Value and parity

Ethics

Volumn 114, Issue 3, 2004, Pages 492-510

  Gert, Joshua ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 4544279806     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/381697     Document Type: Note

References (35)

1. Ruth Chang, "The Possibility of Parity," Ethics 112 (2002): 659-88.
2. For more on the distinction between positive and negative value relations, see ibid., p. 663.
3. Ibid., pp. 660-61.
4. In fact, fewer will suffice, for 'better than' can be used to define 'worse than', and vice versa. But, for reasons given below, the interdefinability of these two terms should not lead us to conclude that parity is equally basic.
5. For example, elsewhere she puts her thesis in the following way: "There is a fourth positive value relation-'on a par'-that, together with the traditional three, exhausts the logical space of comparability." See Chang's introduction to Incommensurability, Incomparability, and Practical Reason (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 4-5.
6. I do not mean to conflate these three dichotomies but only to give more of an idea of the sort of yes/no distinction that might suffice to account for the same phenomena that Chang believes require the postulation of a fourth positive value relation.
7. Indeed, Humeans often hold that there are no rational bounds at all on basic preferences. Such an attitude makes it difficult to enter into a discussion such as the present one, in which it is assumed that some items are better than others in certain respects. The proposal in this article accommodates the existence of wide bounds on the rationality of basic preferences without abandoning the idea that there are any such bounds. It therefore represents a compromise, in some ways, between Humeans and those who hold value to be more objective.
8. Chang, Incommensurability, pp. 7-13.
9. In her Ethics article, Chang also gives a list of philosophers who "have understood incomparability in terms of unresolved conflict between the considerations relevant to choice"; see Chang, "The Possibility of Parity," p. 660, n. 2.
10. Chang, Incommensurability, p. 30.
11. Chang, "The Possibility of Parity," pp. 668-69, including nn. 12, 13, and 16.
12. Chang is certainly aware that this argument has the form of a sorites and would be invalid if 'comparable' were a vague predicate. In this article I do not address her arguments that 'comparable' is not vague, because they are irrelevant to my main suggestion. However, it should be clear that on the view offered below, 'comparable' will be roughly as vague as 'irrational', 'mistaken', or 'puzzling'. My view that 'comparable' is vague is entirely compatible with Chang's claim that the specific failure of Michelangelo to be better than, worse than, or equal to Mozart, with respect to artistic creativity, is not a result of the vagueness of the predicates used to express these relations.
13. Chang, "The Possibility of Parity," p. 674.
14. Ibid., p. 676.
15. The 'a's and 'b's here are included to remind us that we cannot compare the first item in any given ordered pair with the second.
16. Chang, "The Possibility of Parity," pp. 676-77.
17. Of course Chang might say that we should not assume the trichotomy thesis. But the point here is to see whether, in this and other cases, we can say everything we wish to say without abandoning the trichotomy thesis. If we can, then this constitutes an argument against parity, not an assumption that there is no such thing.
18. Despite superficial grammar, these accounts of 'better' and 'worse' clearly do not exhaust the evaluative space. For our account of 'worse' means only that if one chooses a worse item, one has made a mistake. It does not follow from something's not being better, in the sense given above, that it is worse, in this sense. However, on these definitions, A's being better than B does imply, as it should, that B is worse than A.
19. See Joshua Gert, Brute Rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), chap. 7. My view has much in common with Philip Pettit's "genealogical" account of response-dependent notions. See Philip Pettit, "Realism and Response-Dependence," Mind 100 (1991): 587-626, esp. p. 600. Pettit, however, does not emphasize the role of language acquisition.
20. See Joshua Gert, Brute Rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), chap. 7. My view has much in common with Philip Pettit's "genealogical" account of response-dependent notions. See Philip Pettit, "Realism and Response-Dependence," Mind 100 (1991): 587-626, esp. p. 600. Pettit, however, does not emphasize the role of language acquisition.
21. Indeed, these claims could even have different truth values under sufficiently strange circumstances.
22. These are cases in which the failure of 'better than', 'worse than', and 'equal to' to apply is not to be explained by appeal to vagueness, since it is determinate that none of these apply. Unsurprisingly, such cases can be used to explain the phenomena that Chang uses in her arguments against appeals to vagueness.
23. 'Improvement' is to be understood in the same general framework: improving an item is a matter of making it better-in the relevant sense-than some items that it was not formerly better than.
24. Those semi-Humeans who remain uncomfortable with the claim that five years of anxiety is worse than the pain and discomfort involved in getting a filling but who are willing to hold that Mozart is more artistically creative than Britney Spears or that Citizen Kane is a better movie than Plan Nine from Outer Space should feel free to modify the current example by replacing discomforts with artists or films. All essential points will remain the same.
25. It may be worth noting that Chang will have to tell a similar story to avoid similar problems, no matter what account of parity she ends up favoring: she cannot hold that it is always rationally permissible to trade items that are on a par, even when the only relevant value is the value, relative to which, they are on a par. For given the structure of the cases that she takes to show parity (those involved in the Small-Improvement Argument), such trades can easily result in loss of overall value. She avoids these problems in the Ethics paper by giving no indication regarding the rationality of choice when faced with two items that are on a par.
26. In fact, it may seem that I am assuming a dichotomy thesis, since the rule, as stated, has no provision for equality of value. For if the intervals for two items, A and B, merely shared the same upper and lower bounds, it would still be rationally permissible to choose A over a slightly improved B, as long as the improvement in B didn't raise its lower bound higher than A's upper bound. But we can easily modify the rule to allow equality in the following circumstances: when two items each have the same unique rationally required strength of preference.
27. If we deny that the values used in these ordered pairs admit of exact equality then there will be six ways, and 'parity' will conflate four of them.
28. Chang, Incommensurability, pp. 4-5.
29. Chang, "The Possibility of Parity," p. 665.
30. Elsewhere I have argued against the idea that the value of comparable items is what determines the rational status of choices between them. Rather, it is comparisons of the wholesale rational status of various options that allows us to interpolate the respective values of the items involved in those options. See Gert, chap. 4.
31. Chang, "The Possibility of Parity," pp. 663-64.
32. If one objects to this possibility then one must object to the possibility of parity also, for these relations between three items are virtually definitive of instances of parity: consider Michelangelo, Mozart, and a composer just a bit worse than Mozart.
33. Chang, "The Possibility of Parity," p. 666.
34. See Paul Weirich, "Risk's Place in Decisions Rules," Synthese 126 (2001): 427-41; and I.J. Good, "Rational Decisions," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, ser. B, 14 (1952): 107-14.
35. See Paul Weirich, "Risk's Place in Decisions Rules," Synthese 126 (2001): 427-41; and I.J. Good, "Rational Decisions," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, ser. B, 14 (1952): 107-14.