DPhil Seminar (Wednesday - Week 5, MT26)

Abstract: According to the Fair Chance View (FCV), the best way to allocate a scarce benefit between equally deserving people is by using a lottery that gives each person fair chances of receiving that benefit. Though many find FCV plausible, it suggests a counterexample to Statewise Dominance, a fundamental axiom of decision theory which implies that one risky prospect cannot be better than another unless one of its possible outcomes is better. The standard response to this issue, associated with Broome’s Redescription Strategy, preserves Statewise Dominance by claiming that fair chances themselves improve the value of outcomes. I argue that this locates the value of fair chances in the wrong place. I develop two challenges for the Redescription Strategy. The first is that it struggles to account for what Otsuka calls the ‘ephemerality’ of fair chances: although fair chances seem valuable ex ante, this value intuitively disappears entirely when viewing outcomes ex post. The second concerns aggregation: under a variety of standard value structures, the total value of facing many unrealised chances of benefits is either trivial or will implausibly outweigh the value of actually receiving the benefits themselves. I then defend an alternative view which rejects Statewise Dominance and holds that fairness weights the value that outcomes contribute to the value of risky prospects. I show this naturally avoids both challenges. I end by addressing two objections to this view: firstly, that it implies an irrational preference for repeatedly redrawing the winner of a fair lottery, and secondly, that it loses the intuitive appeal of consequentialist ethics, that what we ought to do is determined purely by what makes the world best.

Registration: If you do not hold a university card, please contact the seminar convenor or admin@philosophy.ox.ac.uk at least two working days before a seminar to register your attendance.

See the DPhil Seminar website for details.

_{DPhil Seminar Convenor: Tom Heywood}