Epistemicism and commensurability

ABSTRACT

The topic for this paper is the apparent value incommensurability – two goods are apparently incommensurable when it appears that neither is better than the other nor are they equally good. I consider three theories of this phenomenon. Indeterminists like Broome [Broome, John. 1997. “Is Incommensurability Vagueness?” In Incommensurability, Incomparability and Practical Reason, edited by Ruth Chang. Harvard University Press.] hold that it is due to vagueness: when two goods appear to be incommensurable, this owes to the fact that ‘better than’ is vague. Incommensurabilists like Chang [Chang, Ruth. 2002. “The Possibility of Parity.” Ethics 112 (4): 659–688.] hold that some goods appear to be incommensurable because they genuinely are, because it is determinate that neither is better than the other, nor are they equally good. I defend epistemicism, the view that the appearance of value incommensurability is due only to our ignorance of how goods compare. In reality, all goods are commensurable. I offer two arguments for epistemicism. First, epistemicists are committed to less unexplained axiological structure than are non-epistemicists, Second, only epistemicists have an adequate explanation of some facts about the scope of apparent incommensurability. Finally, I identify a class of putative counterexamples to the epistemicist’s analysis..

KEYWORDS:

• Epistemicism
• incommensurability
• axiology
• vagueness
• parity

Acknowledgements

Many people have helped me think about the issues in this paper, including Steve Darwall, Michael Della Rocca, Chris Heathwood, Dan Greco, Shelly Kagan, Harry Lloyd, Jason Raibley, Zoltan Szabo and Angela Yeo. A version of this paper was presented at the Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress in August 2021, where I received valuable questions and feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Chang (2002), Broome (2000), Raz (1986) all consider this case.

2 See Norcross (2020) for a discussion of incommensurability especially as it relates to questions about aggregation.

3 Parfit (1984, §146).

4 Though see Dorr et al. (n.d., Forthcoming) for an in-depth discussion of the completeness of comparatives in general.

5 Raz (1985), (1997) holds perhaps the purest form of incommensurabilism.

6 Griffin (1986). Hurka (1993). Parfit (1984, 431).

7 Incommensurabilists and Indeterminists disagree about what is often called the trichotomy thesis: for any two goods A and B: either A is better than B, A is worse than B, or A is equal in value to B. For indeterminists, this thesis is determinately true even though each disjunct is indeterminate. Anyone who rejects this thesis, on my classification, is an incommensurabilist. I think that the three-fold classification of views I use in this paper is more perspicuous than classifying the views on the basis of whether or not they accept the trichotomy thesis. The truth or falsity of this thesis does not cut at the joints of the nature of evaluative comparison. Thanks to a referee for pushing me to clarify how I classify the views.

8 Regan (1997) defends the view that all goods are commensurable, which is entailed by epistemicism.

9 Williamson (1994) and Sorensen (2001), among others, defend the epistemic theory of vagueness.

10 Hajek and Rabinowicz (2022) develop a model of incommensurability which analyses degrees of commensurability in terms of the proportion of permissible preference orderings which rank two goods consistently – similar to a supervaluatioinist model of vagueness.

11 Carlson (2004), (2013), Elson (2014), (2017), Constantinescu (2012), Gustafsson (2013), Andersson (2015), Andersson and Herlitz (2018).

12 See Parfit (1984) and Sinnott-Armstrong (1985) for early discussions, and Chang (2002) and Gustafsson and Espinoza (2010) for more detailed recent analyses.

13 That is, the incommensurability of two goods may consist in the fact that it is indeterminate how they compare or may consist in the fact that it is determinate that neither is better than the other and it is determinate that they are equally good. I use this disjunctive terminology only when I am grouping together all non-epistemicist views to discuss a common problem that they have.

14 Ross (1939, 275). Thanks to Jason Raibley for drawing this passage to my attention and encouraging me to engage with Ross’s view.The final sentence brings up the relation between pluralism and value incommensurability, and for more on this, see Klocksiem (2011).

15 This is because there can be at most one incommensurate zone in a standard configuration (which, recall, is a cross-section of the commensurability map). See Broome (1997) for a discussion of why this must be the case.

16 Perhaps the indeterminist could say that the facts which explain the scope of incommensurability are the same as the facts which explain the scope of the penumbra of any vague predicate: facts about use. Though this seems reasonable at first glance, it commits the indeterminist to an implausible result. If the facts about usage change, then the facts about which goods are commensurable will also change. Yet, it is not the case that a change in how speakers use ‘better than’ could make it the case that one career is better than another, when formerly they were incommensurable, or could make it the case that an instance of pleasure is better than an instance of virtue, when before they were incommensurable. Indeterminists should not tie the axiological facts so closely to facts about use.

