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Sources of transitivity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2022

Daniel Muñoz*
Affiliation:
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 240 E Cameron Ave Chapel Hill, NC 27514, USA

Abstract

Why should ‘better than’ be transitive? The leading answer in ethics is that values do not change with context. But this cannot be the entire source of transitivity, I argue, since transitivity can fail even if values never change, so long as they are complex, with multiple dimensions combined non-additively. I conclude by exploring a new hypothesis: that all alleged cases of nontransitive betterness, such as Parfit’s Repugnant Conclusion, can and should be modelled as the result of complexity, not context-relativity.

Type
Article
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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