Erich Rast

Overall betterness and other comparative forms of values are often taken as being representable by an ordering relation, although there are differing opinions about the exact properties that such a representation should have. In these types of order-based approaches, it is possible to define metrics on value representations and compute distances between the value representations of agents by so-called consensus measures, which describe the nearness or remoteness of the values of one agent to those of another agent or a group of agents. These measures minimally satisfy the three essential properties of coincidence, symmetry, and triangle inequality, and often more conditions are postulated. In a recent article on value disagreement, I have briefly mentioned a peculiar kind of measures that are not symmetric, hence also not distance measures, but which seem to have some ‘intuitive appeal’ and give rise to what I called perspectival disagreement. In this talk, I lay out this kind of disagreement and address the question whether it exists in real life and, if so, how important it is.