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Sources of transitivity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2022

Daniel Muñoz Open the ORCID record for Daniel Muñoz [Opens in a new window]
Daniel Muñoz*
Affiliation:
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 240 E Cameron Ave Chapel Hill, NC 27514, USA
*
Email: Daniel.Munoz@unc.edu
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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.

Keywords

Transitivityvalue theorymultidimensionalityintrinsic valueCondorcet’s Paradox

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Article
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Economics & Philosophy , Volume 39 , Issue 2 , July 2023 , pp. 285 - 306
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© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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