Vaulting Intuition: Temkin's Critique of Transitivity

How to rank distributions of benefits and harms? In this book, Larry Temkin addresses this question in detail. Its core claims are two. First, the goodness of a distribution is sometimes ‘essentially comparative’ – it sometimes depends on which alternative distribution(s) it is compared to. Second, there are many cases in which our intuitions are at odds with the transitivity of ‘all things considered better than’ and these cases give us reason to doubt that this relation is transitive. (Transitivity holds that if some alternative a 3 is better than a 2 , and a 2 is better than a 1 , then a 3 is better than a 1 .)