GERT, Joshua - Value and Parity (2004)

Value and Parity
Author(s): by Joshua Gert
Source: Ethics, Vol. 114, No. 3 (April 2004), pp. 492-510
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/381697 .
Accessed: 21/06/2014 09:35
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Ethics.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 91.229.229.96 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 09:35:24 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
DISCUSSIONS
Value and Parity*
Joshua Gert
In “The Possibility of Parity,” Ruth Chang argues for the existence of a

fourth value relation, which she calls “parity.”1 The three traditional
value relations are ‘better than’, ‘worse than’, and ‘equal to’. In saying
of one thing that it stands in one of these relations to a second thing,
one is making a positive assertion about the value relations between the
two: one is not merely denying that such a relation holds, as one would
be doing if one merely said that A is not better than B. In this sense,
the three traditional value relations are positive value relations.2 An
assertion of parity between two items is not merely the denial that one
or more of these traditional relations obtain; in this sense parity is also
a positive value relation. This article agrees with much of what Chang
has to say, especially when she argues against a number of alternative
interpretations of the cases that she takes to support the existence of
parity. Nevertheless, it is the purpose of this article to offer its own
interpretation of the cases she makes use of. The suggested interpre-
tation is consistent with virtually all of Chang’s claims about the partic-
ular cases, but it does not require us to posit a fourth positive value
relation that has so far evaded the explicit conceptual or linguistic notice
of a species so prone to making comparisons.
The raw material out of which Chang constructs her arguments for
the existence of parity is primarily to be found in cases in which we are
reluctant to say, of two items being compared in a certain evaluative
respect, that one is better than the other, or that they are equally good.
Following Chang, let us call these “hard cases.” Of course the mere
* Many thanks to Ruth Chang for her extremely speedy and helpful criticisms of the
first draft of this article. Thanks also to a number of anonymous referees from Ethics, and
to Maria Victoria Costa, for comments on the penultimate version.
1. Ruth Chang, “The Possibility of Parity,” Ethics 112 (2002): 659–88.
2. For more on the distinction between positive and negative value relations, see ibid.,
p. 663.
Ethics 114 (April 2004): 492–510

䉷 2004 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0014-1704/2004/11403-
0004$10.00
492

Gert Value and Parity 493
existence of hard cases does very little by itself to support the idea of
a fourth positive value relation. Chang describes three other possible
interpretations of such cases: (a) one of the two items really is better,
or they are equally good, but we just don’t know it, (b) such cases
represent failures of comparability, so that no positive value relation
whatever holds between the two items (this is what many philosophers
mean by calling such items ‘incommensurable’ or ‘incomparable’) and
(c) such cases represent instances in which the vagueness of ‘better
than’ and ‘equally good’ explains why there is no fact of the matter
whether one of the items is better than the other, even though it is also
not true that they are equally good. I will not discuss Chang’s remarks
about a through c, for even if she is right in holding that they cannot
account for all hard cases, this article will argue that we do not need a
fourth positive value relation to account for them. I agree with Chang
that each of these three alternative interpretations assumes what she
calls “the trichotomy thesis.” The trichotomy thesis holds that if two
items are comparable, it is because one of the items is better than the
other, or because they are equally good. In Chang’s terminology, the
thesis holds that “the conceptual space of comparability between two
items is spanned by the trichotomy of relations ‘better than,’ ‘worse
than,’ and ‘equally good.’”3 This article will defend the trichotomy thesis,
at least in one important sense: it will hold that any other positive value
relations that we might wish to make use of can be defined in terms of
the three traditional relations.4 Thus it will not exactly deny the possi-
bility of parity, if parity is understood in a certain derivative way. But
Chang’s idea seems to be that parity is a fourth value relation of the
same sort as the three traditional value relations.5 This is the idea that
will be challenged.
The central piece of conceptual apparatus that will be exploited in
this article is the distinction between the choices that a person is dis-
posed to make, and the choices that a person is disposed to regard as
rationally permissible. The former may plausibly be taken to reveal a
person’s preferences, but a person’s valuations are more plausibly taken
to be revealed by the latter. That is, preference and valuation are not
the same thing, and preference is most closely related to choice, while
valuation is more closely related to the assessment of choice. For ex-
3. Ibid., pp. 660–61.

4. In fact, fewer will suffice, for ‘better than’ can be used to define ‘worse than’, and
vice versa. But, for reasons given below, the interdefinability of these two terms should
not lead us to conclude that parity is equally basic.
5. For example, elsewhere she puts her thesis in the following way: “There is a fourth
positive value relation—‘on a par’—that, together with the traditional three, exhausts the
logical space of comparability.” See Chang’s introduction to Incommensurability, Incompa-
rability, and Practical Reason (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 4–5.

