Ruth Chang

The Possibility of Parity

Some comparisons are hard. Who is more creative, Mozart or Michelangelo? Mozart is better in some respects of creativity, Michelangelo in others; however, there is no obvious way in which one has the greater creativity tout court. Or take two rather different careers, such as a career in accounting and one in skydiving, or two Sunday enjoyments, such as an afternoon at the museum and one hiking in the woods, or two moral requirements, such as a duty to keep promises and a requirement to avoid causing unnecessary pain. In many such cases, although we agree what considerations are relevant to the comparison, it seems all we can say is that the one alternative is better with respect to some of those considerations while the other is better in others, but it seems there is no truth about how they compare all things considered. Hard cases of comparison are ubiquitous. Indeed, if, as many philosophers believe, the comparability of the alternatives is necessary for justified choice between them, hard cases are very plausibly at the root of moral dilemmas and the most intractable sorts of practical conflict generally. Philosophers typically have one of three reactions to such cases. Epistemicists insist that, although it may be difficult or even impossible to determine how the items compare all things considered, one must

Parity, interval value, and choice

In “The Possibility of Parity,” I argued that the right thing to say about certain hard cases of comparison—cases in which one item is better in some relevant respects, while the other is better in other relevant respects, but there is no obvious truth about how the items compare in all relevant respects—is that the items are ‘on a par’. ‘Parity’, I said, is a fourth “positive” value relation of independent standing, not subsumable under the familiar trichotomy of relations ‘better than’, ‘worse than’, and ‘equally good’. My argument took the form of an argument by elimination: the cases of interest are not cases of ignorance, in which one of the traditional three relations holds but we don’t know which, nor cases of vagueness, in which the items occupy the borderline of one of the traditional three relations but are cases of determinate comparability; therefore, as cases of determinate comparability in which none of the traditional three relations holds, they must be cases in which a fourth relation of comparability holds—they are on a par. In his interesting discussion of my article, “Value and Parity,” Joshua Gert agrees that the cases I think are cases of parity are not cases of ignorance or vagueness and agrees that we cannot simply assume that because neither of two alternatives is better than the other and they are not equally good that they are thereby incomparable. Nevertheless, he wants to challenge my claim that these cases are ones in which the items are related by a fourth positive relation “of the same sort” as the usual