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    Made withinDC&Austin
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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that We cannot exorcise the paradoxes of population ethics by giving up the transitivity of 'better than'

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

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.The mere addition argument can be reconstructed on the normative level in terms of what one ought to choose, without appeal to transitivity
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    • 2.The normative reconstruction yields a moral dilemma in which all available actions are forbidden
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    • 3.A non-transitive value ordering cannot form the basis of a satisfactory answer to what one ought to choose
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Temkin's intransitivity solution presupposes that 'better than' can be essentially comparative, yet population ethics paradoxes arise even under monadic value assessments.
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    • 2.If paradoxes survive the elimination of relational comparison entirely, transitivity failure is revealed as epiphenomenal rather than causally responsible for the paradoxes.
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    • 3.Parfit's original cases in 'Reasons and Persons' demonstrate repugnant conclusions through independent evaluative steps, each of which is non-comparative and individually compelling.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Stuart Rachels and Temkin acknowledge that abandoning transitivity generates what they call 'essentially comparative' value, yet this move simply relocates rather than resolves the underlying tension between quantity and quality of welfare.
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    • 2.Any framework replacing transitive 'better than' must still assign action-guidance under conditions where Arrhenius's impossibility theorems show no consistent population axiology can satisfy all plausible adequacy conditions.
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    • 3.Because Arrhenius's formal impossibility results are axiology-neutral and apply across both transitive and non-transitive orderings, non-transitivity provides no principled escape from the paradoxes Arrhenius identifies.
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