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Normative theories of rational choice: expected utility

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2017)

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  1. Expected Comparative Utility Theory: A New Theory of Rational Choice.David Robert - 2018 - Philosophical Forum 49 (1):19-37.
    In this paper, I argue for a new normative theory of rational choice under risk, namely expected comparative utility (ECU) theory. I first show that for any choice option, a, and for any state of the world, G, the measure of the choiceworthiness of a in G is the comparative utility (CU) of a in G—that is, the difference in utility, in G, between a and whichever alternative to a carries the greatest utility in G. On the basis of this (...)
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  • A restatement of expected comparative utility theory: A new theory of rational choice under risk.David Robert - 2021 - Philosophical Forum 52 (3):221-243.
    In this paper, I argue for a new normative theory of rational choice under risk, namely expected comparative utility (ECU) theory. I first show that for any choice option, a, and for any state of the world, G, the measure of the choiceworthiness of a in G is the comparative utility (CU) of a in G—that is, the difference in utility, in G, between a and whichever alternative to a carries the greatest utility in G. On the basis of this (...)
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  • Pascalian Expectations and Explorations.Alan Hajek & Elizabeth Jackson - forthcoming - In Roger Ariew & Yuval Avnur (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Pascal. Wiley-Blackwell.
    Pascal’s Wager involves expected utilities. In this chapter, we examine the Wager in light of two main features of expected utility theory: utilities and probabilities. We discuss infinite and finite utilities, and zero, infinitesimal, extremely low, imprecise, and undefined probabilities. These have all come up in recent literature regarding Pascal’s Wager. We consider the problems each creates and suggest prospects for the Wager in light of these problems.
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  • Probabilifying reflective equilibrium.Finnur Dellsén - 2024 - Synthese 203 (2):1-24.
    This paper aims to flesh out the celebrated notion of reflective equilibrium within a probabilistic framework for epistemic rationality. On the account developed here, an agent's attitudes are in reflective equilibrium when there is a certain sort of harmony between the agent's credences, on the one hand, and what the agent accepts, on the other hand. Somewhat more precisely, reflective equilibrium is taken to consist in the agent accepting, or being prepared to accept, all and only claims that follow from (...)
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  • Resource Rationality.Thomas F. Icard - manuscript
    Theories of rational decision making often abstract away from computational and other resource limitations faced by real agents. An alternative approach known as resource rationality puts such matters front and center, grounding choice and decision in the rational use of finite resources. Anticipated by earlier work in economics and in computer science, this approach has recently seen rapid development and application in the cognitive sciences. Here, the theory of rationality plays a dual role, both as a framework for normative assessment (...)
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  • Instrumental Rationality in the Social Sciences.Katharina Nieswandt - 2023 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences (1):46-68.
    This paper draws some bold conclusions from modest premises. My topic is an old one, the Neohumean view of practical rationality. First, I show that this view consists of two independent claims, instrumentalism and subjectivism. Most critics run these together. Instrumentalism is entailed by many theories beyond Neohumeanism, viz. by any theory that says rational actions maximize something. Second, I give a new argument against instrumentalism, using simple counterexamples. This argument systematically undermines consequentialism and rational choice theory, I show, using (...)
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  • The property rights approach to moral uncertainty.Harry R. Lloyd - manuscript
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  • Expected comparative utility theory: A new theory of instrumental rationality.David Robert - manuscript
    This paper aims to address the question of how one ought to choose when one is uncertain about what outcomes will result from one’s choices, but when one can nevertheless assign probabilities to the different possible outcomes. These choices are commonly referred to as choices (or decisions) under risk. I assume in this paper that one ought to make instrumentally rational choices—more precisely, one ought to adopt suitable means to one’s morally permissible ends. Expected utility (EU) theory is generally accepted (...)
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  • Uncertain Values: An Axiomatic Approach to Axiological Uncertainty.Stefan Riedener - 2021 - Berlin, Germany: De Gruyter.
