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    Carmelics

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that There exists a genuine fourth value relation — 'on a par' — distinct from 'better than', 'worse than', and 'equally good'.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Ruth Chang's 'on a par' relation presupposes that small improvements to one item would not make it better than the other, but this 'bi-directionality' condition can be accommodated by a vague or indeterminate equality relation without positing a fourth value relation.
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    • 2.Epistemic indeterminacy about where items fall on a single value scale fully explains our inability to rank them, rendering 'on a par' an unnecessary ontological posit rather than a genuine evaluative category.
      ?

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    Reason for 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Derek Parfit and others in the fitting-attitudes tradition hold that all genuine value comparisons reduce to rankings of reasons, and any apparent 'on a par' cases reflect agent-relative permissibility rather than an objective fourth value relation.
      ?

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    • 2.If 'on a par' is defined by the resistance to improvement tests, it faces the 'chaining argument': a series of pairwise 'on a par' judgments can transitively generate absurd outcomes, suggesting the relation lacks the formal properties required of a genuine value relation.
      ?

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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
    ?
    • 1.Some pairs of items are comparable even though neither is better than the other.
      ?

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    • 2.Some comparable pairs cannot be judged equally good because they differ in the respects they display.
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    • 3.The existing trichotomy of 'better than', 'worse than', and 'equally good' cannot account for comparability between items that differ across incommensurable dimensions.
      ?

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