WiP - Brian Hedden / Parity and Pareto
WiP - Brian Hedden / Parity and Pareto
Monday March 11, our Work in Progress series has Brian Hedden, Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University, with a presentation of his work on "Parity and Pareto".
Parity and Pareto
Pareto principles are at the core of ethics and decision theory. The Strong Pareto principle says that if one thing is better than another for someone and at least as good for everyone else, then the one is overall better than the other. But a host of famous figures express it differently, with 'not worse' in place of 'at least as good.' In the presence of parity (or incommensurability), this results in a strictly stronger Pareto principle, which I call Super-Strong Pareto. Super-Strong Pareto, however, yields cyclic betterness and is therefore false. I point out a number of influential arguments - concerning population ethics, collective action problems, and decision-making in the face of parity and uncertainty - that crucially rely on Super-Strong Pareto and are therefore unsound. I then turn to the most influential argument against the possibility of parity - Broome's collapsing argument - and argue that it likewise relies on Super-Strong Pareto reasoning and is therefore question-begging. Finally, I turn to the much-neglected question of how to justify Strong Pareto. The answer I arrive at, which emphasizes tie-breaking, yields a interesting insight, namely that Super-Strong Pareto amounts to the denial of a kind of insensitivity to mild sweetening. That helps explain why it is problematic in the presence of parity.