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  1. Ex-Ante Prioritarianism Violates Sequential Ex-Ante Pareto.Johan E. Gustafsson - 2022 - Utilitas 34 (2):167-177.
    Prioritarianism is a variant of utilitarianism. It differs from utilitarianism in that benefiting individuals matters more the worse off these individuals are. On this view, there are two standard ways of handling risky prospects: Ex-Post Prioritarianism adjusts for prioritizing the worse off in final outcomes and then values prospects by the expectation of the sum total of those adjusted values, whereas Ex-Ante Prioritarianism adjusts for prioritizing the worse off on each individual's expectation and then values prospects by the sum total (...)
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  • Higher‐order evidence and losing one's conviction.Leah Henderson - 2022 - Noûs 56 (3):513-529.
    There has been considerable puzzlement over how to respond to higher-order evidence. The existing dilemmas can be defused by adopting a ‘two-dimensional’ representation of doxastic attitudes which incorporates not only substantive uncertainty about which first-order state of affairs obtains but also the degree of conviction with which we hold the attitude. This makes it possible that in cases of higher-order evidence the evidence sometimes impacts primarily on our conviction, rather than our substantive uncertainty. I argue that such a two-dimensional representation (...)
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  • Instrumental Rationality Without Separability.Johanna Thoma - 2018 - Erkenntnis 85 (5):1219-1240.
    This paper argues that instrumental rationality is more permissive than expected utility theory. The most compelling instrumentalist argument in favour of separability, its core requirement, is that agents with non-separable preferences end up badly off by their own lights in some dynamic choice problems. I argue that once we focus on the question of whether agents’ attitudes to uncertain prospects help define their ends in their own right, or instead only assign instrumental value in virtue of the outcomes they may (...)
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  • If There Are No Diachronic Norms of Rationality, Why Does It Seem Like There Are?Ryan Doody - 2019 - Res Philosophica 96 (2):141-173.
    I offer an explanation for why certain sequences of decisions strike us as irrational while others do not. I argue that we have a standing desire to tell flattering yet plausible narratives about ourselves, and that cases of diachronic behavior that strike us as irrational are those in which you had the opportunity to hide something unflattering and failed to do so.
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  • A Counterexample to Three Imprecise Decision Theories.Seamus Bradley - 2018 - Theoria 85 (1):18-30.
    There is currently much discussion about how decision making should proceed when an agent's degrees of belief are imprecise; represented by a set of probability functions. I show that decision rules recently discussed by Sarah Moss, Susanna Rinard and Rohan Sud all suffer from the same defect: they all struggle to rationalize diachronic ambiguity aversion. Since ambiguity aversion is among the motivations for imprecise credence, this suggests that the search for an adequate imprecise decision rule is not yet over.
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  • Imprecise Probabilities and Unstable Betting Behaviour.Anna Mahtani - 2014 - Noûs 52 (1):69-87.
    Many have argued that a rational agent's attitude towards a proposition may be better represented by a probability range than by a single number. I show that in such cases an agent will have unstable betting behaviour, and so will behave in an unpredictable way. I use this point to argue against a range of responses to the ‘two bets’ argument for sharp probabilities.
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  • Can free evidence be bad? Value of informationfor the imprecise probabilist.Seamus Bradley & Katie Steele - 2016 - Philosophy of Science 83 (1):1-28.
    This paper considers a puzzling conflict between two positions that are each compelling: it is irrational for an agent to pay to avoid `free' evidence before making a decision, and rational agents may have imprecise beliefs and/or desires. Indeed, we show that Good's theorem concerning the invariable choice-worthiness of free evidence does not generalise to the imprecise realm, given the plausible existing decision theories for handling imprecision. A key ingredient in the analysis, and a potential source of controversy, is the (...)
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  • Dilation, Disintegrations, and Delayed Decisions.Arthur Paul Pedersen & Gregory Wheeler - 2015 - In Thomas Augistin, Serena Dora, Enrique Miranda & Erik Quaeghebeur (eds.), Proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Imprecise Probability: Theories and Applications (ISIPTA 2015). Aracne Editrice. pp. 227–236.
    Both dilation and non-conglomerability have been alleged to conflict with a fundamental principle of Bayesian methodology that we call \textit{Good's Principle}: one should always delay making a terminal decision between alternative courses of action if given the opportunity to first learn, at zero cost, the outcome of an experiment relevant to the decision. In particular, both dilation and non-conglomerability have been alleged to permit or even mandate choosing to make a terminal decision in deliberate ignorance of relevant, cost-free information. Although (...)
