Harry S. Silverstein

The Two‐Envelope Paradox Resolved

In the standard version of the two-envelope paradox I am invited to play a game in which I may select one of two sealed envelopes. I am told (reliably) that both contain money, one twice as much as the other. After making my selection I am given the choice of swapping envelopes or sticking with my original pick. The paradox arises from the following reasoning, which gives the counterintuitive result that, whichever envelope I originally selected, it is in my interest to swap:

‘The Evil of Death’ Defended: Reply to Burley

Silverstein takes the Epicurean view to be ‘that death cannot intelligibly be claimed to be an evil for the person who dies’ (ED, p. 96), and to be based on two main premises. One is that, in order for something, x , to have any value for a subject, S, x must connect with S’s feelings in some relevant way. Silverstein calls this the ‘values connect with feelings’ principle or VCF. The second main premise is that x can connect with S’s feelings only if x coexists with S. From these two premises, the Epicurean concludes that S’s death (in the sense of S’s being dead ) cannot be an evil for S, since S’s having feelings and S’s being dead are mutually exclusive states of affairs. When one of them obtains, the other cannot, and hence there is what Silverstein calls a ‘no-subject’ problem, making it unintelligible that S’s death could be an evil for S.