17 Compare: non-epistemicists about vagueness find it hard to believe that a man with n hairs is bald, but a man with n + 1 hairs is not, even though the exact value of n is unknown to us and perhaps unknowable.

18 Perhaps the fact that there are two sharp transitions for the non-epistemicist is not worse than the fact that there is only one sharp transition for the epistemicist. If the sharp transition could be accounted for this would indeed be true, since both sharp transitions could be accounted for in the same way. But it is my view that the transitions in question cannot be accounted for, and in that case, having two of them is worse than having one.

19 Chang (2002) recognizes something like this argument, but fails to note that it applies to parity-based views like hers in addition to the other incommensurabilist views she is attacking – Chang is committed to two sharp transitions in a standard configuration: from worse than to parity with, and from parity with to better than. See also Elson (2014) and Flanigan and Halstead (2018, 215–216) for discussions of this point.

20 Chang (2002, 673–675) would seem to agree with this thought (though for kinds of incommensurability other than her parity-based view), because of what she calls the small unidimensional difference principle.

21 This argument was developed by Broome (1997).

22 The incommensurabilist might make the following speech: ‘one of the data that needs to be accounted for is that it seems determinately true that none of the three evaluative comparatives relates some pairs of items, and it also seems true that the borders of the incommensurate zone are not sharp. We can explain the latter in terms of vagueness, but not the former. We do in fact need both theoretical tools to explain the phenomena.’ The reason this speech is off track is that the incommensurabilist has described the phenomenon at issue in a theoretically loaded way. The intuition or seeming that they purport to have here is no such thing, but rather just a restatement of their theory. When we redescribe the phenomenon in a theoretically neutral way, as I did at the start of this paper by calling it ‘apparent incommensurability,’ we can see that there is no phenomenon that can only be explained by incommensurabilism + vagueness.

23 Flanigan and Halstead (2018, 215) also makes this point.

24 An analogy with the debate about vagueness is suggestive again. Some of the main arguments for epistemicism about vagueness hinge on the inability of competing theories of vagueness to adequately model the phenomenon of higher-order vagueness (see Williamson 1994). And I have been arguing that something analogous to the problem of higher-order vagueness, the fuzziness of the edges of the incommensurate zone in a standard configuration, is a phenomenon that non-epistemicist theories of apparent incommensurability cannot adequately explain.

25 Of course, my arguments in this paragraph do not apply to Flannigan and Halstead’s (2018) version of indeterminism. They rightly give the same treatment to first- and higher-order indeterminacy.

26 Williamson (1994), (2000) argues for margin of error principles.

27 In my view this response would not amount to borrowing theoretical resources from the indeterminist to explain the borders of the incommensurate zone, because the indeterminacy in question belongs to epistemic facts not to axiological facts (the indeterminist’s thesis is a thesis about the indeterminacy of axiological facts). The vagueness of ‘knowledge’ may be something that we are committed to for independent reasons. For indeterminist-epistemicists, the two possibilities are in fact one; for them the vagueness of ‘knowledge’ amounts to failures of positive introspection which I model in the next two paragraphs and in figure 4.

28 Or, alternatively, enough sugar to result in a just perceptible difference in sweetness.

29 Thanks to an anonymous referee, among others, for pushing this objection.

30 Defended in Williamson (2000).

31 Thanks for suggesting this example and a helpful discussion of these points.

32 Nothing here hinges on the claim that states of affairs are the ultimate value-bearers. See Lemos (1991) for a discussion of the question of what the value bearers are.

33 Or, alternatively, if we wish to cast the question in terms of welfare value, rather than goodness simpliciter: ‘does my drinking this tea increase my welfare more than drinking this coffee?

34 Indeed, egoists cannot even guarantee this either, since our powers of memory and our ability to predict the consequences of our actions for our future welfare are severely limited. Only the even less plausible time slice egoism, according to which the only things which are good simpliciter are things that are good for me right now, could guarantee us knowledge of all of the factors determining which of two options is morally better (and even this presupposes that we are always in a position to know how well-off we are and what makes us well-off at a time).

35 Broome (2000, 23–24) and Chang (2002) are characteristic examples.

36 Thanks to Shelly Kagan for offering this objection.