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  • Dutch Books, Coherence, and Logical Consistency.Anna Mahtani - 2014 - Noûs 49 (3):522-537.
    In this paper I present a new way of understanding Dutch Book Arguments: the idea is that an agent is shown to be incoherent iff he would accept as fair a set of bets that would result in a loss under any interpretation of the claims involved. This draws on a standard definition of logical inconsistency. On this new understanding, the Dutch Book Arguments for the probability axioms go through, but the Dutch Book Argument for Reflection fails. The question of (...)
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  • Safeguards of a Disunified Mind.Wlodek Rabinowicz - 2014 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 57 (3):356-383.
    The papers focuses on pragmatic arguments for various rationality constraints on a decision maker’s state of mind: on her beliefs or preferences. An argument of this kind typically targets constraint violations. It purports to show that a violator of a given constraint can be confronted with a decision problem in which she will act to her guaranteed disadvantage. Dramatically put, she can be exploited by a clever bookie who doesn’t know more than the agent herself. Examples of pragmatic arguments of (...)
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  • Sequential decision making without independence: a new conceptual approach. [REVIEW]A. Nebout - 2014 - Theory and Decision 77 (1):85-110.
    This paper presents a critical reflection on dynamic consistency as commonly used in economics and decision theory, and on the difficulty to test it experimentally. It distinguishes between the uses of the term dynamic consistency in order to characterize two different properties: the first accounts for the neutrality of individual preferences towards the timing of resolution of uncertainty whereas the second guarantees that a strategy chosen at the beginning of a sequential decision problem is immune to any reevaluation and will (...)
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  • What are the minimal requirements of rational choice? Arguments from the sequential-decision setting.Katie Siobhan Steele - 2010 - Theory and Decision 68 (4):463-487.
    There are at least two plausible generalisations of subjective expected utility (SEU) theory: cumulative prospect theory (which relaxes the independence axiom) and Levi’s decision theory (which relaxes at least ordering). These theories call for a re-assessment of the minimal requirements of rational choice. Here, I consider how an analysis of sequential decision making contributes to this assessment. I criticise Hammond’s (Economica 44(176):337–350, 1977; Econ Philos 4:292–297, 1988a; Risk, decision and rationality, 1988b; Theory Decis 25:25–78, 1988c) ‘consequentialist’ argument for the SEU (...)
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  • Fast and frugal heuristics: rationality and the limits of naturalism.Horacio Arló-Costa & Arthur Paul Pedersen - 2013 - Synthese 190 (5):831-850.
    Gerd Gigerenzer and Thomas Sturm have recently proposed a modest form of what they describe as a normative, ecological and limited naturalism. The basic move in their argument is to infer that certain heuristics we tend to use should be used in the right ecological setting. To address this argument, we first consider the case of a concrete heuristic called Take the Best (TTB). There are at least two variants of the heuristic which we study by making explicit the choice (...)
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  • Adequate Moods for non-eu Decision Making in a Sequential Framework.Nathalie Etchart - 2002 - Theory and Decision 52 (1):1-28.
    In a dynamic (sequential) framework, departures from the independence axiom (IND) are reputed to induce violations of dynamic consistency (DC), which may in turn have undesirable normative consequences. This result thus questions the normative acceptability of non expected-utility (non-EU) models, which precisely relax IND. This paper pursues a twofold objective. The main one is to discuss the normative conclusion: usual arguments linking violations of DC to departures from IND are shown to be actually based on specific (but usually remaining implicit) (...)
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  • Distinguishing indeterminate belief from “risk-averse” preferences.Katie Steele - 2007 - Synthese 158 (2):189-205.
    I focus my discussion on the well-known Ellsberg paradox. I find good normative reasons for incorporating non-precise belief, as represented by sets of probabilities, in an Ellsberg decision model. This amounts to forgoing the completeness axiom of expected utility theory. Provided that probability sets are interpreted as genuinely indeterminate belief, such a model can moreover make the “Ellsberg choices” rationally permissible. Without some further element to the story, however, the model does not explain how an agent may come to have (...)
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  • How to Read a Representor.Edward Elliott - forthcoming - Ergo.
    Imprecise probabilities are often modelled with representors, or sets of probability functions. In the recent literature, two ways of interpreting representors have emerged as especially prominent: vagueness interpretations, according to which each probability function in the set represents how the agent's beliefs would be if any vagueness were precisified away; and comparativist interpretations, according to which the set represents those comparative confidence relations that are common to all probability functions therein. I argue that these interpretations have some important limitations. I (...)
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  • Unspecific Evidence and Normative Theories of Decision.Rhys Borchert - forthcoming - Episteme:1-23.