494 Ethics April 2004
ample, when faced with a choice between two items and asked to choose
between them (not: to assess their relative value) based on beauty, talent,
or something of that sort, it might be that I would choose one item,
but that I can see that the opposite choice might also have been made
by someone else without either of us failing to appreciate the “true
value” of each item. Moreover, I can often see that this might continue
to be true even if the item I chose were improved to some degree. For
on this picture of human choice and valuation, our valuations of two
items are not given by our dispositions to choose, but by our dispositions
either to understand or to be puzzled by certain choices: to regard them
as rational or irrational, mistaken or not mistaken.6 Our valuation of
an item may, but need not be, interpreted as a belief. But however a
valuation is interpreted, it can be expressed by claims regarding the
rationality of certain choices. This interpretation of ‘valuation’ will form
the basis for an explanation of all of the intuitions Chang cites in favor
of the possibility of parity.
The above distinction between preference and valuation allows for
an easy explanation of the following common phenomenon: often we
claim that while we would prefer A over B if we were choosing based
on value V, this does not mean that we regard A as superior to B in
respect of that value. If one has linked preference to valuation too
closely, one may wonder how someone could prefer A to B—that is, not
simply opt for A on a random basis—without regarding A as superior
to B, at least if that person were rational. But this worry will seem
theoretically motivated once one (a) distinguishes preference from val-
uation, (b) acknowledges the plausibility of the idea that our valuations
reflect our views regarding the rationality of preference, and (c) notes
that only very rarely do we think of our particular personal preferences
as the uniquely rational ones.7 This view of preference and value allows
that two people in the same epistemic situation, who have the same
perfectly precise standards for assessing the value of items with respect
to V, and who take the same interest in whether or not something has
value V, could make different, but equally rational choices between two
6. I do not mean to conflate these three dichotomies but only to give more of an
idea of the sort of yes/no distinction that might suffice to account for the same phenomena
that Chang believes require the postulation of a fourth positive value relation.
7. Indeed, Humeans often hold that there are no rational bounds at all on basic
preferences. Such an attitude makes it difficult to enter into a discussion such as the
present one, in which it is assumed that some items are better than others in certain
respects. The proposal in this article accommodates the existence of wide bounds on the
rationality of basic preferences without abandoning the idea that there are any such
bounds. It therefore represents a compromise, in some ways, between Humeans and those
who hold value to be more objective.

items, when the relevant value is value V. It is the purpose of this article
to explain and defend this view of preference and valuation.
It may initially seem that in refocusing the discussion from judg-
ments of relative value to judgments of the rational permissibility of
choice, the subject has been changed. But, as Chang acknowledges, the
whole practical import of the discussion of incomparability—and there-
fore of parity, which is Chang’s tool for arguing against incomparabil-
ity—lies in its implications for rationally justified choice. Chang first
introduced us to the notion of parity in Incommensurability, Incompara-
bility, and Practical Reason. There, after an isolated remark to the effect
that incomparability may have interesting implications for some unspe-
cified metaphysical questions about value, her six subsequent pages of
discussion of the significance of the topic are cast entirely in terms of
justified choice.8 Moreover, Chang’s discussion makes it clear that almost
all the contributors to that volume share the same view of the extremely
tight connection between value and practical reason.9 And despite the
fact that the comparison between Mozart and Michelangelo, which plays
such a large role in “The Possibility of Parity,” may not seem to be a
practical one, it is notable that the vast majority of the other illustrative
examples in Incommensurability, Incomparability, and Practical Reason and
“The Possibility of Parity” are examples of choice situations. On reflec-
tion, this should not be a surprise. The idea that there could be value
“out there” independent of practical human questions is a very suspi-
cious one. And there does seem to be an analytic tie between value
judgments and the rationality of choice: if one is comparing items in
terms of what Chang calls a “covering value” such as philosophical
talent—and Chang holds that all comparisons must take place relative
to some such value—then if one makes certain comparisons, one is
rationally committed to making certain corresponding choices.
Of course, the fact that value comparisons have implications for
justified choice is compatible with the idea that the scope of the value
relations, including parity, is much wider than the scope of our possible
practical choices. Thus, we might discuss the relative merits of Mozart
and Michelangelo without suggesting anything about the justification
of certain choices. But given that virtually the whole discussion of the
significance of comparability, and therefore of parity, is given in terms
of justified choice, it does not seem that this difference in scope could
be very great. Moreover, we can make an even stronger claim. Chang
strongly suggests that the limits of applicability of the comparable/in-
8. Chang, Incommensurability, pp. 7–13.

9. In her Ethics article, Chang also gives a list of philosophers who “have understood
incomparability in terms of unresolved conflict between the considerations relevant to
choice”; see Chang, “The Possibility of Parity,” p. 660, n. 2.

comparable distinction, and therefore the limits of applicability of her
notion of parity, coincide exactly with the limits of possible practical
choice. She writes: “Even if there is never a failure of applicability [of
value terms, so that one can sensibly ask ‘How philosophically talented
is the number five?’ and so can also sensibly compare its level of talent
with Wittgenstein’s], we would still want to make a distinction between
cases that practical reason might present to us and ones beyond its
scope. So we have an equivalent distinction, not made in terms of ap-
plicability and nonapplicability.”10 It is clear that Chang does not see
the notion of parity as sensibly applied to a pair of items unless practical
reason might actually be faced with a choice between them.
CHANG’S ARGUMENT
Chang’s argument for the possibility of parity starts by drawing attention
to the existence of cases in which two items are not related by any of
the three traditional value relations. For example, suppose you are called
upon to judge which of two items of clothing is more elegant: say, some
instance of Victorian ballroom dress and a costume worn in eleventh-
century Japan by members of the imperial court. You are unwilling to
say of either item that it is more elegant than the other. So far that is
consistent with their being equally elegant. But suppose now that you
would be willing to say that a certain alteration in the width of the silk
belt in the Japanese costume would increase its elegance. The alteration
is made, and now you are asked the original question again: which is
more elegant, the Victorian ballroom dress or the improved Japanese
court outfit? It may well be that you would still be unwilling to say that
the improved Japanese outfit is more elegant than the Victorian dress:
their elegance is simply too different to allow such a claim. If that is
the case then it seems that we should not say that the two original items
of clothing were equally elegant. After all, if they had been, then the
improvement in the elegance of one should have made it the more
elegant item. So none of the three traditional value relations seems to
have held between the two original items of clothing. If this particular
case is not convincing, Chang offers others and cites many authors who
offer still others.11 In any case, Chang herself agrees that there are
examples of this sort that do show that there can be pairs of items that
are not related by any of the traditional three value relations. Doubting
readers should therefore grant this point for the sake of the debate.
So far this argument, which Chang calls “the Small-Improvement
Argument,” only succeeds in showing that there can be pairs of items,
neither of which are better with respect to some value, even though
10. Chang, Incommensurability, p. 30.

