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1This paper addresses the phenomenon of incomplete preferences in disaster risk management. If an agent finds two options to be incomparable and thus has an incomplete preference ordering, i.e., neither prefers one option over the other nor finds them equally as good, it is not possible for the agent to perform a value tradeoff, necessary for an informed decision, between these two options. In this paper we suggest a way to model incomplete preference orderings by means of probabilistic preferenc…Read more
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87Risk and mid-level moral principlesBioethics 26 (1): 8-14. 2010.We discuss ethical aspects of risk-taking with special focus on principlism and mid-level moral principles. A new distinction between the strength of an obligation and the degree to which it is valid is proposed. We then use this distinction for arguing that, in cases where mid-level moral principles come into conflict, the moral status of the act under consideration may be indeterminate, in a sense rendered precise in the paper. We apply this thought to issues related to pandemic influenza vacc…Read more
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12Incomparable risks, values and preferencesDissertation, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. 2006.. Consistent valuation and societal prioritization of risks presupposes comparability among risks, that is, in order to rank risks in order of severity, and allocate risk preventative resources accordingly, we must be able to determine whether one risk is better or worse than another, and by how much. It is often claimed, however, that some risks are not amenable to this kind of comparison because they are incommensurable, which roughly means that they are not comparable with respect to a common…Read more
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53How to depolarise the ethical debate over human embryonic stem cell research (and other ethical debates too!)Journal of Medical Ethics 38 (8): 496-500. 2012.The contention of this paper is that the current ethical debate over embryonic stem cell research is polarised to an extent that is not warranted by the underlying ethical conflict. It is argued that the ethical debate can be rendered more nuanced, and less polarised, by introducing non-binary notions of moral rightness and wrongness. According to the view proposed, embryonic stem cell research—and possibly other controversial activities too—can be considered ‘a little bit right and a little bit…Read more
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35The primary aim of this thesis is to examine some of the arguments that have been leveled against the idea that all value bearing entities are comparable. A secondary aim is to investigate some putative properties of the relation ‘better than', especially transitivity and vagueness. Also, some of the consequences of accepting incomparability are investigated, both with regards to other value theoretical issues, such as the implications for monadic value predicates, and with regards to more appli…Read more
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103Some New Monadic Value PredicatesAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 46 (1): 31-37. 2009.Some things have positive value and some things have negative value. The things with positive value are good and the things with negative value are bad. There are also things in-between that are neither good nor bad, which are neutral. All in all, then, there are three monadic value predicates: “good,” “bad,” and “neutral.”
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142The small improvement argumentSynthese 165 (1). 2008.It is commonly assumed that moral deliberation requires that the alternatives available in a choice situation are evaluatively comparable. This comparability assumption is threatened by claims of incomparability, which is often established by means of the small improvement argument (SIA). In this paper I argue that SIA does not establish incomparability in a stricter sense. The reason is that it fails to distinguish incomparability from a kind of evaluative indeterminacy which may arise due to t…Read more
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184Conflicting reasons in the small-improvement argumentPhilosophical Quarterly 60 (241): 754-763. 2010.The small-improvement argument is usually considered the most powerful argument against comparability, viz the view that for any two alternatives an agent is rationally required either to prefer one of the alternatives to the other or to be indifferent between them. We argue that while there might be reasons to believe each of the premises in the small-improvement argument, there is a conflict between these reasons. As a result, the reasons do not provide support for believing the conjunction of…Read more
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Mind |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Value Theory, Miscellaneous |