The Hägerström Lectures 2022

Two items are incommensurable in value if none is more valuable than the other, nor are they equally valuable. The nowadays so influential fitting-attitudes analysis of value suggests a way of accounting for cases like this: incommensurability arises if divergent attitudes towards the compared items are permissible, i.e., not unfitting; for example, if it is permissible to prefer one item to the other but also permissible to have the opposite preference. In these lectures, I will consider how incommensurability interpreted on these lines can be put to philosophical work. The two areas I will consider are population ethics and the epistemic interpretation of probability.