This seemed pretty bizarre to me at first with the example of "get free insurance", since I automatically interpret "get free x" as "have the wide choice of paying $y >= 0 for x".
The problem with The Parity of No-Choice Situations becomes much clearer to me when I consider the possibility that I have the choice to say "blip" or "blop" whenever anything consequentially relevant happens to me. That would defuse the paradox, but in a way that seems completely divorced from ethics. I end up unable to understand what "No-Choice" could even mean, other than the fatalist frame in which everything is No-Choice.
But in the blip or blop cases, you have the option to say nothing also. The claim is that if, in two cases, you only have one option--you can't do multiple different things--then those don't differ in the value of the freedom of choice. Of course they don't--you don't have any choice in either case.
Your argument presupposes that choice does not have intrinsic value rather than demonstrate it. Specifically, the "The Insignificance of Dominated Options” remains unsubstantiated. Indeed, the whole point of thinking there is intrinsic value to choice means that something other than the consequence of your option matters.
If I get the option to send my kid to two good schools in addition to having the option of sending them to a great school, that would be better than having the latter option alone because I have more free choice.
I'm not saying this proves that there is intrinsic value to choice, I'm saying you haven't proven that there isn't.
Note, for the argument to go through, we don't even have to think the insignificance of dominated options always hold. We could rework the argument with three choices of food to eat--tasty couscous, human feces, or bird feces (assume human and bird feces are equally bad). In that case, I think most people will have the intuition that this isn't any better than only having the good option of tasty couscous.
> If a person is deciding between two types of jam that are equally good, and you give them the option to instead spread bat feces over their jam, this extra option doesn’t make them better off.
Obviously false. The whole point of freedom is that it is the freedom to make choices that are not the best. I will be taking some bat feces with all my jam from now on.
This seemed pretty bizarre to me at first with the example of "get free insurance", since I automatically interpret "get free x" as "have the wide choice of paying $y >= 0 for x".
The problem with The Parity of No-Choice Situations becomes much clearer to me when I consider the possibility that I have the choice to say "blip" or "blop" whenever anything consequentially relevant happens to me. That would defuse the paradox, but in a way that seems completely divorced from ethics. I end up unable to understand what "No-Choice" could even mean, other than the fatalist frame in which everything is No-Choice.
But in the blip or blop cases, you have the option to say nothing also. The claim is that if, in two cases, you only have one option--you can't do multiple different things--then those don't differ in the value of the freedom of choice. Of course they don't--you don't have any choice in either case.
I don't quite understand your first remark.
Your argument presupposes that choice does not have intrinsic value rather than demonstrate it. Specifically, the "The Insignificance of Dominated Options” remains unsubstantiated. Indeed, the whole point of thinking there is intrinsic value to choice means that something other than the consequence of your option matters.
If I get the option to send my kid to two good schools in addition to having the option of sending them to a great school, that would be better than having the latter option alone because I have more free choice.
I'm not saying this proves that there is intrinsic value to choice, I'm saying you haven't proven that there isn't.
Note, for the argument to go through, we don't even have to think the insignificance of dominated options always hold. We could rework the argument with three choices of food to eat--tasty couscous, human feces, or bird feces (assume human and bird feces are equally bad). In that case, I think most people will have the intuition that this isn't any better than only having the good option of tasty couscous.
> If a person is deciding between two types of jam that are equally good, and you give them the option to instead spread bat feces over their jam, this extra option doesn’t make them better off.
Obviously false. The whole point of freedom is that it is the freedom to make choices that are not the best. I will be taking some bat feces with all my jam from now on.