Parity, Interval Value, and Choice

Abstract

In "The Possibility of Parity," I argued that the right thing to say about certain hard cases of comparison-cases in which one item is better in some relevant respects, while the other is better in other relevant respects, but there is no obvious truth about how the items compare in all relevant respects-is that the items are 'on a~ par'.' 'Parity', I said, is a fourth "positive' value relation of independent standing, not subsumable under the familiar trichotomny of relations 'better than', 'worse than', and 'equally good'.My argument took the' fonrm of an argument by elimination: the cases of interest are not cases of ignorance, in which one of the traditional three relations holds but we don't know which, nor cases of vagueness, in which the items occupy the borderline of one of the traditional three relations but are cases of determinate comparability; therefore, as cases of determinate comparability in which none of the traditional three relations holds, they must be cases in which a fourth relation of comparability holds-they are on a par.In his interesting discussion of my article, "Value and Parity,"Joshua Gert agrees that the cases I think are cases of Parity are not cases of ignorance or vagueness and agrees that we cannot simply assume that because neither of two alternatives is better than the other and they are not equally good that they are thereby incomparable.2 Nevertheless, he wants to challenge my claim that these cases are ones in which the items are related by a fourth positive relation "of the same sort" as the usual * Many thanks arc due to Kit Fine for invaluable comments on an earlier draft and to Ft ik Carlson, David Miller, Derek Par fit, and' twvo anonymous zeferees at Etida for uisefuil caiticisms that helped me to improve and clarify various points.I am grateful toJoshua Geri for his discussion or my earlier wvork and' for lengthy e-mail correspondence ott an tearlier version of the present article.1.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 110 citations exist upstream.