    How ought you to evaluate your options if you're uncertain about what's fundamentally valuable? A prominent response is Expected Value Maximisation (EVM)—the view that under axiological uncertainty, an option is better than another if and only if it has the greater expected value across axiologies. But the expected value of an option depends on quantitative probability and value facts, and in particular on value comparisons across axiologies. We need to explain what it is for such facts to hold. Also, EVM (...)
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  • Revisiting the criticisms of rational choice theories.Catherine Https://Orcidorg Herfeld - 2021 - Philosophy Compass 17 (1):e12774.
    Theories of rational choice are arguably the most prominent approaches to human behaviour in the social and behavioral sciences. At the same time, they have faced persistent criticism. In this paper, I revisit some of the core criticisms that have for a long time been levelled against them and discuss to what extent those criticisms are still effective, not only in light of recent advancements in the literature but also of the fact that there are different variants of rational choice (...)
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  • Can risk aversion survive the long run?Hayden Wilkinson - 2022 - Philosophical Quarterly 73 (2):625-647.
    Can it be rational to be risk-averse? It seems plausible that the answer is yes—that normative decision theory should accommodate risk aversion. But there is a seemingly compelling class of arguments against our most promising methods of doing so. These long-run arguments point out that, in practice, each decision an agent makes is just one in a very long sequence of such decisions. Given this form of dynamic choice situation, and the (Strong) Law of Large Numbers, they conclude that those (...)
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  • Beyond Uncertainty: Reasoning with Unknown Possibilities.Katie Steele & H. Orri Stefánsson - 2020 - Cambridge University Press.
    The main aim of this book is to introduce the topic of limited awareness, and changes in awareness, to those interested in the philosophy of decision-making and uncertain reasoning.
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  • Duty and Doubt.Seth Lazar - 2020 - Journal of Practical Ethics 8 (1):28-55.
    Deontologists have been slow to address decision-making under risk and uncertainty, no doubt because the standard approaches to non-moral decision theory appear superficially similar to consequentialist moral reasoning. I identify some central tenets of simple decision theory and show that they should not put deontologists off, before showing where we should go next to develop a comprehensive deontological decision theory.
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  • Catastrophic risk.H. Orri Stefánsson - 2020 - Philosophy Compass 15 (11):1-11.
    Catastrophic risk raises questions that are not only of practical importance, but also of great philosophical interest, such as how to define catastrophe and what distinguishes catastrophic outcomes from non-catastrophic ones. Catastrophic risk also raises questions about how to rationally respond to such risks. How to rationally respond arguably partly depends on the severity of the uncertainty, for instance, whether quantitative probabilistic information is available, or whether only comparative likelihood information is available, or neither type of information. Finally, catastrophic risk (...)
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  • Infinite options, intransitive value, and supererogation.Daniel Muñoz - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 178 (6):2063-2075.
    Supererogatory acts are those that lie “beyond the call of duty.” There are two standard ways to define this idea more precisely. Although the definitions are often seen as equivalent, I argue that they can diverge when options are infinite, or when there are cycles of better options; moreover, each definition is acceptable in only one case. I consider two ways out of this dilemma.
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  • To Buy or Not to Buy? The Moral Relevance of the Individual Demand in Everyday Purchase Situations.Rebecca Ullrich & Bernward Gesang - 2020 - Food Ethics 5 (1-2).
    The question of the moral relevance of the individual demand is fundamental to many purchase decisions of daily consumer life. Can a single purchase make a difference for the better or worse? Each individual consumer could argue that companies are unlikely to adjust their production due to one single item more or less being sold. He might therefore decide not to change his consumption behavior but instead to rely on the effort of others, a pattern commonly referred to as collective (...)
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  • Belief, Faith, and Hope: On the Rationality of Long-Term Commitment.Elizabeth Jackson - 2021 - Mind 130 (517):35–57.
    I examine three attitudes: belief, faith, and hope. I argue that all three attitudes play the same role in rationalizing action. First, I explain two models of rational action—the decision-theory model and the belief-desire model. Both models entail there are two components of rational action: an epistemic component and a conative component. Then, using this framework, I show how belief, faith, and hope that p can all make it rational to accept, or act as if, p. I conclude by showing (...)