11. Chang, “The Possibility of Parity,” pp. 668–69, including nn. 12, 13, and 16.

they are also not equally good with respect to that value. What Chang
needs to do is to argue that not all of these cases are cases of incom-
mensurability: cases in which no positive value relation holds between
the items. She attempts to do this with an argument she calls “the
Unidimensional Chaining Argument,” which runs as follows. Suppose
we have two items that are not related by any of the three traditional
value relations, when compared with respect to a certain value. Let us
say that the items are Michelangelo and Mozart, and that the value is
artistic creativity. Now, imagine a third artist, Talentlessi, who is quite
uncreative artistically, so that he is clearly comparable with Mozart: he
is worse. It is possible (let us grant) to imagine a sort of chain of artists,
starting with Talentlessi and ending with Michelangelo, which has the
following property. Between each two members of this chain, there is
only a small unidimensional change. The dimension of change need
not be constant from adjacent pair to adjacent pair, but each pair differs
only in one respect, and not a great deal in that respect. Chang argues
that since Talentlessi is comparable with Mozart, and since no single
small unidimensional change could transform an artist from one who
was comparable with Mozart into one who was not, each member of
the chain from Talentlessi to Michelangelo is comparable with Mozart.12
Since Michelangelo himself is the last member of this chain, it follows
that he is comparable, in respect of artistic creativity, with Mozart. We
have already granted that Michelangelo and Mozart do not bear either
of the traditional three value relations to each other, with respect to
artistic creativity. Thus, since they are nevertheless comparable, there
must be a fourth such relation. And this relation we call ‘parity’.
THE ARGUMENT AGAINST PARITY

Chang herself provides the central point that this article will exploit in
arguing against the need to posit a fourth positive value relation. The
Unidimensional Chaining Argument makes crucial use of the following
claim: “A small unidimensional difference [is not] powerful enough to
effect a switch from two . . . items being comparable to their being
incomparable.”13 Chang calls this claim “the Small Unidimensional Dif-
ference Principle.” But she herself points out that the Small Unidi-
12. Chang is certainly aware that this argument has the form of a sorites and would
be invalid if ‘comparable’ were a vague predicate. In this article I do not address her
arguments that ‘comparable’ is not vague, because they are irrelevant to my main sug-
gestion. However, it should be clear that on the view offered below, ‘comparable’ will be
roughly as vague as ‘irrational’, ‘mistaken’, or ‘puzzling’. My view that ‘comparable’ is
vague is entirely compatible with Chang’s claim that the specific failure of Michelangelo
to be better than, worse than, or equal to Mozart, with respect to artistic creativity, is not
a result of the vagueness of the predicates used to express these relations.
13. Chang, “The Possibility of Parity,” p. 674.

mensional Difference Principle, despite its “deep intuitive appeal,” is
simply false in some cases. The example Chang uses to illustrate its lack
of full generality comes from economics and is the following. It is pos-
sible to hold that different people’s utilities simply are incomparable.
If that is so, then if I am better off in situation A than in situation B,
and if you are better off in situation B than in situation A, then, with
respect to social well-being, situations A and B cannot be compared.
But this impossibility of interpersonal comparisons of utility does not
mean that it is always impossible to compare situations with respect to
social well-being. For we can apply a Pareto Rule.
Pareto Rule: Unless we are equally well-off in each of two states
of affairs, one state is better than another if at least one of us is
better off than we would be in the other state and none of us is
worse off; otherwise the states are incomparable.14
Let us use ordered pairs of the form (x, y) to represent states of affairs
in which I have utility x and you have utility y. Now consider states A,
B, and C, which are given by the ordered pairs (9a, 10b), (10a, 9b),
and (10a, 10b).15 If we use the Pareto Rule given above, then a small
unidimensional change might make the difference between A not being
comparable to B, and its being comparable. For such a change might
turn A, which is not comparable to B, into C, which is comparable to
B. Chang acknowledges that this falsifies the Small Unidimensional Dif-
ference Principle.16 As she writes: “The Small Unidimensional Difference
Principle holds only when comparability and incomparability are not
rule generated in this way.” The Pareto Rule works as it does because
the unified judgment it yields concerning a pair of social states is gen-
erated by looking at two judgments of a simpler sort: judgments about
whether each of the two people is better or worse off in one of two
states. If we assume the trichotomy thesis with regard to these latter
judgments, there are nine relevant ways in which the members of the
ordered pairs can be related to each other.17 In three cases the Pareto
Rule says that the first ordered pair represents a state that is better than
the state represented by the second. In three cases it yields the opposite
judgment. In one case it claims that the states are equally good. This
leaves a remainder of two cases, and in those the rule yields its judgment
14. Ibid., p. 676.

15. The ‘a’s and ‘b’s here are included to remind us that we cannot compare the
first item in any given ordered pair with the second.
16. Chang, “The Possibility of Parity,” pp. 676–77.
17. Of course Chang might say that we should not assume the trichotomy thesis. But
the point here is to see whether, in this and other cases, we can say everything we wish
to say without abandoning the trichotomy thesis. If we can, then this constitutes an ar-
gument against parity, not an assumption that there is no such thing.

of incomparability, at least if there is no further standard to which we
can appeal. This article will propose a rule that shares certain formal
features with the Pareto Rule above, although it does not—in an im-
portant sense—yield judgments of incomparability. And it will be argued
that this rule can generally, and plausibly, be used to describe the kinds
of valuations that Chang makes use of in her arguments, without any
appeal to a fourth positive value relation.
WHAT ARE VALUATIONS?

