Until recently, many philosophers took Causal Decision Theory to be more successful than its rival, Evidential Decision Theory. Things have changed, however, with a renewed concern that cases involving an extreme form of decision instability are counterexamples to CDT :392–403, 1984; Egan in Philos Rev 116:93–114, 2007). Most prominent among those cases of extreme decision instability is the Psychopath Button, due to Andy Egan; in that case, CDT recommends a seemingly absurd act that almost certainly results in your death. This (...) renewed attention to decision instability has spurned an array of modifications to and rejections of CDT. I argue, however, that the Psychopath Button and its ilk are no counterexamples to CDT. That is, given the causalist’s commitments in Newcomb Problems, they already have the tools to justify CDT’s verdict in Egan-style cases of extreme decision instability. I first argue that there is no reason to think the Psychopath Button is a counterexample to CDT; in particular, many philosophers have placed too much weight on pre-theoretic intuition in Egan-cases, and apart from pre-theoretic intuition, arguments against CDT in cases of extreme decision instability are flawed. My second claim is that the causalist can provide good reasons for following CDT in cases of extreme decision instability. I present a new case, the Two Button Defense, that highlights precisely why the causalist can reasonably follow CDT in even the Psychopath Button. CDT therefore stands as a viable decision theory, without need for modification, restriction, or rejection. (shrink)

According to the standard objection to backward induction in games, its application depends on highly questionable assumptions about the players' expectations as regards future counterfactual game developments. It seems that, in order to make predictions needed for backward reasoning, the players must expect each player to act rationally at each node that in principle could be reached in the game, and also to expect that this confidence in the future rationality of the players would be kept by each player come (...) what may: even at the game-nodes that could only be reached by irrational play. Both expectations seem to be rather unreasonable: a player's initial disposition to rational behaviour may be weakened by a long stretch of irrational play on his part and, even more importantly, his initial confidence in the other players' future rationality may be undermined by an irrational play on their part. For different formulations of this objection see Binmore, Reny and, Bicchieri, Pettit and Sugden. and Aumann and.). (shrink)

It is plausible that Newcomb problems in which causal maximizers and evidential maximizers would do different things would not be possible for ideal maximizers who are attentive to metatickles. An objection to Eells’s first argument for this makes welcome a second. Against it I argue that even ideal evidential and causal maximizers would do different things in some non-dominance Newcomb problems; and that they would hope for different things in some third-person and non-action problems, which is relevant if a good (...) theory of rational choices of acts should fit smoothly into a good theory of rational desires for facts. (shrink)

Rational actions reflect beliefs and preferences in certain orderly ways. The problem of theory is to explain which beliefs and preferences are relevant to the rationality of particular actions, and exactly how they are relevant. One distinction of interest here is between an agent's beliefs and preferences just before an action's time, and his beliefs and preferences at its time. Theorists do not agree about the times of beliefs and desires that are relevant to the rationality of action. Another distinction (...) is between actions that would, in one sense or another, maximize expected utilities given relevant beliefs and desires, and actions, decisions for which would, in one sense or another, be stable. There is disagreement about the relevance of these things to the rationality of actions. Here, in the first part below, several possible positions on these issues are explained and compared. In the second part, I contrast perspectives on these issues, and comment on arguments that might be brought against the position I favor. In the third part, I restate and elaborate on this position. (shrink)

Sufficient conditions are given under which ratifiable acts exist.

Causal decision theory produces decision instability in cases such as Death in Damascus where a decision itself provides evidence concerning the utility of options. Several authors have proposed ways of handling this instability. William Harper (1985 and 1986) advances one of the most elegant proposals. He recommends maximizing causal expected utility among the options that are causally ratifiable. Unfortunately, Harper's proposal imposes certain restrictions; for instance, the restriction that mixed strategies are freely available. To obtain a completely general method of (...) handling decision instability, I step outside the confines of pure causal decision theory. I introduce a new kind of backtracking expected utility and propose maximizing it among the options that are causally ratifiable. In other words, I propose a hierarchical maximization of (1) conditional causal expected utility and (2) the new backtracking expected utility. I support this proposal with some intuitive considerations concerning the distinction between optimality and conditional optimality. And I prove that the proposal yields a solution in every finite decision problem. (shrink)

An option available to an agent is stable if it maximizes expected utility on the hypothetical assumption that the agent is going to choose it. As is well known, some decision problems lack a stable solution. Paul Weirich (1986 and 1988) has recently proposed a decision principle which prescribes that the option chosen should be at least weakly stable--or "weakly ratifiable", to use his terminology. According to him, full stability is an excessively strong demand. I shall argue that Weirich's proposal (...) conflicts with the familiar condition of dominance. But I shall also prove that this difficulty can be avoided if we replace weak stability by "moderate" stability--where the latter property is somewhat stronger than the former. It will be seen, however, that this modification does not help against other ailments connected with stability. In particular, to heed the demand of stability (of any kind) is to engage in a form of "wishful acting". Also, the different stability demands all conflict with a close relative of the dominance condition: the condition of "indifference". According to this condition, two actions are equally choiceworthy if they would always lead to the same outcomes--whatever state the world is in. On the other hand, the conditions of dominance and indifference would both be satisfied if we replaced a demand for stability (of some kind) by a related but distinct principle of "retrievability". Retrievability and (full) stability are mutually independent properties of options, but each of them entails moderate stability. The paper ends with a discussion of the relevance of retrievability to theories of choiceworthiness and practical reason. (shrink)