Some comparisons are easy. For instance a kale salad is clearly better than a bag of potato chips with respect to nutritional value, and, a dollar bill is clearly equal to four quarters with respect to monetary value. Other comparisons are hard. Who was better with respect to artistic creativity, Mozart or Michelangelo? What is better with respect to fulfilling one’s moral duties, staying in France to take care of your elderly mother or leaving to join the Free French Forces during World War II? In each of these hard cases, there is an intuitive resistance to claims that one of the items is better than, worse than, or equal to the other. Importantly though, the intuitive resistance does not seem to be due simply to ignorance about the items themselves or their attendant consequences. In this way, the items are seemingly incomparable with each other. This phenomenon of seeming incomparability raises the pressing questions of what is going on in such cases and what we should rationally do when faced with choices between such items. My dissertation examines both of these questions and argues for several surprising conclusions over three chapters. In the first chapter, I consider the Parity account of seeming incomparability, which claims that while seemingly incomparable items are neither better than, worse than, nor equal to each other, there is nonetheless a distinct and previously unrecognized fourth comparative relation of parity that does hold between them. Here I argue that despite appearances, this endorsement of parity between seemingly incomparable items is not actually unique to the Parity account. In the second chapter, I consider how seeming incomparability affects the rationality of our choices over time. Here I argue that while it seems clearly irrational for an agent to make a series of choices that they know will result in a suboptimal outcome, this is surprisingly not the case when seeming incomparability is involved. In the final chapter, I consider seeming incomparability that takes the form of mildly incomplete preferences. Here I argue that while such preferences violate the standard set of axioms for rational preferences, there is an alternate set of axioms that we can appeal to instead for rationally governing mildly incomplete preferences.
Yan, Leo Hsin-Gin,
"Making Sense of Seeming Incomparability"
(2019).
Philosophy Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.26300/xdm5-c320
