Abstract
This work motivates the Combined Model for Combining Ideals, which Larry Temkin introduces in “sketch” form in Rethinking the Good, and goes on to begin filling in the details of the sketch. It argues that the Combined Model for Combining Ideals is most plausible when there are upper and lower caps on the extent to which an ideal can add to or subtract from the overall goodness of an outcome, but the caps for different values can and should differ.
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Notes
Google Books, Web and Scholar searches, and library searches for “Capped Model”, “Capped Model for Ideals”, “Capped Model for Utility”, and variants of the latter two with “of” instead of “for” unearthed no sustained discussions of Temkin’s model. I have received only three Google Alert results related to these terms despite the alerts being active for years. The references therein were not related in any significant way to the topic of Temkin’s work. Symposia on the book are largely silent on the model and its plausibility. See Volume 74 of Analysis Reviews and Volume 2 of Law, Ethics and Philosophy. Subsequent work building on RTG likewise largely ignores Chapter 10 and how best to specify the features of its primary subject matter. Temkin’s post-RTG work at least points out parallels in healthcare allocation (e.g., 2014b).
This concise summary builds on an initial definition and a subsequent discussion of where CMCI is compatible with SMCI (Temkin 2012: 329–330, 350). Temkin likens this scoring system to gymnastics scoring but notes that gymnastics scoring has changed (328–329). For the sake of presentation, Temkin assumes only four ideals; nothing hinges on his choice of the four (313–315). Nick Beckstead (2009) uses freedom in examples I discuss in the main text.
It rejects SMCI’s commitment to the intrinsic value of utility, the simple additive approach to valuing outcomes, and (likely) its commitment to the impartiality of utility (Temkin 2012: 343, 348–349, 315).
This piece is explicitly exploratory. I seek to identify the most plausible version of a CMCI. While I provide reason to adopt it here, assessing its overall merits, particularly when compared with SMCI, is a further project. A brief aside to deal with one of the most obvious criticisms of the view is nonetheless necessary. The most common objection to CMCI among my interlocutors is that it is implausible that adding more of a positive value to an outcome does not improve it. As one early reader of this draft put it, more of any good is always, in the relevant respect, better. This outcome may be avoided by suggesting that the cap is better understood as a traditional threshold and that additions of the good are discounted as they approach the threshold such that particular values can be represented with an asymptotic curve. On such a model, the good is always making a scenario better, but it cannot make a scenario better than the cap. This is a questionable reading of Temkin’s position given (a) the charts in his book that represent the model do not take this form, (b) Temkin concedes certain cases are problematic that only seem problematic if this implication holds, and (c) Temkin states that CMCI is a new position in need of development and the threshold model is a traditional one of which Temkin is no doubt aware. Yet I think Temkin can, plausibly, accept this modification as a friendly amendment if it does not accurately reflect what he originally had in mind with CMCI. The bigger issue is that some of the disadvantageous cases below still arise on even this modified version of CMCI. Thank you to Howard Nye for pushing me on this point.
RC famously holds that for “any possible population of at least ten billion people, all with a very high quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better even though its members have lives that are barely worth living” (Parfit 1984: 388).
I believe it is more valuable where it can be applied in practical cases (like the healthcare case mentioned in section 5), but a model can be adequate without meeting this criterion.
These intuitions motivate different axiological views, the Second Standard and the Disperse Additional Burdens Views (Temkin 2012: 32, 67–68).
Temkin adds a “seemingly” qualifier to the claim that CMCI fits with our anti-aggregative intuitions (2012: 313). This could make my claim too strong, but I fail to see the value of a CMCI that cannot explain at least some of these cases. It is unclear why one would reject SMCI in the absence of ample case examples.
This piece is not concerned with the voluminous literature on how to solve the Repugnant Conclusion.
See e.g., Roberts (2014).
See Temkin (2012: 485-488) for how they may fit together.
Temkin positively cites these cases and agrees that they are “as least as counterintuitive” (2012: 361-362n33). These cases are also relevant to the discussion in note 5 on how best to interpret Temkin. I think the most problematic cases arise on any plausible interpretation. I wrote to Beckstead to get approval for quoting them. I sincerely thank him for providing me with them and allowing me to quote and comment upon them.
Michael Huemer, in turn, worries that if “there is an upper bound to the value that an outcome can gain from the realization of any given value…[this] has consequences that are much less plausible than the Repugnant Conclusion” (2013: 340–341). Yet his case-based challenges to a ‘Single-Cap Model’ (342) stem from an assumption that “ideals have their own separate caps” (340). This assumption is not explicitly required by CMCI. Huemer’s criticisms of the ‘Multicap Model’, in turn, seem uncharitable. His first case-based challenge (342–343) stems from an overly restrictive understanding of CMCI, which requires “separate caps for different kinds or levels of utility” (342, my emphasis). CMCIs need not require this. His second case-based challenge, the ‘Egyptology Objection’ (343), stems from a concern with impartiality that does not uniquely apply to CMCI. SMCI is committed to impartiality and some CMCIs reject it (see notes 3–5).
This is derived from Temkin’s average utility-based example (2012: 320–321). CMCI is also meant to limit types of different values when conducting a single value comparison (335). Unlimited gains in one type of utility (i.e., the taste of cheeseburgers) should not automatically outweigh greater losses in another (i.e., love).
I thank an anonymous reviewer for this phrasing.
