>
> Your man Gower had some particularly good passages that suggesting that
> math’s ability to come to a usable conclusion depends on how it is
> interpreted, not only on the math itself.
>
Yes indeed. In this case Sandel is discussing Utilitarianism, via Jeremy
Bentham and John Stuart Mill. In this case the Utilitarians needed a
metric, a way to do two things:
1 - Apply a relationship between two events. Simple < = > triple would
appear to work. In other words he needs to sort the value of the events
using the greater than, less than and equal operators for pleasures.
2 - He then needs to aggregate them for groups to which the particular
pleasure is to be measured in order to determine the common good.
Here are the two key problems:
1 - Not all multi-dimensional spaces have a metric. I.e. its not always the
case that a set of values for an experiment have metric values, they may
simply be a collection of properties like Name = Owen, Age = 69, Sex = yes
indeed, and so on. These are not easily sorted against a utilitarian
pleasure even if modeled specifically for that pleasure.
2 - Even if you could sort, we've seen with Arrow's Impossibility theorem
that for choices greater than two, there is no solution for the problem.
This is why there is so much attention to fair voting and how to achieve
it.
Now all that is simply an illustration. I'm not attacking Utilitarianism,
and indeed I enjoy the philosophic conversation that attends it and its
laudable goal.
However, I am a bit concerned that at least modern philosophers have not
pointed out these two trivial objections and found at least a few classes of
solutions.
Indeed, as far as I can tell .. and I have looked .. this form of thinking
is foreign to philosophers.
> I cannot tell from your example whether I would agree that your Harvard
> philopher is doing philosophy. He may be saying very wise things and not
> doing philosophy. If he starts somewhere, more or less arbitrarily, and
> shows how you can get somewhere else through sound argument, he is being a
> philopher, as well as being wise. ****
>
> ** **
>
> Nick
>
I do think he is doing original work, or at least did at Oxford during his
degree. He now is primarily a teacher.
-- Owen
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