What does it mean to claim that one thing is better than another? The
suggestion I would like to make, which need be only roughly true to
indicate how we can understand Chang’s hard cases without having to
posit a fourth positive value relation, is that we use the word ‘better’ to
mean something like the following: ‘to be chosen, on pain of having
made a mistake’. Correlatively, ‘worse’ can be taken to mean ‘not to be
chosen, on pain of having made a mistake’.18 What is it that makes it
appropriate or true to claim that a particular choice is a mistake? It is
important to see that no particular answer need be given here. The
present proposal is consistent with the idea that judgments such as ‘that
choice was a mistake’ or ‘that choice was rationally permissible’ are
merely expressions of certain noncognitive attitudes. For even a non-
cognitivist needs to explain the patterns of judgment that Chang points
to: for example, how it can be acceptable to judge that A is neither
better nor worse than B and that this would remain true even if A were
improved somewhat. This article’s proposal offers the noncognitivist a
straightforward means for providing the required explanation. Alter-
nately, however, the proposal is perfectly consistent with the idea that
judgments about the rationality of choices are robust beliefs and that
they have cognitive content and can be literally true or false. I favor
such a cognitivist position, which I explain and defend elsewhere in
terms of an overwhelming agreement in a relevant attitude toward prac-
tical choices (both one’s own and those of others).19 For when there is
such overwhelming agreement in response or attitude, then the pro-
cesses of ostensive language teaching and learning can parlay it into a
18. Despite superficial grammar, these accounts of ‘better’ and ‘worse’ clearly do not
exhaust the evaluative space. For our account of ‘worse’ means only that if one chooses
a worse item, one has made a mistake. It does not follow from something’s not being
better, in the sense given above, that it is worse, in this sense. However, on these definitions,
A’s being better than B does imply, as it should, that B is worse than A.
19. See Joshua Gert, Brute Rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004),
chap. 7. My view has much in common with Philip Pettit’s “genealogical” account of
response-dependent notions. See Philip Pettit, “Realism and Response-Dependence,” Mind
100 (1991): 587–626, esp. p. 600. Pettit, however, does not emphasize the role of language
acquisition.

concept with an objective referent in the same way that they do in the
case of color terms such as ‘yellow’ and ‘red’: statistical outliers are
identified by the linguistic community as inappropriate applications of
the term, allowing both for the identification of an objective referent,
and also for the correlative notions of color blindness and other visual
dysfunctions. If some such story is correct, then an overwhelming agree-
ment that a certain patch is yellow is (to put it mildly) very strong
evidence that it is yellow. For such agreement is very strong evidence
that the patch has the property that plays the appropriate role in the
teaching and learning of the meaning of the word ‘yellow’. And this is
true even though the claim that something is yellow is very different
from the claim that the overwhelming majority of people see it as yel-
low.20 In the case of a choice being a mistake, the relevant response is
something like puzzlement about someone making the trade-off in ques-
tion. The claim that there is such overwhelming agreement may initially
seem unlikely if it is confused with the claim that there is such agreement
in the trade-offs people are actually disposed to make. But this is to
confuse preference with valuation. Once one is clear on this distinction,
it should seem much more plausible that despite a great variation in
the choices we are disposed to make, we nevertheless tend to understand
(not be puzzled by) the overwhelming majority of practical choices made
by other people.
Given the meaning of ‘better’ that I am claiming is the relevant
one here—one that can be translated into claims about whether or not
certain choices are rationally permissible or not—and assuming, for the
moment, the response-dependent account of rational permissibility that
I have briefly suggested, we have (again, to put it mildly) very strong
evidence that B is better than W if a sufficiently overwhelming majority
of people would be puzzled by the choice of W over B. And we have
very strong evidence that one item is not better than another if a similar
majority would not be puzzled in the same way. There may of course
be cases in which there is no majority of either sort: many people would
be puzzled, but many would not. Similarly, there are plenty of cases in
which many people would call something ‘blue’ while many others
would call it ‘green’. When this happens, this counts as evidence that
we have a borderline case and that the meanings of the relevant terms
are not sufficiently precise to yield a determinate truth-value. There is
no need to deny the existence of such borderline cases. But what is not
a borderline case is the case in which one item is clearly not better than
another and also clearly not worse. And we have strong evidence that
we have such a case when the vast majority of people would not be
20. Indeed, these claims could even have different truth values under sufficiently
strange circumstances.

21
puzzled by either choice. Moreover, when this happens it may often
be that the two items would continue to have this relation even if one
item were improved a bit, although sufficient improvement would make
one item better than the other.22 These are the “hard cases” that Chang
claims her notion of parity is required to explain. This article claims
that all that is required are the same positive value relations that we
have always been familiar with—although it is true that we need to
understand these notions themselves in terms of the still more basic
notion of a practical mistake in choice: a choice that is irrational or
doesn’t make sense. But this latter notion is much less obscure than
the notion of parity. I have gestured at a response-dependent account
of this basic notion, but any other account could be substituted in its
place: a Platonic account, or even a noncognitivist account, although
in that case Chang’s data might have to be reinterpreted slightly. Both
the noncognitivist account and my own favored response-dependent
account appeal to the idea of explaining the meaning of value claims
in terms of what does and does not make sense to human beings, rather
than explaining what makes sense for human beings in terms of the
values of various items—values, the origins of which remain a mystery.
Now consider the following thought experiment. A series of people
are placed in situations in which they must choose one of two evils,
which they will then suffer. And for each pair, we can say whether or
not we would regard it as a mistake, or a symptom of irrationality, if the
first evil were chosen over the second evil, and whether or not we would
make a similar judgment if the second evil were chosen over the first
evil. The following table sets out a plausible pairing of choice pairs with
our assessments of the two respective choices. ‘R’ indicates ‘rationally
permissible’, and ‘I’ indicates ‘irrational’. ‘Dental visit’ indicates the pain
and discomfort typically caused by getting a filling at the dentist’s, in-
cluding the pain of a Novocain injection in the upper palate.
1. [One second of nausea, Dental visit] [R, I]
2. [One minute of nausea, Dental visit] [R, I]
3. [One day of poison ivy, Dental visit] [R, R]
4. [One week of poison ivy, Dental visit] [R, R]
5. [One month of poison ivy, Dental visit] [R, R]
6. [Six months of anxiety, Dental visit] [I, R]
7. [One year of anxiety, Dental visit] [I, R]
8. [Five years of anxiety, Dental visit] [I, R]
21. These are cases in which the failure of ‘better than’, ‘worse than’, and ‘equal to’
to apply is not to be explained by appeal to vagueness, since it is determinate that none
of these apply. Unsurprisingly, such cases can be used to explain the phenomena that
Chang uses in her arguments against appeals to vagueness.
22. ‘Improvement’ is to be understood in the same general framework: improving
an item is a matter of making it better—in the relevant sense—than some items that it
was not formerly better than.

