Volume 16, Number 3
December 2019
ARTICLE

On Keeping Things in Proportion

and
Volume 16, Number 3, December 2019, Pages 229–258
https://doi.org/10.26556/jesp.v16i3.794
PDFPDF

Abstract

Formula One is not very important. You cannot care about it too much. The refugee crisis is more important. You can care about it much more. In this paper we investigate how important something is. By ‘importance’ we mean how much it is fitting to care about a thing. We explore a view about this which we call Proportionalism. This view says that a thing’s importance depends on that thing’s share of the world’s total value. The more of what matters there is, the less you can care about each thing in particular. The less of what matters there is, the more you can care about each thing in particular. We argue that, in many respects, Proportionalism is superior to its competitors. It captures some intuitions they leave out and it has a powerful motivation. So, we suggest, you should keep things in proportion.
Copyright © 2019 Adam Lovett and Stefan Riedener
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.
|

Introducing Discord

Mark Schroeder

Crime, Public Health, and Inhumane Objectivity

Nadine Elzein

Personal Reactive Attitudes and Partial Responses to Others: A Partiality-Based Approach to Strawson’s Reactive Attitudes

Rosalind Chaplin

Famine, Affluence, and Aquinas

Marshall Bierson and Tucker Sigourney

Are All Deceptions Manipulative or All Manipulations Deceptive?

Shlomo Cohen

It’s a Fine Line Between Sadism and Horror

Scott Woodcock

What Is the Bad-Difference View of Disability?

Thomas Crawley

Forgiveness and the Significance of Wrongs

Stefan Riedener

The Importance of Roles in the Skill Analogy

Matt Dougherty

On Ex Ante Contractualism

Korbinian Rüger

Can We Intend the Past?

Oded Na'aman

The Value of Caring: A Reply to Maguire

Jörg Löschke

Portico