Simon Graf
University of Leeds
Sometimes we face choices in which the different values we subscribe to give us conflicting recommendations. One famous example of such a case is found in Sartre (1966), who describes an encounter with one of his students who is torn between joining the Free French Forces and staying home to care for his mother. Sartre describes his student as “hesitating between two kinds of morality; a morality motivated by sympathy and individual devotion and another morality of broader scope” (1966: 36). These cases of value conflict present us with distinct puzzles about morality and rational choice. Since there seems to be no well-defined preference ranking with respect to the considered alternatives the value conflict cannot be resolved by appealing to any standard means of decision-making.
This paper sets out to compare these value-conflict cases with so-called permissive cases, cases in which one body of evidence rationalizes multiple doxastic attitudes. The question of whether there are permissive cases or whether rationality always recommends a unique rational attitude has recently received much attention in epistemology, whereby permissivists believe that there are at least some permissive cases, impermissivists argue that there is a unique attitude for every evidential situation. Instead of contributing to this debate directly by providing arguments in favour or against permissivism, this paper argues that permissive cases are best understood as the epistemic equivalent of value conflict cases.
The proposed resemblance arises from a similarity in the underlying conflicts displayed in these cases. While Sartre’s student is in a case of value conflict, permissive cases demonstrate epistemic standard conflicts. In both instances, the agents involved are faced with incommensurable alternatives which are independent and non-directly comparable sources of normative value. I follow Ruth Chang (2002), and others, who have argued that in contrasting incommensurable alternatives, we need to transcend the traditional dichotomy of comparison relations of better than, worse than, and equally good. That is, we need to understand value conflict cases and permissive cases as cases in which the options are not equally good but, on a par, whereby parity is understood to be a fourth positive value relation. To make the proposed analogy explicit, I’ll illustrate that both types of cases not only present us with normatively permissible alternatives, but also have various idiosyncratic characteristics of comparisons under parity, such as sweetening insensitivity, normative bindingness, and angst (Williams 2016).
Chair: Sonja Riegler
Time: September 7th, 11:20-11:50
Location: SR 1.004
SOPhiA 2026 