To Boldly Go Where No Man, or Woman, Has Gone Before!

This chapter challenges several common assumptions regarding the assessment of outcome goodness. In Part I Larry Temkin challenges various Axioms of Transitivity, including the Axiom of Transitivity for All Things Considered Better Than, according to which for any three outcomes, A, B, and C, if, all things considered, A is better than B, and all things considered, B is better than C, then, all things considered, A is better than C. Whether or not the Axioms of Transitivity hold, he suggests, depends on the nature of the good; in particular, on whether an Internal Aspects View or an Essentially Comparative View of outcome goodness is correct. In Part II, Temkin considers whether we should be neutral between different possible locations of the good: space, time, and people. He suggests that from a normative perspective we should treat space differently than time, and people differently than space and time. Temkin shows that three intuitively plausible dominance principles regarding space, time, and people are incompatible. He also argues that in some cases we should give priority to people over space and time, and to time over space, but that, controversially, in some cases, we should give priority to time over people.