Temkin's essentially comparative view, wrongful life and the mere addition paradox

Roberts, Melinda A.

doi:10.1093/analys/anu027

Analysis

2014

DOI: 10.1093/analys/anu027

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Temkin's essentially comparative view, wrongful life and the mere addition paradox

Melinda A. Roberts

Abstract: required for its practical relevance. What is required is a model that can help us think through these issues and get us to approximate answers. And of course, no such model can be one that also (a) appears to predict that there are no answers or (b) engineers an 'answer' by betraying our ideals. What we appear to arrive at by Rethinking the Good's end is choice between options (a) and (b). Perhaps, there are other relevant alternatives.

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Cited by 6 publications

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References 9 publications

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“… 17 Temkin’s main definition of the Internal Aspects View doesn’t mention 1D Scoring (Temkin 2012: 370; see also Temkin 1999: 777), nor do others’ definitions (Coons 2014: 292; Roberts 2014: 309; Handfield 2016: 4; Pummer 2018: 1740; an exception is Cusbert 2017: 74). …”

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confidence: 99%

Sources of transitivity

Muñoz

2022

Economics and Philosophy

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Why should ‘better than’ be transitive? The leading answer in ethics is that values do not change with context. But this cannot be the entire source of transitivity, I argue, since transitivity can fail even if values never change, so long as they are complex, with multiple dimensions combined non-additively. I conclude by exploring a new hypothesis: that all alleged cases of nontransitive betterness, such as Parfit’s Repugnant Conclusion, can and should be modelled as the result of complexity, not context-relativity.

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confidence: 99%

Sources of transitivity

Muñoz

2022

Economics and Philosophy

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“…See Handfield (), Huemer (), Kagan (), Roberts (), Ross (), Temkin (, , ), and Voorhoeve (), among others.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…For readings of Temkin that stress the choice set, see Ross (, p. 437), Handfield (, Section 3.3), and Roberts (, p. 310).…”

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confidence: 99%

Acting on Essentially Comparative Goodness

Cusbert

2017

Thought: A Journal of Philosophy

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Temkin's Essentially Comparative View of moral ideals says that goodness is comparison set dependent: the goodness of an outcome is relativized to a set of outcomes. This view does not entail that betterness is intransitive; indeed, it provides the resources for maintaining transitivity. However, it does entail that the structure of goodness is more complex than is standardly supposed. It thereby demands a modification of the standard connection between goodness and decision. I set out this challenge, canvas some options, and show that Temkin vacillates between two of them.

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Essentially Comparative Value Does Not Threaten Transitivity

Handfield

2016

Thought: A Journal of Philosophy

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The essentially comparative conception of value entails that the value of a state of affairs does not depend solely upon features intrinsic to the state of affairs, but also upon extrinsic features, such as the set of feasible alternatives. It has been argued that this conception of value gives us reason to abandon the transitivity of the better than relation. This paper shows that the support for intransitivity derived from this conception of value is very limited. On its most plausible interpretations, it merely provides a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for intransitivity. It is further argued that the essentially comparative conception of value appears to support a disjunctive conclusion: there is incommensurability of value or betterness is not transitive. Of these two alternatives, incommensurability is preferable, because it is far less threatening to our other axiological commitments.

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Temkin's essentially comparative view, wrongful life and the mere addition paradox

Cited by 6 publications

References 9 publications

Sources of transitivity

Sources of transitivity

Acting on Essentially Comparative Goodness

Essentially Comparative Value Does Not Threaten Transitivity

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