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Moral Aggregation, Iwao Hirose. Oxford University Press, 2015, xiii + 234 pages.

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Moral Aggregation, Iwao Hirose. Oxford University Press, 2015, xiii + 234 pages.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2015

Susanne Burri*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK. email: [email protected]. URL: www.susanneburri.ch.

Abstract

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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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References

1 Well-being or desire satisfaction are examples for such factors.

2 To think of the WCC as a counterexample to formal aggregation, Hirose must assume that in the WCC, we judge it wrong not to bring about the best possible consequences.

3 While this view has problems of its own, this need not concern me here, as I am merely suggesting that our intuitions about the WCC are consistent with formal aggregation.

4 A complete and transitive order ≿ on some set X is continuous iff for every yX, the sets {xX: xy} and {xX: xy} are closed.

5 Hirose (39–40) makes the stronger claim that discontinuous orderings can never be represented by real-valued functions and are thus by definition inconsistent with formal aggregation. This is incorrect. If–-as Hirose (23, fn. 3) assumes – only countably many states of affairs need to be ranked, it is possible to represent any complete and transitive order with a real-valued function.

6 In light of the fact that Hirose defends formal aggregation as a constraint on moral theories, I take it that he wishes to reject the theories that violate it.