I share Gustav Arrhenius (2016)’s worry that Parfit’s attempt to avoid SC by introducing imprecision into value comparisons (in e.g. 2016) does not avoid RC, let alone SC. I do not commit myself to Arrhenius and Temkin’s shared worry that no theory of population ethics can account for all of our intuitions and cherished principles here.
While Temkin also uses baseball as the focus of a different analogy (2012: 468) the basics of my own sports analogy should be clear as presented regardless of one’s cultural origins, and the sport’s status as a new Olympic event suggests that it is an international sport, I recognize that the sport is not played in many nations. A brief explanation of the rules of baseball would likely make this piece easier to follow for those in nations that do not widely participate in the game. Per the official rules of the game (Major League Baseball: 2016):
1.01 (1.01) Baseball is a game between two teams of nine players each, under direction of a manager, played on an enclosed field…under jurisdiction of one or more umpires.
1.02 (5.04) The offensive team’s objective is to have its batter become a runner, and its runners advance.
1.03 (5.05) The defensive team’s objective is to prevent offensive players from becoming runners, and to prevent their advance around the bases.
1.04 (5.06) When a batter becomes a runner and touches all bases legally he shall score one run for his team.
1.05 (1.02) The objective of each team is to win by scoring more runs than the opponent.
1.06 (1.03) The winner of the game shall be that team which shall have scored… the greater number of runs at the conclusion of a regulation game.
The relationship between the theoretical and the practical is difficult to parse. Those who think that practical examples tell us little about the nature of value may be unmoved from the practical examples here and in section 5. Yet the use of practical examples is consistent with the broader literature and the reasons many people engage in axiological query to begin with, including solving real problems.
Determining how to do this given the possibility of incommensurability is difficult. I place myself on a par with Temkin, Parfit, and others by suggesting that the current project is, in part, an attempt to explain how best to model the relative value of different values on a common scale. How to individuate values is also a concern. If certain values are incommensurable, placing them on the same scale will be difficult, if not impossible (but see e.g., Parfit 2016 and the work of Ruth Chang for work that puts values whose relations are not precisely defined on common scales). If they are commensurable, it can be difficult to place them on the same scale without implicitly suggesting that they are all reducible to some other value that the scale can measure. These issues are beyond the scope of this work. Where Temkin’s project and much of contemporary axiology assumes that we can individuate values, doing so here is not a departure from the literature. Individuating them in the real world is difficult, which limits some of the practical value of this project, but having a good theory is prerequisite to many good practical projects and the individuation assumption is necessary to outline the scope of the theory here.
It is conceivable that egalitarian impulses are driven by false beliefs (see e.g., Frankfurt 2015) and an ideal CMCI will not use egalitarians’ preferred caps. The rhetorical value of CMCI as a tool for promoting pluralism would be thereby constrained vis-à-vis egalitarians. Yet a CMCI that sets all caps at the same place would not allow anyone to prioritize any value and will be unpalatable to all partisans. Such a CMCI will not accurately reflect the nature of value if there is good reason to prioritize values while recognizing the importance of others. The substantive value of a CMCI thus rests on recognition of different caps for different values.
Under the modern gymnastics scoring system discussed in note 3, execution is capped and difficulty is uncapped. This could be a datum against the view that all values require caps, but analogies can be imperfect and important.
For a detailed explanation of WAR, see FanGraphs (2017).
On the standard model, the constituent components of the batting average total actually need to be disaggregated to go on this scale. They are then recombined with home runs and other markers to form “Batting Runs”, one of the components of WAR. The point remains that the lower limits for competence for the original aggregated figures and home runs that are entered into the WAR metric are not equal.
I thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this way of phrasing the issue. I move outside the WAR framework in these two restatements in part to avoid the complications in the previous footnote. The numbers in these two examples are simplifications for the sake of making the real but more complex WAR point clearer. I return to actual calculations in the following paragraph and the remainder of the article.
All baseball facts here are widely known by casual fans and do not require academic citations, but I can point to the relevant Major League Baseball record books as needed on request.
Baseball also suggests that the context matters for where the caps are placed. E.g., the number of home runs required to be considered for an MVP candidate for a Designated Hitter is different from the number required for a third baseman. The point at which each would no longer be credited for further home runs differs between them. I will not get into the issue of whether this is true for values here because Temkin’s challenge requires me not to take a stand on whether values are intrinsically valuable or essentially comparative.
E.g., one may worry that different caps within types of values could also lead to worrisome conclusions, but I will not enter that debate here except to note that my view requires that once they cumulatively reach the overall cap for the value, any additional units of the value, regardless of type, will no longer be credited to the goodness of an outcome with respect to that value.
Per Temkin, “it is entirely possible that some different model might do a better job of capturing what the Capped Model is intended to capture, and that we should simply reject the Capped Model and replace it with another model instead” (2012: 489). He even suggests that this may be the “ultimate” conclusion to draw from Chapter 10 (313). ‘Holism’ is offered as a possible alternative (568). Yet more work needs to be done to understand the position in its best lights and thereby rule out the possibility of CMCI meeting the adequacy criteria above.
Thank you to Hannah Da Silva, the anonymous reviewers, and an audience at the Canadian Philosophical Association’s 2016 Annual Congress (especially Howard Nye and Steve Coyne) for comments on previous drafts of this work. Thank you to Nick Beckstead, Theron Pummer, and Larry S. Temkin for discussions on related issues.
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Da Silva, M. Developing a Capped Model for Combining Ideals. Philosophia 47, 59–73 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-018-9956-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-018-9956-y