80-829 Incommensurability: Ethics and Philosophy of Science
12 units, Carnegie Mellon University
Claims that certain things are incommensurable are common in several areas of philosophical discourse. In the philosophy of science, for example, it has been claimed that different scientific theories, or particular claims or terms within these theories, are incommensurable. In ethics, some have argued that different types of values rights, utility, personal commitments, individual identities are incommensurable. In many cases, incommensurability is treated as a problem that needs to be surmounted in order for agents to make rational decisions to compare alternative theories or to evaluate acts or policies that implicate different kinds of value. The first part of this course examines what incommensurability is supposed to be, how it supposedly arises in various fields, and what kind of challenge it poses for theories of rationality and rational choice. In the second part of the course we examine theories in which incommensurability is not a problem to be overcome, but a kind of moral requirement in itself. For instance, the injunction at the heart of Kantian ethics not to treat agents with dignity like things with a price requires that these entities not be brought into certain kinds of comparative relationship. Similar claims seem to be at work in certain liberal political theories Walzer and Rawls, in views that seek to limit the scope of goods that can be distributed in markets, and in views of science that treat conceptual diversity as an source of important social benefit. A goal of the course is to show how a variety of issues across diverse philosophical contexts have a common structure and how formal work in social choice e.g., Arrovian impossibility results, and decision theory e.g., theories of choice that relax the ordering assumption can help to clarify and resolve important problems.
Prerequisites: none listed
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