Wlodek Rabinowicz (Lund & LSE): “Incommensurability Meets Risk”

Abstract: The problem to be discussed in this talk concerns interaction between value incommensurability and risk, More specifically, it focuses on value comparisons between risky actions whose outcomes are guaranteed to be mutually incommensurable in value: they will be incommensurable whatever state the world is in. It might seem that the actions compared should themselves in all such cases be incommensurable. But this intuition, as we shall see, might well be challenged; indeed, it should be challenged.

The problem in its main outline is originally due to Caspar Hare (2010). Later it was taken up by Miriam Schoenfield (2014) and by Bales, Cohen & Handfield (2014). While Hare views it as a problem for rational preferences and rational choice, I here present it as primarily a challenge for formal axiology – a general account of value relations. Both Schoenfield and Bales et al. combine these two perspectives: As they present it, the problem arises for rational choice insofar as the latter is guided by considerations of value. All these authors’ contributions will need to be discussed in the paper I am in the process of writing. In my talk, however, I want to describe the problem as such and suggest how I think it should be solved. I will propose a solution, but then I will also identify a residual problem that I don’t know how to solve.

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