This paper studies the relationship between promoting people's welfare and respecting their autonomy of choice under risk. I highlight a conflict between these two aims. Given compelling assumptions, welfarists end up disregarding people's unanimous preference, even when everyone involved is entirely rational and only concerned with maximizing their own welfare. Non-welfarist theories of social choice are then considered. They are shown to face difficulties, too: either they fail to respect the value of welfare in at least one important sense, or (...) they end up prioritizing different people's welfare differently in non-risky choices, on the basis of their attitudes to risk, which are intuitively irrelevant in this context. (shrink)

No existing normative decision theory adequately handles risk. Expected Utility Theory is overly restrictive in prohibiting a range of reasonable preferences. And theories designed to accommodate such preferences (for example, Buchak's (2013) Risk‐Weighted Expected Utility Theory) violate the Betweenness axiom, which requires that you are indifferent to randomizing over two options between which you are already indifferent. Betweenness has been overlooked by philosophers, and we argue that it is a compelling normative constraint. Furthermore, neither Expected nor Risk‐Weighted Expected Utility Theory (...) allow for stakes‐sensitive risk‐attitudes—they require that risk matters in the same way whether you are gambling for loose change or millions of dollars. We provide a novel normative interpretation of Weighted‐Linear Utility Theory that solves all of these problems. (shrink)

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 (...) theories which accommodate risk aversion end up delivering the same verdicts as risk-neutral theories in nearly all practical cases. If so, why not just accept a simpler, risk-neutral theory? The resulting practical verdicts seem to be much the same. In this paper, I show that these arguments do not in fact condemn those risk-aversion-accommodating theories. Risk aversion can indeed survive the long run. (shrink)

Fanatics claim that we must give up guaranteed goods in pursuit of extremely improbable Utopia. Recently, Wilkinson has defended Fanaticism by arguing that nonfanatics must violate at least one plausible rational requirement. We reject Fanaticism. We show that by taking stakes-sensitive risk attitudes seriously, we can resist the core premises in Wilkinson’s argument.

Expected utility theory often falls silent, even in cases where the correct rankings of options seems obvious. For instance, it fails to compare the Pasadena game to the Altadena game, despite the latter turning out better in every state. Decision theorists have attempted to fill these silences by proposing various extensions to expected utility theory. As I show in this paper, such extensions often fall silent too, even in cases where the correct ranking is intuitively obvious. But we can extend (...) the theory further than has been done before---I offer a new extension, Invariant Value Theory, which deals neatly with those problem cases and also satisfies various desirable conditions. But other prima facie desirable conditions, including Independence, the theory violates. Is this a problem for the proposal? It may not be---in a new impossibility result, I show that no theory can satisfy Independence in full generality without violating several other conditions that together seem just as plausible. (shrink)