    The nature of evidence is a problem for epistemology, but I argue that this problem intersects with normative decision theory in a way that I think is underappreciated. Among some decision theorists, there is a presumption that one can always ignore the nature of evidence while theorizing about principles of rational choice. In slogan form: decision theory only cares about the credences agents actually have, not the credences they should have. I argue against this presumption. In particular, I argue that (...)
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  • Risk-taking and tie-breaking.Ryan Doody - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (7):2079-2104.
    When you are indifferent between two options, it’s rationally permissible to take either. One way to decide between two such options is to flip a fair coin, taking one option if it lands heads and the other if it lands tails. Is it rationally permissible to employ such a tie-breaking procedure? Intuitively, yes. However, if you are genuinely risk-averse—in particular, if you adhere to risk-weighted expected utility theory (Buchak in Risk and rationality, Oxford University Press, 2013) and have a strictly (...)
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  • Generalized Immodesty Principles in Epistemic Utility Theory.Alejandro Pérez Carballo - 2023 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 10 (31):874–907.
    Epistemic rationality is typically taken to be immodest at least in this sense: a rational epistemic state should always take itself to be doing at least as well, epistemically and by its own light, than any alternative epistemic state. If epistemic states are probability functions and their alternatives are other probability functions defined over the same collection of proposition, we can capture the relevant sense of immodesty by claiming that epistemic utility functions are (strictly) proper. In this paper I examine (...)
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  • Exposing some points of interest about non-exposed points of desirability.Arthur Van Camp & Teddy Seidenfeld - 2022 - International Journal of Approximate Reasoning 144:129-159.
    We study the representation of sets of desirable gambles by sets of probability mass functions. Sets of desirable gambles are a very general uncertainty model, that may be non-Archimedean, and therefore not representable by a set of probability mass functions. Recently, Cozman (2018) has shown that imposing the additional requirement of even convexity on sets of desirable gambles guarantees that they are representable by a set of probability mass functions. Already more that 20 years earlier, Seidenfeld et al. (1995) gave (...)
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  • People in Suitcases.Kacper Kowalczyk - 2022 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 20 (1-2):3-30.
    Ex-ante deontology is an attempt to combine deontological constraints on doing or intending harm with the idea that one should act in everyone’s interest if possible. I argue that ex-ante deontology has serious problems in cases where multiple decisions are to be made over time. I then argue that these problems force us to choose between commonsense deontological morality and a more consequentialist morality. I suggest that we should choose the latter.
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  • Confidence in Beliefs and Rational Decision Making.Brian Hill - 2019 - Economics and Philosophy 35 (2):223-258.
    Abstract:The standard, Bayesian account of rational belief and decision is often argued to be unable to cope properly with severe uncertainty, of the sort ubiquitous in some areas of policy making. This paper tackles the question of what should replace it as a guide for rational decision making. It defends a recent proposal, which reserves a role for the decision maker’s confidence in beliefs. Beyond being able to cope with severe uncertainty, the account has strong normative credentials on the main (...)
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  • Money-Pump Arguments.Johan E. Gustafsson - 2022 - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    Suppose that you prefer A to B, B to C, and C to A. Your preferences violate Expected Utility Theory by being cyclic. Money-pump arguments offer a way to show that such violations are irrational. Suppose that you start with A. Then you should be willing to trade A for C and then C for B. But then, once you have B, you are offered a trade back to A for a small cost. Since you prefer A to B, you (...)
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  • (1 other version)Imprecise Probabilities.Seamus Bradley - 2019 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Orderly Decision Theory.Peter J. Hammond - 1988 - Economics and Philosophy 4 (2):292-297.
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  • Arbitrage, rationality, and equilibrium.Robert F. Nau & Kevin F. McCardle - 1991 - Theory and Decision 31 (2):199-240.
    No-arbitrage is the fundamental principle of economic rationality which unifies normative decision theory, game theory, and market theory. In economic environments where money is available as a medium of measurement and exchange, no-arbitrage is synonymous with subjective expected utility maximization in personal decisions, competitive equilibria in capital markets and exchange economies, and correlated equilibria in noncooperative games. The arbitrage principle directly characterizes rationality at the market level; the appearance of deliberate optimization by individual agents is a consequence of their adaptation (...)
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  • The Social Cost of Carbon: Valuing Inequality, Risk, and Population for Climate Policy.Marc Fleurbaey, Maddalena Ferranna, Mark Budolfson, Francis Dennig, Kian Mintz-Woo, Robert Socolow, Dean Spears & Stéphane Zuber - 2019 - The Monist 102 (1):84-109.
