Trade-offs, Transitivity, and Temkin †

The last few years have seen a number of new and important publications in moral theory. Arguably none more important than Larry S. Temkin’s Rethinking the Good: Moral Ideals and the Nature of Practical Reasoning. This fascinating work highlights and explores in depth a seemingly fundamental inconsistency in our own axiological beliefs. Put roughly, the inconsistency arises given our general willingness to make small trade-offs among individual goods and their distribution among people (such as our willingness to trade-off a slightly larger headache for one individual for the sake of preventing slightly smaller headaches for two individuals), our general unwillingness to subject small numbers of people to very large harms to prevent very minor harms to many people (such as causing a single person fifty years of torturous pain for the sake of preventing very minor headaches for a very large number of people), and the transitivity of “better than”, i.e., the claim that if A is better than B and B is better than C, then A must be better than C. This tension is no revelation.1 What is a revelation is the doggedness with which Temkin pursues his inquiry into it, and the depths he is able to plunge. And while I do not believe the book is flawless, it is nevertheless extremely, well, important : it contains a number of groundbreaking discussions of the nature of the good, the nature of evaluative ideals, and the extent to which we should hedge our bets concerning the transitivity of the predicate “better than”. Furthermore, I admire this book because it has that ever-so-rare property of philosophical texts: it is actually convincing, at least convincing enough to convince me that the status of the “better than” predicate is a substantive matter, the intransitivity of which may well