ABSTRACT
The mathematician John Allen Paulos (1988, pp. 124-25) provides a problem he credits to Pascal. Two men bet $100 on who will win six coin tosses first. The game is interrupted after eight tosses with the first man winning five times and the second man winning three times. The contestants had made no agreement as to what would be done if the game were interrupted. So, how much money should change hands? One view is that the first man should win the $100 because he was leading when the game ended. Another view is that no money should change hands because the game was not completed. A third view is that the second man should award the first man 5=8 of the wager, which represents the percentage of coin tosses the first man won. A fourth view, which Paulos claims that Pascal favors, is that the second man should award the first man 7=8 of the wager: Had the game not been interrupted, the probability that the first man would have won is 7=8. (The second man needs to win three tosses in a row, which has the probability of 1=2 6
1=2 6 1=2 ¼ 1=8, thereby making the first man 7=8 likely
to win.) So, which of these four options is the most fair? I believe that there is no answer to this question, just as there are no objectively true answers to moral questions per se. I shall argue that if metaethical objectivism were true, there would be
answers to all sorts of moral problems that we acknowledge to be not only unascertainable, but to lack answers altogether. Examples of such substantive moral claims include:
. ‘In situation X, we should do a, all things considered.’