Given our understanding of ‘worse’, we can read the following valuations
off of this table. First, rows 1 and 2 indicate that the pain and discomfort
of a dental visit is worse than a minute or less of nausea. Second, rows
6, 7, and 8 indicate that six months or more of anxiety is worse than
the pain and discomfort of a dental visit. Some readers will be tempted
to claim that one’s preferences regarding such things as pain, itch, and
anxiety are not subject to rational criticism. Indeed, one surprisingly
popular Humean view claims that none of one’s basic preferences are
subject to rational criticism, unless they are based on irrational beliefs.
Criticizing such views is beyond the scope of this article. But those who
profess a Humean open-mindedness with regard to the preferences at
issue should ask themselves what they would think if their son or daugh-
ter refused a treatment for an anxiety disorder that promised to last,
without treatment, for six months or a year, when that treatment in-
volved roughly the same pain and discomfort as a trip to the dentist.
Such a refusal is enough, by itself, to show that a person is suffering
from a phobia or some other mental illness. It cannot plausibly be
interpreted merely as the expression of an unusual preference. Perhaps
it is the philosopher’s focus on reasoning that makes it seem as though
all mental illnesses must be cognitive. But there are affective disorders
as well, and one characteristic feature of such disorders is the possession
of irrational basic preferences.23
Now, for the same reasons that were employed in the Small-Im-
provement Argument, rows 3, 4, and 5 show that one week of the itch
of poison ivy (or one day, or one month) is not equal in badness to the
pain and discomfort of a dental visit. Is this failure of equality merely
an epistemic matter, or a matter of vagueness? Well, let us eliminate
these two potential explanations for purposes of argument and see if
there is some alternative interpretation of the data that still allows all
of our judgments to be literally true. This will be enough to show that
we need not embrace parity even if Chang is right that we cannot explain
our judgments here by appeal to epistemic problems or to vagueness.
Our strategy will therefore be to make some very strong assumptions
about comparability, including the elimination, for purposes of argu-
ment, of any relevant vagueness or epistemic problems. Nevertheless,
we will come up with a rule of valuation for the evils in the above thought
experiment that is consistent with all of Chang’s claims and yet does
23. Those semi-Humeans who remain uncomfortable with the claim that five years
of anxiety is worse than the pain and discomfort involved in getting a filling but who are
willing to hold that Mozart is more artistically creative than Britney Spears or that Citizen
Kane is a better movie than Plan Nine from Outer Space should feel free to modify the current
example by replacing discomforts with artists or films. All essential points will remain the
same.

not require us to posit a fourth positive value relation. It is important
here to realize that the strength (and probable falsity) of our assump-
tions about comparability, lack of vagueness, and so on, do not weaken,
but rather strengthen, the argument against Chang. For the argument
will show that even if we accept Chang’s arguments against various al-
ternative explanations of the phenomena, we can still explain those
phenomena without appeal to a fourth value relation. So suppose the
following: that the strengths of any given person’s preferences can be
compared so precisely that they admit of real-number values, indexed
to some standard. That is, when a person is faced with a choice between
two alternatives, then, unless some sort of irrationality is involved, knowl-
edge of those numbers would allow us to predict which option that
person was going to choose. One way of accounting for the judgments
in the second column of the above list is to assign to each evil a range
that indicates the strengths of the preferences (to avoid that evil) that
we would not consider to be irrational or mistaken. For example, we
might assign the following ranges of ‘strength of preference to avoid’
to each of the evils involved.
Dental visit [50, 140]
One second of nausea [2, 4]
One minute of nausea [6, 15]
One day of poison ivy [20, 60]
One week of poison ivy [70, 120]
One month of poison ivy [130, 250]
Six months of anxiety [200, 400]
One year of anxiety [450, 700]
Five years of anxiety [800, 2,000]
These ranges allow us to explain why it is not a mistake to prefer a day

of poison ivy to the pain and discomfort of a dental visit: it is rationally
permissible to have a preference of strength 70 to avoid the dental pain
(for any preference strength between 50 and 140 is rationally permis-
sible) and a preference of strength 35 to avoid the day of itching (for
any preference strength between 20 and 60 is rationally permissible).
Similarly, it is not a mistake to prefer the dental pain in this case, since
it is rationally permissible to have a preference of strength 50 to avoid
the pain and of 60 to avoid the itch. In fact, our interpretation of these
ranges entails that whenever there is any overlap in the two ranges
associated with two evils, then it will not, by itself, be a mistake to choose
either option. This is what is happening in cases 3, 4, and 5. On the
other hand, not even the strongest rationally permissible preference to
avoid a minute’s nausea (here, a preference of strength 15) is enough
to overcome the weakest rationally permissible preference to avoid the
dental pain (here, a preference of strength 50), so that it would be a
symptom of irrationality to select the dental pain over the minute’s

