CEPPA Talk (in person) – Daniel Muñoz (UNC Chapel Hill)

Location: Edgecliffe G03

Title: Values as Vectors

Abstract: Often, two things seem tied in value, though slightly improving one would not break the tie. How can we model such ‘insensitivity to sweetening’? A leading answer is that overall values, rather than being like precise numbers, must be imprecise, giving rise to a special nontransitive value relation, which Chang calls parity. But parity is notoriously hard to pin down, and imprecise values are neither necessary nor sufficient for modeling sweetening. I propose instead to model overall values as many-dimensional vectors. The result is a fresh and flexible framework for the stranger side of ethics—as well as an elegant definition of parity as a tie between things of nonfungible value.