The intrinsic properties of the remaining works of art haven’t changed. Why should each work now count for more, just because there are fewer of them? 3/n
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Our paper responds to an important paper by Gwen Bradford (and Gwen personally helped us a lot!). She poses the above problem clearly, and argues that the best resolution of it involves a technical notion of degree of irreplaceable value. 4/n
Roughly, her idea is that, as there are fewer of the irreplaceable objects, their degree of irreplaceable value (not the amount) increases, and this underwrites stronger reason to preserve the objects. We think this view is *very* interesting, but we present an alternative. 5/n
Our account involves two ideas. The first is that typically if there are fewer objects in a class, destroying one of them leads to a larger loss of rational confidence that there will still be objects of this type than destroying one of them would lead to, if there were more. 6/n
If there’s value in there being objects of this kind at all, then the expected cost of the loss of each object will also increase as the total number decreases. So, these facts about uncertainty naturally predict stronger reason to preserve each object as there are fewer! 7/n
But what about artificial cases where one is sure that there will be objects of this type, even if one of them is destroyed? That’s where our second idea comes in. 8/n
The idea is that (roughly) there’s value in diversity of values, i.e. the world is better to the extent that there are more different “types” of valuable things. This is an intuitively compelling idea, but it is hard to articulate exactly (what’s a “type”?). 9/n
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https://philpapers.org/rec/BRAUIV