structure of Values and Norms, Cambridge University Press, in press.
31. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Oxford University Press 1972, pp. 20-21 and 48-51.
32. Folke Tersman, Reflective equilibrium: an essay in moral epistemology, PhD thesis, Stockholm University 1993.
33. It should be noted that this argument relies on the impossibility to derive values in the way indicated. As was pointed out to me by an anonymous referee, an attempt to drive a wedge between decision theory and moral philosophy might make use of the fact that reference to mode-free value objects is often needed to define mode-containing value objects. However, this definitional relationship is not sufficient to delineate a subject-area that is independent of moral philosophy. (In similar manner, we need mode-free value objects, such as "cough", in order to express value objects that contain the mode of deliberateness, such as "cough deliberately". This is no reason to remove the value analysis of deliberate actions from moral philosophy.)