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  • Rationality in context: On inequality and the epistemic problems of maximizing expected utility.Dominik Klein, Johannes Marx & Simon Scheller - 2020 - Synthese 197 (1):209-232.
    The emergence of economic inequality has often been linked to individual differences in mental or physical capacities. By means of an agent-based simulation this paper shows that neither of these is a necessary condition. Rather, inequality can arise from iterated interactions of fully rational agents. This bears consequences for our understanding of both inequality and rationality. In a setting of iterated bargaining games, we claim that expected utility maximizing agents perform suboptimally in comparison with other strategies. The reason for this (...)
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  • (1 other version)Deontological decision theory and lesser-evil options.Seth Lazar & Peter A. Graham - 2021 - Synthese (7):1-28.
    Normative ethical theories owe us an account of how to evaluate decisions under risk and uncertainty. Deontologists seem at a disadvantage here: our best decision theories seem tailor-made for consequentialism. For example, decision theory enjoins us to always perform our best option; deontology is more permissive. In this paper, we discuss and defend the idea that, when some pro-tanto wrongful act is all-things considered permissible, because it is a ‘lesser evil’, it is often merely permissible, by the lights of deontology. (...)
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  • Can resources save rationality? ‘Anti-Bayesian’ updating in cognition and perception.Eric Mandelbaum, Isabel Won, Steven Gross & Chaz Firestone - 2020 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 143:e16.
    Resource rationality may explain suboptimal patterns of reasoning; but what of “anti-Bayesian” effects where the mind updates in a direction opposite the one it should? We present two phenomena — belief polarization and the size-weight illusion — that are not obviously explained by performance- or resource-based constraints, nor by the authors’ brief discussion of reference repulsion. Can resource rationality accommodate them?
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  • Full & Partial Belief.Konstantin Genin - 2019 - In Richard Pettigrew & Jonathan Weisberg (eds.), The Open Handbook of Formal Epistemology. PhilPapers Foundation. pp. 437-498.
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  • Exiting The Consequentialist Circle: Two Senses of Bringing It About.Paul Edward Hurley - 2019 - Analytic Philosophy 60 (2):130-163.
    Consequentialism is a state of affairs centered moral theory that finds support in state of affairs centered views of value, reason, action, and desire/preference. Together these views form a mutually reinforcing circle. I map an exit route out of this circle by distinguishing between two different senses in which actions can be understood as bringing about states of affairs. All actions, reasons, desires, and values involve bringing about in the first, deflationary sense, but only some appear to involve bringing about (...)
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  • How to Argue for Pragmatic Encroachment.Blake Roeber - 2018 - Synthese (6):2649-2664.
    Purists think that changes in our practical interests can’t affect what we know unless those changes are truth-relevant with respect to the propositions in question. Impurists disagree. They think changes in our practical interests can affect what we know even if those changes aren’t truth-relevant with respect to the propositions in question. I argue that impurists are right, but for the wrong reasons, since they haven’t appreciated the best argument for their own view. Together with “Minimalism and the Limits of (...)
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  • Belief and Credence: A Defense of Dualism.Elizabeth Jackson - 2019 - Dissertation, University of Notre Dame
    Belief is a familiar attitude: taking something to be the case or regarding it as true. But we are more confident in some of our beliefs than in others. For this reason, many epistemologists appeal to a second attitude, called credence, similar to a degree of confidence. This raises the question: how do belief and credence relate to each other? On a belief-first view, beliefs are more fundamental and credences are a species of beliefs, e.g. beliefs about probabilities. On a (...)
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  • Against Denialism.John Broome - 2019 - The Monist 102 (1):110-129.
    Several philosophers deny that an individual person’s emissions of greenhouse gas do any harm; I call these “individual denialists.” I argue that each individual’s emissions may do harm, and that they certainly do expected harm. I respond to the denialists’ arguments.
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  • A Ten-Year Retrospective Analysis of Consent for the Donation of Residual Human Tissue in a Singapore Healthcare Institution: Reflections on Governance.Tuck Wai Chan & Calvin Wai-Loon Ho - 2017 - Asian Bioethics Review 9 (4):335-351.
