Scalar goodness

This chapter turns to deontic concepts. I argue that goodness is an interval scale, and consider two interactions with disjunction that would enforce the validity of the Disjunctive Inference: maximality (à la Lewis and Kratzer) and intermediacy. I identify a number of empirically problematic consequences of maximality, concluding that goodness is intermediate: a disjunction can be strictly worse than one of the disjuncts. I propose, as one way to flesh out the scale further, that goodness has the formal structure of expected value, and show that this proposal makes intuitively reasonable predictions about the puzzle cases for maximality as well as a wide variety of instances in which probabilistic information influences the relative goodness of outcomes. Finally, I discuss several possible schemata for the interpretation of the positive form good in light of the sensitivity of this item to prosodic focus and the non-synonymy of its positive and superlative forms.