nausea. This is the reasoning behind the judgments in the second col-
umn of rows 1 and 2 above. Similarly, not even the strongest rationally
permissible preference to avoid the dental pain would be sufficient to
overcome the weakest rationally permissible preference to avoid six
months or more of anxiety. This is the reasoning behind the judgments
in the second column of rows 6, 7, and 8 above.
Now, if there are no restrictions placed on consecutive choices, we
will get into trouble making the blanket claim that overlapping ranges
indicate the rational permissibility of choosing either item. For, on the
ranges given above, it would be rationally permissible to prefer a trip
to the dentist to a day of poison ivy and to prefer a month of poison
ivy to a trip to the dentist, although it is irrational to prefer a month
of itching to a day of itching.24 But the fact that the ranges given above
for the dental pain, the day of itching, and the month of itching are,
respectively, [50, 140], [20, 60], and [130, 250] should not be taken to
mean that the very same agent might rationally have preferences of
strengths 50 and 60 when considering the first two of these evils but
have preferences of strengths 140 and 130 when considering the first
and third. Rather, the ranges reflect the fact that there is a rationally
permissible latitude in the strengths of the preferences that humans
can have for avoiding the dental pain and for avoiding itching. But
there must be a certain consistency in the preferences a given agent
has for items that bear the very same value in differing degrees. Given
the ranges above, someone whose preference to avoid a day of itching
has strength 60 should not have a strength of preference to avoid a
week of itching that deviates from 120 by any great amount. And some-
one who prefers the trip to the dentist to the day of itching cannot have
a preference to avoid the dental pain that is greater than 60; thus such
a person would not be rational to prefer the month of itching to the
trip to the dentist. These kinds of restrictions do not argue in any way
against the proposal being made here, however, since the strength of
the agent’s preference for an item is a very different thing from his
valuation of that item. It is possible for an agent who is, relatively speak-
ing, very averse to pain, to recognize this fact about himself, and thus
to acknowledge that while it would be rationally permissible to be quite
a bit less averse, it would not be rationally permissible to be very much
24. It may be worth noting that Chang will have to tell a similar story to avoid similar
problems, no matter what account of parity she ends up favoring: she cannot hold that
it is always rationally permissible to trade items that are on a par, even when the only
relevant value is the value, relative to which, they are on a par. For given the structure of
the cases that she takes to show parity (those involved in the Small-Improvement Argu-
ment), such trades can easily result in loss of overall value. She avoids these problems in
the Ethics paper by giving no indication regarding the rationality of choice when faced
with two items that are on a par.

more averse. The ranges used here should be understood as indicating
which preferences would be irrational or mistaken simply in virtue of
the values of the relevant items. But of course preferences can be ir-
rational for other reasons, having to do with their relations to the other
preferences of the agent. The fact that preference is different from
valuation means that the proposal offered here is even consistent with
the idea that the preferences of individual rational agents must satisfy
the axioms of rational choice theory. Of course, agents should be able
to change their preferences over time, and this will result in intransitive
preferences, but this is not a problem specifically for the proposal here.
Of course we do not explicitly think of the disvalue of a minute’s
nausea in terms of an interval of rationally permissible strengths of
preferences to avoid it. But the intuitive idea behind the formalization
is an appealing and plausible one. This is the idea that when presented
with pairs of items between which we must make a choice, we can
understand (regard as rationally permissible, or as not being a mistake)
many choices that are different from the choices that we would make,
even though we also regard our choices as rationally permissible. But
there are limits to how far this ability to understand extends, and these
limits vary from case to case. The ranges we have been using are simply
a formal way of expressing how wide these limits are in particular cases.
If we think of our valuations as given by our dispositions to regard certain
choices as rationally permissible, and others as mistakes, then it makes
sense formally to represent our valuations of items with ranges.
Since ranges are represented by two numbers, it should be no
surprise that our valuations do not lend themselves to comparisons as
if they were represented by a single number. In fact, because two num-
bers will be required to represent a valuation, there will be a general
rule of comparison that we can use to make ‘better than’ and ‘worse
than’ judgments that has a structure rather similar to the Pareto Rule
discussed above. This rule is the following:
Range Rule: One item is better than another in a certain respect

if the lower bound of the range of the strengths of its relevant
rationally permissible preferences is higher than the upper bound
of the other’s; otherwise the items are not traditionally compa-
rable.
More roughly put, one item is better than another in a certain respect
if and only if their relevant ranges are disjoint. This rule allows us to
say that the pain and discomfort of a dental visit is worse than a minute’s
nausea but not as bad as six months of anxiety. Now, in claiming that
items with overlapping ranges are not traditionally comparable it may

