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Clumps and Pumps: Clumpiness, Resolution and Rational Choice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2012

ASBJØRN STEGLICH-PETERSEN
ASBJØRN STEGLICH-PETERSEN*
Affiliation:
University of [email protected]
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Abstract

It is widely held that the possibility of value-incomparability poses a serious threat to comparativism. Some comparativists propose to avoid this problem by supplementing the three traditional value relations with a fourth value relation, variously identified as ‘roughly equal’ or ‘on a par’. However, in a recent article in this journal, Nien-he Hsieh has proposed that the comparisons thought to require rough equality or parity could instead be understood in terms of the concept of ‘clumpiness’. Against this suggestion, Martin Peterson has argued that the concept of clumpiness allows agents to be exploited in money-pumps, thus removing the central appeal of the concept. In this note, I show that Peterson's argument fails to establish that the concept of clumpiness allows agents to be exploited in money-pumps.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 24 , Issue 1 , March 2012 , pp. 118 - 125
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

1 Griffin, J., Well-Being (Oxford, 1986)Google Scholar; Parfit, D., Reasons and Persons (Oxford, 1984)Google Scholar.

2 Chang, R., ‘The Possibility of Parity’, Ethics 112 (2002), pp. 659–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Hsieh, N., ‘Equality, Clumpiness and Incomparability’, Utilitas 17 (2005), pp. 180–204CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Hsieh, ‘Equality, Clumpiness and Incomparability’, p. 184.

5 Peterson, M., ‘Parity, Clumpiness and Rational Choice’, Utilitas 19 (2007), pp. 505–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 For this example, see Chang, R., ‘Introduction’, in her Incommensurability, Incomparability, and Practical Reason (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 1–34Google Scholar.

7 This argument for incomparability by the three traditional value relations is termed ‘The Small Improvement Argument’. For a thorough recent discussion, see Espinoza, N., ‘The Small Improvement Argument’, Synthese 168 (2008), pp. 127–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Hsieh, ‘Equality, Clumpiness and Incomparability’, p. 184.

9 Hsieh, ‘Equality, Clumpiness and Incomparability’, p. 186.

10 M. Peterson, ‘Parity, Clumpiness and Rational Choice’, pp. 512–13. In the same article, Peterson also presents money-pump arguments against parity and rough equality. Money-pump arguments were originally devised to justify standard assumptions about consistency of preferences in economic theory. For a careful discussion of this use of money-pump arguments, see Cubitt, R. and Sugden, R., ‘On Money Pumps’, Games and Economic Behaviour 37 (2001), pp. 121–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 The rationale for making the choices a matter of surprise to the agent is to avoid the objection that it might be irrational to embark on a sequence of choices that one knows in advance will make one worse off. Henceforth, I shall make the surprise element a tacit assumption of any further versions of the money-pump argument.

12 M. Peterson, ‘Parity, Clumpiness and Rational Choice’, p. 513.

13 I am grateful to an anonymous referee for raising this possibility.