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Main Authors: Tarsney, Christian, Lederman, Harvey, Spears, Dean
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.17641
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author Tarsney, Christian
Lederman, Harvey
Spears, Dean
author_facet Tarsney, Christian
Lederman, Harvey
Spears, Dean
contents This article presents a new argument against many forms of moral and prudential value incompleteness. The argument relies on two central principles: (i) a weak "negative dominance" principle, to the effect that Lottery 1 is better than Lottery 2 only if some possible outcome of Lottery 1 is better than some possible outcome of Lottery 2, and (ii) a weak form of ex ante Pareto, to the effect that, if Lottery 1 gives an unambiguously better (stochastically dominant) prospect to some individuals than Lottery 2, and equally good prospects to everyone else, then Lottery 1 is better than Lottery 2. Given modest auxiliary assumptions, these two principles rule out incompleteness in the prudential ranking of individual lives, and many forms of incompleteness in the moral rankings of outcomes and lotteries.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_17641
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Dominance Argument Against Incompleteness
Tarsney, Christian
Lederman, Harvey
Spears, Dean
Theoretical Economics
This article presents a new argument against many forms of moral and prudential value incompleteness. The argument relies on two central principles: (i) a weak "negative dominance" principle, to the effect that Lottery 1 is better than Lottery 2 only if some possible outcome of Lottery 1 is better than some possible outcome of Lottery 2, and (ii) a weak form of ex ante Pareto, to the effect that, if Lottery 1 gives an unambiguously better (stochastically dominant) prospect to some individuals than Lottery 2, and equally good prospects to everyone else, then Lottery 1 is better than Lottery 2. Given modest auxiliary assumptions, these two principles rule out incompleteness in the prudential ranking of individual lives, and many forms of incompleteness in the moral rankings of outcomes and lotteries.
title A Dominance Argument Against Incompleteness
topic Theoretical Economics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.17641