Value incommensurability and practical reason

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Moon, David Christopher, 1986-, author

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In cases of apparent value incommensurability, an agent's alternatives appear to her to be neither better than, nor worse than, nor equally as good as one another. It is plausible to suppose that s...

In cases of apparent value incommensurability, an agent's alternatives appear to her to be neither better than, nor worse than, nor equally as good as one another. It is plausible to suppose that some cases of apparent incommensurability will turn out to be instances of genuine, ontological incommensurability ("OI"), while others will turn out to be cases of merely epistemic incommensurability ("EI"). In EI cases, the alternatives are in fact commensurable--they are either better than, worse than, or equally as good as one another--but the agent is ignorant as to which of these value relations holds between them. Cases of apparent incommensurability have long posed a vexing challenge for theorists of practical rationality, because we typically suppose that an alternative is rationally permissible (absent deontic constraints) if and only if it is at least as good as each other alternative--that is, if it is (one of) the best alternative(s). But in cases of apparent incommensurability, there either is no best alternative (if the agent faces an OI case), or the agent is irremediably ignorant as to which alternative is the best (if she faces an EI case). Moreover, the agent may not even know whether she faces an OI case or an EI case: she may be "OI-EI uncertain." In this dissertation, I present my theory of what rationality requires of agents who face a choice between apparently incommensurable alternatives. Chapter 1 covers OI cases; Chapter 2 covers EI cases; and Chapter 3 covers OI-EI uncertainty. While a fair amount has been written about OI cases, very little has been written on the practical rationality of EI cases. There is even less literature--really, none at all--on the topic of whether and how OI-EI uncertainty affects rational choice. I therefore content myself in Chapter 1 with a presentation of the main existing theories of how practical rationality operates in OI cases, and focus my original efforts on Chapters 2 and 3.

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