    A 10-year retrospective analysis of consent documentation for the donation of leftover or residual human tissue from surgical interventions at a major academic healthcare institution in Singapore was conducted. Findings suggest that demographics like gender, religious belief and socioeconomic status could be indicators of the willingness of a patient to donate residual tissue to a tissue repository or biobank for future research use. Patients in general did not decide to donate based on specific details that were provided to them. Instead, (...)
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  • Belief and Credence: Why the Attitude-Type Matters.Elizabeth Grace Jackson - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (9):2477-2496.
    In this paper, I argue that the relationship between belief and credence is a central question in epistemology. This is because the belief-credence relationship has significant implications for a number of current epistemological issues. I focus on five controversies: permissivism, disagreement, pragmatic encroachment, doxastic voluntarism, and the relationship between doxastic attitudes and prudential rationality. I argue that each debate is constrained in particular ways, depending on whether the relevant attitude is belief or credence. This means that epistemologists should pay attention (...)
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  • Accuracy and ur-prior conditionalization.Nilanjan Das - 2019 - Review of Symbolic Logic 12 (1):62-96.
    Recently, several epistemologists have defended an attractive principle of epistemic rationality, which we shall call Ur-Prior Conditionalization. In this essay, I ask whether we can justify this principle by appealing to the epistemic goal of accuracy. I argue that any such accuracy-based argument will be in tension with Evidence Externalism, i.e., the view that agent's evidence may entail non-trivial propositions about the external world. This is because any such argument will crucially require the assumption that, independently of all empirical evidence, (...)
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  • Moral priorities under risk.Chad Lee-Stronach - 2018 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 48 (6):793-811.
    Many moral theories are committed to the idea that some kinds of moral considerations should be respected, whatever the cost to ‘lesser’ types of considerations. A person's life, for instance, should not be sacrificed for the trivial pleasures of others, no matter how many would benefit. However, according to the decision-theoretic critique of lexical priority theories, accepting lexical priorities inevitably leads us to make unacceptable decisions in risky situations. It seems that to operate in a risky world, we must reject (...)
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  • Non-Measurability, Imprecise Credences, and Imprecise Chances.Yoaav Isaacs, Alan Hájek & John Hawthorne - 2021 - Mind 131 (523):892-916.
    – We offer a new motivation for imprecise probabilities. We argue that there are propositions to which precise probability cannot be assigned, but to which imprecise probability can be assigned. In such cases the alternative to imprecise probability is not precise probability, but no probability at all. And an imprecise probability is substantially better than no probability at all. Our argument is based on the mathematical phenomenon of non-measurable sets. Non-measurable propositions cannot receive precise probabilities, but there is a natural (...)
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  • (2 other versions)Hope as a Source of Grit.Catherine Rioux - 2022 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 8 (33):264-287.
    Psychologists and philosophers have argued that the capacity for perseverance or “grit” depends both on willpower and on a kind of epistemic resilience. But can a form of hopefulness in one’s future success also constitute a source of grit? I argue that substantial practical hopefulness, as a hope to bring about a desired outcome through exercises of one’s agency, can serve as a distinctive ground for the capacity for perseverance. Gritty agents’ “practical hope” centrally involves an attention-fuelled, risk-inclined weighting of (...)
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  • Consequentialism and the Standard Story of Action.Paul Hurley - 2018 - The Journal of Ethics 22 (1):25-44.
    I challenge the common picture of the “Standard Story” of Action as a neutral account of action within which debates in normative ethics can take place. I unpack three commitments that are implicit in the Standard Story, and demonstrate that these commitments together entail a teleological conception of reasons, upon which all reasons to act are reasons to bring about states of affairs. Such a conception of reasons, in turn, supports a consequentialist framework for the evaluation of action, upon which (...)
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  • Formalizing value-guided argumentation for ethical systems design.Bart Verheij - 2016 - Artificial Intelligence and Law 24 (4):387-407.