seem that I am simply assuming the trichotomy thesis.25 But I use the
phrase ‘traditionally comparable’ advisedly here, to mean ‘not com-
parable by one of the three traditional value relations’. This leaves it
open that our normal sense of ‘comparable’ includes more than this,
and so I am not begging any questions against Chang. Again, I am not
assuming the trichotomy thesis. Rather, I am seeking to show that we
do not need to posit any additional positive value relations to describe
what is going on in the cases in which two items are not traditionally
comparable.
It is worth noting that the Range Rule, unlike the Pareto Rule, does
not falsify the Small Unidimensional Difference Principle. For the Range
Rule only entails that small unidimensional changes can make the dif-
ference between two items being traditionally comparable and their not
being traditionally comparable. Chang could still hope to argue that
when a small unidimensional difference causes traditional comparability
to disappear, the items are nevertheless still comparable, because they
are on a par. But this claim is almost certainly much too simple. Ordered
pairs that represent ranges can be related in thirteen ways that can be
explained simply in terms of the three traditional value relations that
hold between their members. If we identify one of these ways with ‘better
than’ and one with ‘worse than’—as the Range Rule does—then it
should be clear that using the single term ‘parity’ to refer to the re-
maining eleven (or ten, if we allow exact equality—see case 2 below)
will lose important information.26 The existence of overlapping ranges
for two items, A and B, only entails the following: that it is not a mistake,
or irrational, to choose A over B, or B over A, and that this may continue
to be true even if one of the items is slightly improved. But this truth
is consistent with all of the following cases (and more):
1. That A and B have exactly the same range. Thus, for any third
item, C, the rational status of choosing A over C, or vice versa, will always
be the same as the rational status of choosing B over C, or vice versa.
This case might plausibly be called ‘parity’.
2. The same as case 1, but the ranges are stipulated to be quite
narrow. Such a case approximates the case in which there is a unique
rationally permissible degree of preference shared by both: the case of
25. In fact, it may seem that I am assuming a dichotomy thesis, since the rule, as
stated, has no provision for equality of value. For if the intervals for two items, A and B,
merely shared the same upper and lower bounds, it would still be rationally permissible
to choose A over a slightly improved B, as long as the improvement in B didn’t raise its
lower bound higher than A’s upper bound. But we can easily modify the rule to allow
equality in the following circumstances: when two items each have the same unique ra-
tionally required strength of preference.
26. If we deny that the values used in these ordered pairs admit of exact equality
then there will be six ways, and ‘parity’ will conflate four of them.

exact equality of value. Because of this, it seems very unhelpful to call
the items ‘incomparable’. ‘Rough equality’ seems much more informa-
tive.
3. That A and B have overlapping ranges because they share a
lower bound, but the range for B has an upper bound that is significantly
higher than the range for A. In such a case there will be many items
of which the following will be true: it would be a mistake to choose A
over that item, but not a mistake to choose B over that item. Thus this
case does not seem usefully described as one of parity or rough equality.
4. B’s range has higher upper and lower bounds than A’s, but B’s
lower bound is nevertheless marginally lower than A’s upper bound.
That is, the ranges for A and B are almost, but not quite, disjoint. This
does not seem usefully described as a case of parity or rough equality
for the same reasons as in case 3. Moreover, in this case it also seems
clearly to be a mistake to describe A and B as incomparable, since a
small improvement to B would make the ranges actually disjoint, so that
B would be simply better than A.
It is very important to note that a small unidimensional difference
that changes two items from being traditionally comparable to not being
traditionally comparable can be expected to yield items of the sort de-
scribed in 4. For before the small unidimensional change their ranges
were disjoint: this is why one was better than the other. And cases of
this sort simply do not seem appropriately described as cases of parity
or incomparability, for the reasons given above. Despite this, it may seem
that I have conceded at least the possibility of parity to Chang by granting
the reasonable application of the term ‘parity’ to case 1. But if we are
to be charitable to Chang, we should not hold that in arguing for the
existence of a fourth positive value relation she means to be doing
nothing more than putting a label to a phenomenon that can be easily
explained in terms of the three traditional relations. Moreover, if this
is what Chang had in mind, then it is mysterious why she did not mention
or give a name to any of the other kinds of case. Finally, Chang has
claimed in earlier work that parity, together with the three traditional
positive value relations, exhausts the logical space of comparability.27
Now, Chang might protest at this point that the phenomena that
I claim can be “easily explained” in terms of the three traditional re-
lations can only be so explained by a model that interprets value in
terms of ranges of rationally permissible strengths of preference. And
she might go on to claim that while ranges provide one model for
understanding value and parity, there are other models. Thus the notion
of parity is distinct from and independent of any of these models and
cannot be “explained away” by any given one of them. But the use of
27. Chang, Incommensurability, pp. 4–5.

ranges is simply an efficient formal way of representing our dispositions
to regard certain choices, in the light of certain values, as mistakes or
not. This article is not making the controversial—though plausible—
claim that the value of an item should actually be understood as a range
of rationally permissible strengths of preference. It is making the less
controversial claim that ‘better in respect R’ can usefully be understood
as ‘rationally to be preferred, when choosing based on R alone’. All the
above use of ranges can be recast in terms of claims of the following
sort: ‘Although in a choice between A and B, one could rationally choose
either, A would have to be improved more than B, before it was no
longer a mistake to choose it over C’. We can express this claim in terms
of ranges by saying that the ranges for A and B overlap, but B’s upper
bound is higher than A’s, and C’s lower bound is higher than either.
And we can efficiently summarize large numbers of claims of this last
sort by assigning ranges to the items with which we are concerned. But
talk of ranges, and of degrees of preference, is clearly dispensable. And
this means that all the phenomena that Chang takes to support the
existence of parity can be explained in terms of the everyday notion of
‘better than’ and the idea of greater or lesser improvements.
SOME PHILOSOPHICAL ADVANTAGES

Chang holds that the existence of parity would be of importance for
views of practical reason, in the following way. It is a common view,
which Chang herself endorses, that “the possibility of justified choice
between two alternatives depends on their being comparable; if the
alternatives cannot be compared, practical reason fails to determine at
least one of the alternatives as justified.”28 Parity is therefore important,
on Chang’s view, because it may provide a way to increase the number
of cases in which one can make justified choices: cases in which practical
reason yields the status ‘rationally permissible’ to at least one of the
options.29 But the interpretation of valuation offered in this article also
has this implication and does not wait on an explanation of how the
parity of items might be relevant to rational choice between them. For
example, if we assign Aye the range [3, 6] with respect to philosophical
talent and assign Bea the range [4, 8], this means that it is rationally
permissible to prefer Aye to Bea when selecting one of them based on
philosophical talent, but also that it would not be a mistake to select
Bea over Aye. This explains the rational permissibility of either choice

