The Significance of Value Additivity
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The Significance of Value Additivity Campbell Brown1 Received: 16 August 2018 / Accepted: 24 August 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Whether value is “additive,” that is, whether the value of a whole must equal the sum of the values of its parts, is widely thought to have significant implications in ethics. For example, additivity rules out “organic unities,” and is presupposed by “contrast arguments.” This paper reconsiders the significance of value additivity. The main thesis defended is that it is significant only for a certain class of “mereologies”, roughly, those in which both wholes and parts are “complete”, in the sense that they can exist independently. For example, value additivity is significant in the case of a mereology of material objects, but not in the case of a mereology of propositions.
1 Introduction By saying that value is “additive” I shall mean that the value of a whole must equal the sum of the values of its parts. Whether value is additive in this sense has been regarded as important by many philosophers. Moore (1903) famously warned against assuming additivity. He posited “organic unities” whose values are non-additive. Familiar examples abound: a football team of mediocre players who coordinate well together may defeat a team full of individually brilliant lone wolves; a collection of tasty ingredients may combine to form a disgusting dish; a knife paired with a fork may be very useful, while either utensil alone is of only limited utility; and so on.1 Additivity is also widely thought to be implicated in a pervasive, yet controversial, style of argument in moral philosophy. Kagan (1988) calls arguments in this style “contrast arguments”. Perhaps the most famous is advanced by Rachels (1975) in his discussion of active and passive euthanasia. Some believe active euthanasia is 1 On organic unities, see, e.g., Carlson (1997), Hurka (1998), Lemos (1998, 2015), Zimmerman (1999), Dancy (2003), Brown (2007), Fletcher (2010).
* Campbell Brown [email protected] 1
London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK
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morally worse than passive euthanasia because the former involves killing a person, whereas the latter involves only letting a person die. Rachels rejects this view. He describes another pair of cases which differ only in that one involves killing and the other letting die, but in which, intuitively, neither is morally worse than the other. In both cases, a man sets out to drown his innocent cousin. In one case he carries out his plan, killing his cousin. In the other case, he finds his cousin already drowning, and so instead simply stands by and lets him die. If the bare difference between killing and letting die makes no moral difference in this pair of cases, Rachels argues, then it cannot make a difference in cases of active and passive euthanasia either. According to Kagan, arguments like Rachels’ covertly assume that value is additive.2 On the other hand, one might be sceptical about the significance of additivity. One m
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