Academic

Edmundson on Value Pluralism & Intransitivity

By Lawrence Solum

William A. Edmundson (Georgia State University) has posted Pluralism, Intransitivity, Incoherence (THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS OF LAW AND ECONOMICS, Mark White, ed., Cambridge, 2009) on SSRN.  Here is the abstract:

Pluralism is an appealing and now orthodox view of the sources of value. But pluralism has led to well-known difficulties for social-choice theory. Moreover, as Susan Hurley has argued, the difficulties of pluralism go even deeper. In 1954, Kenneth May suggested an intrapersonal analogue to Arrow's Impossibility Theorem. In brief, May showed that an individual's response to a plurality of values will, given certain additional assumptions, lead to intransitive preference orderings. (Daniel Kahneman and others have shown that intransitivity is an empirical feature of preferences.) Hurley challenged May's additional assumptions as implausibly strong; but her work did not exclude the possibility that values may disobey the canon of rationality that insists on transitivity. John Broome has recently extended these canons to the "betterness" relation. This chapter argues that there is no good reason to be confident that values, understood as real features of the world, behave consistently with those canons.

An illuminating paper--highly recommended.  Download it while its hot!

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on June 20, 2008 (boomark / email).