29. Elsewhere I have argued against the idea that the value of comparable items is
what determines the rational status of choices between them. Rather, it is comparisons of
the wholesale rational status of various options that allows us to interpolate the respective
values of the items involved in those options. See Gert, chap. 4.

without requiring us to assert that they are equally talented, and without
any appeal to vagueness.
One worry that the above example is likely to suggest is the fol-
lowing. If it is permissible to prefer Bea to degree 8, while it would only
be permissible to prefer Aye to degree 6, and if, similarly, the lowest
degree that one could be motivated to choose Bea is higher than the
lowest for Aye, what could explain this other than the fact that Bea is
more philosophically talented? The answer to this question is that it
does not take sufficiently seriously the independently plausible idea that
there are ranges of rationally permissible degrees of motivation to
choose items. And why should there not be such ranges? After all, ‘ra-
tionally permissible’ is very closely related to ‘normal’ (‘irrational’ and
‘abnormal’ are terms of criticism, though ‘rationally permissible’ and
‘normal’ are not typically terms of praise), and there are normal ranges
of height, weight, intelligence, and so on. Once one concedes this point,
situations like the Aye and Bea comparison will arise. It can be admitted
that there is a difference, relevant to evaluations, between Aye and Bea.
Indeed this is one way of explaining Chang’s otherwise obscure notion
of an ‘evaluative difference’, which she uses to explain the notion of
incomparability. According to Chang, all the positive value relations
assert the existence of some evaluative difference between compared
items: even ‘equal to’ does this, by asserting that the difference is zero.
Of incomparables, one cannot even say that the difference is zero.30
Now, of Aye and Bea one cannot say that Bea is simply better than Aye.
For to say this would imply that it would be a mistake to choose Aye
over Bea. But if one likes, one can characterize the evaluative difference
(difference in valuations) between the two candidates by saying that Bea
is “better in a sense” than Aye. This sense is the following: even though
Bea is not simply better than Aye, there are other possible candidates—
Cee for example, with range [7, 9]—who are simply better than Aye,
but who are not simply better than Bea.31 And there are many other
ways in which the valuations of items can be related that we could call
‘evaluative differences’ (cases 3 and 4 above, for example) even though
one item is not simply better than the other.
A final advantage of our strategy of representing valuations with
ranges is that we can save standard decision and rational choice theory
from Chang’s claim that “the basic assumptions of standard decision
and rational choice theory [are] mistaken: preferring X to Y, preferring
Y to X, and being indifferent between them do not span the conceptual
30. Chang, “The Possibility of Parity,” pp. 663–64.

31. If one objects to this possibility then one must object to the possibility of parity
also, for these relations between three items are virtually definitive of instances of parity:
consider Michelangelo, Mozart, and a composer just a bit worse than Mozart.

space of choice attitudes one can have toward alternatives.”32 In the first
place, the suggestion of this article makes it very clear that choice at-
titudes need not be taken to reflect valuations of the sort that Chang
is concerned with. That is, Chang’s criticism of standard decision and
rational choice theory is misplaced unless our preferences should be
taken as completely revealing our valuations. Since only very rarely do
we think of our choices as the uniquely rational option, this assumption
is unwarranted. And in the second place, it is possible to do decision
theory and rational choice theory while assigning ranges in place of
scalar values for desirability indices. Indeed, the idea of using a range
to characterize subjective probability estimates is already familiar in ex-
pected-utility theory.33 In this way, the techniques of decision and ra-
tional choice theory could be brought to bear directly on the logic of
value.

33. See Paul Weirich, “Risk’s Place in Decisions Rules,” Synthese 126 (2001): 427–41;
and I. J. Good, “Rational Decisions,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, ser. B, 14 (1952):
107–14.


GERT, Joshua - Value and Parity (2004)

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

GERT, Joshua - Value and Parity (2004)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Value and Parity

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.96 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 09:35:24 AM

Value and Parity*

In “The Possibility of Parity,” Ruth Chang argues for the existence of a

Ethics 114 (April 2004): 492–510

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.96 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 09:35:24 AM

3. Ibid., pp. 660–61.

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.96 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 09:35:24 AM

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.96 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 09:35:24 AM

8. Chang, Incommensurability, pp. 7–13.

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.96 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 09:35:24 AM

10. Chang, Incommensurability, p. 30.

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.96 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 09:35:24 AM

THE ARGUMENT AGAINST PARITY

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.96 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 09:35:24 AM

14. Ibid., p. 676.

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.96 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 09:35:24 AM

WHAT ARE VALUATIONS?

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.96 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 09:35:24 AM

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.96 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 09:35:24 AM

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.96 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 09:35:24 AM

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.96 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 09:35:24 AM

These ranges allow us to explain why it is not a mistake to prefer a day

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.96 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 09:35:24 AM

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.96 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 09:35:24 AM

Range Rule: One item is better than another in a certain respect

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.96 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 09:35:24 AM

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.96 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 09:35:24 AM

27. Chang, Incommensurability, pp. 4–5.

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.96 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 09:35:24 AM

SOME PHILOSOPHICAL ADVANTAGES

28. Chang, “The Possibility of Parity,” p. 665.

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.96 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 09:35:24 AM

30. Chang, “The Possibility of Parity,” pp. 663–64.

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.96 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 09:35:24 AM

32. Chang, “The Possibility of Parity,” p. 666.

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.96 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 09:35:24 AM

You might also like