It’s hard to do utilitarian ethics without commensurate utility functions, and so utilitarian ethical calculations, in the comparatively rare cases where they’re implemented with actual numbers, often use a notion of cardinal utility. (The Wikipedia article’s kind of a mess, unfortunately.) As far as I can tell this has nothing to do with cardinal numbers in mathematics, but it does provide for commensurate utility scales; in this case, you’d probably be mapping preference orderings over possible world-states onto the reals in some way.
There do seem to be some interesting things you could do with pure preference orderings, analogous to decision criteria for ranked-choice voting in politics. As far as I know, though, they haven’t received much attention in the ethics world.
It’s hard to do utilitarian ethics without commensurate utility functions, and so utilitarian ethical calculations, in the comparatively rare cases where they’re implemented with actual numbers, often use a notion of cardinal utility. (The Wikipedia article’s kind of a mess, unfortunately.) As far as I can tell this has nothing to do with cardinal numbers in mathematics, but it does provide for commensurate utility scales; in this case, you’d probably be mapping preference orderings over possible world-states onto the reals in some way.
There do seem to be some interesting things you could do with pure preference orderings, analogous to decision criteria for ranked-choice voting in politics. As far as I know, though, they haven’t received much attention in the ethics world.