    The persuasiveness of an argument depends on the values promoted and demoted by the position defended. This idea, inspired by Perelman’s work on argumentation, has become a prominent theme in artificial intelligence research on argumentation since the work by Hafner and Berman on teleological reasoning in the law, and was further developed by Bench-Capon in his value-based argumentation frameworks. One theme in the study of value-guided argumentation is the comparison of values. Formal models involving value comparison typically use either qualitative (...)
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  • Deontic Modals and Probability: One Theory to Rule Them All?Fabrizio Cariani - 2016 - In Nate Charlow & Matthew Chrisman (eds.), Deontic Modality. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
    This paper motivates and develops a novel semantic framework for deontic modals. The framework is designed to shed light on two things: the relationship between deontic modals and substantive theories of practical rationality and the interaction of deontic modals with conditionals, epistemic modals and probability operators. I argue that, in order to model inferential connections between deontic modals and probability operators, we need more structure than is provided by classical intensional theories. In particular, we need probabilistic structure that interacts directly (...)
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  • Credence and Correctness: In Defense of Credal Reductivism.Matthew Brandon Lee - 2017 - Philosophical Papers 46 (2):273-296.
    Credal reductivism is the view that outright belief is reducible to degrees of confidence or ‘credence’. The most popular versions of credal reductivism all have the consequence that if you are near-maximally confident that p in a low-stakes situation, then you outright believe p. This paper addresses a recent objection to this consequence—the Correctness Objection— introduced by Jeremy Fantl and Matthew McGrath and further developed by Jacob Ross and Mark Schroeder. The objection is that near-maximal confidence cannot entail outright belief (...)
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  • Modeling the Ellsberg paradox by argument strength.Niki Pfeifer & H. Pankka - 2017 - In G. Gunzelmann, A. Howes, T. Tenbrink & E. Davelaar (eds.), Proceedings of the 39th Cognitive Science Society Meeting. pp. 925-930.
    We present a formal measure of argument strength, which combines the ideas that conclusions of strong arguments are (i) highly probable and (ii) their uncertainty is relatively precise. Likewise, arguments are weak when their conclusion probability is low or when it is highly imprecise. We show how the proposed measure provides a new model of the Ellsberg paradox. Moreover, we further substantiate the psychological plausibility of our approach by an experiment (N = 60). The data show that the proposed measure (...)
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  • Risky business.Alan Hájek - 2021 - Philosophical Perspectives 35 (1):189-205.
    Philosophical Perspectives, Volume 35, Issue 1, Page 189-205, December 2021.
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  • Behavior is sensible but not globally optimal: Seeking common ground in the optimality debate.Dobromir Rahnev & Rachel N. Denison - 2018 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 41.
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  • Transformative Experience, by L. A. Paul.Richard Pettigrew - 2016 - Mind 125 (499):927-935.
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  • The normative decision theory in economics: a philosophy of science perspective. The case of the expected utility theory.Magdalena Małecka - 2019 - Journal of Economic Methodology 27 (1):36-50.
    This article analyses how normative decision theory is understood by economists. The paradigmatic example of normative decision theory, discussed in the article, is the expected utility theory. It...
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  • Which Methods Are Useful to Justify Public Policies? An Analysis of Cost–Benefit Analysis, Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis, and Non-Aggregate Indicator Systems.Gertrude Hirsch Hadorn - 2022 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 53 (2):123-141.
    Science-based methods for assessing the practical rationality of a proposed public policy typically represent assumed future outcomes of policies and values attributed to these outcomes in an idealized, that is, intentionally distorted way and abstracted from aspects that are deemed irrelevant. Different types of methods do so in different ways. As a consequence, they instantiate the properties that result from abstraction and idealization such as conceptual simplicity versus complexity, or comprehensiveness versus selectivity of the values under consideration to different degrees. (...)
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  • Resource-rationality as a normative standard of human rationality.Matteo Colombo - 2020 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 43.
    Lieder and Griffiths introduce resource-rational analysis as a methodological device for the empirical study of the mind. But they also suggest resource-rationality serves as a normative standard to reassess the limits and scope of human rationality. Although the methodological status of resource-rational analysis is convincing, its normative status is not.
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