Incomparable Values

People tend to rank values of all kinds linearly from good to bad, but there is little reason to think that this is reasonable or correct. This book argues, to the contrary, that values are often partially ordered and hence frequently incomparable.

Autorentext

John Nolt is Professor Emeritus in Philosophy at the University of Tennessee and a Research Fellow at the Howard Baker Center for Public Policy. He has published seven books, including Environmental Ethics for the Long Term (Routledge, 2015), and numerous articles on logic and environmental, intergenerational, and climate ethics.

Inhalt

Part I. Preliminaries

1. Incomparability, Axiologies, Axiomatics, and Model Theory

2. Logic, Comparison, Hasse Diagrams, and Set Theory

Part II. Basic Formal Axiology

3. Arithmetical Value Structures

4. Cartesian Models

5. Integer Multiplication, Delimitation, and Commensurability

6. Incomparability Obscured

7. Aggregating Welfare over Populations

8. Evaluating and Comparing Situations

Part III. Ethical Decision Theory

9. The Deontic Logic of Decision

10. Rational Ethical Decisions

Part IV. Bounds

11. Absolute Value and Concept Generalization

12. Bounds of Finite Value Sets

13. Value Analysis

14. Incomparability and Infinity