    We analyze the role of ethical values in the determination of the social cost of carbon, arguing that the familiar debate about discounting is too narrow. Other ethical issues are equally important to computing the social cost of carbon, and we highlight inequality, risk, and population ethics. Although the usual approach, in the economics of cost-benefit analysis for climate policy, is confined to a utilitarian axiology, the methodology of the social cost of carbon is rather flexible and can be expanded (...)
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  • Reply to Maher and Kashima.Isaac Levi - 1991 - Economics and Philosophy 7 (1):101-103.
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  • On the Application of Multiattribute Utility Theory to Models of Choice.Jeffrey Helzner - 2009 - Theory and Decision 66 (4):301-315.
    Ellsberg (The Quarterly Journal of Economics 75, 643–669 (1961); Risk, Ambiguity and Decision, Garland Publishing (2001)) argued that uncertainty is not reducible to risk. At the center of Ellsberg’s argument lies a thought experiment that has come to be known as the three-color example. It has been observed that a significant number of sophisticated decision makers violate the requirements of subjective expected utility theory when they are confronted with Ellsberg’s three-color example. More generally, such decision makers are in conflict with (...)
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  • How Should Risk and Ambiguity Affect Our Charitable Giving?Lara Buchak - 2023 - Utilitas 35 (3):175-197.
    Suppose we want to do the most good we can with a particular sum of money, but we cannot be certain of the consequences of different ways of making use of it. This article explores how our attitudes towards risk and ambiguity bear on what we should do. It shows that risk-avoidance and ambiguity-aversion can each provide good reason to divide our money between various charitable organizations rather than to give it all to the most promising one. It also shows (...)
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  • How can we be moral when we are so irrational?Nils-Eric Sahlin & Johan Brännmark - unknown
    Normative ethics usually presupposes background accounts of human agency, and although different ethical theorists might have different pictures of human agency in mind, there is still something like a standard account that most of mainstream normative ethics can be understood to rest on. Ethical theorists tend to have Rational Man, or at least some close relative to him, in mind when constructing normative theories. It will be argued here that empirical findings raise doubts about the accuracy of this kind of (...)
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  • Ordering and Independence.Edward F. McClennen - 1988 - Economics and Philosophy 4 (2):298-308.
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  • Conditional choice with a vacuous second tier.Rush T. Stewart - 2016 - Synthese 193 (1):219-243.
    This paper studies a generalization of rational choice theory. I briefly review the motivations that Helzner gives for his conditional choice construction . Then, I focus on the important class of conditional choice functions with vacuous second tiers. This class is interesting for both formal and philosophical reasons. I argue that this class makes explicit one of conditional choice’s normative motivations in terms of an account of neutrality advocated within a certain tradition in decision theory. The observations recorded—several of which (...)
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  • Rejoinder.Teddy Seidenfeld - 1988 - Economics and Philosophy 4 (2):309.
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  • Seidenfeld.Isaac Levi - 2004 - Synthese 140 (1-2):89 - 96.
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  • Unsharp Sharpness.Nils-Eric Sahlin & Paul Weirich - 2013 - Theoria 80 (1):100-103.
    In a recent, thought-provoking paper Adam Elga argues against unsharp – e.g., indeterminate, fuzzy and unreliable – probabilities. Rationality demands sharpness, he contends, and this means that decision theories like Levi's, Gärdenfors and Sahlin's, and Kyburg's, though they employ different decision rules, face a common, and serious, problem. This article defends the rule to maximize minimum expected utility against Elga's objection.
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  • Reply to Maher.Isaac Levi - 1989 - Economics and Philosophy 5 (1):79.
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  • The Value of Evidence and Ratificationism.Patryk Dziurosz-Serafinowicz - forthcoming - Erkenntnis:1-25.
    In sequential decision problems, an act of learning cost-free evidence might be symptomatic, in the sense that performing this act itself provides evidence about states of the world it does nothing to causally promote. It is well known that orthodox causal decision theory, like its main rival evidential decision theory, may sanction such acts as rationally impermissible. This paper shows that, under plausible assumptions, a minimal version of ratificationist causal decision theory, known as principled ratificationism, fares better in this respect, (...)
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  • Ambiguity aversion: the explanatory power of indeterminate probabilities.Horacio Arló-Costa & Jeffrey Helzner - 2010 - Synthese 172 (1):37-55.
    Daniel Ellsberg presented in Ellsberg (The Quarterly Journal of Economics 75:643–669, 1961) various examples questioning the thesis that decision making under uncertainty can be reduced to decision making under risk. These examples constitute one of the main challenges to the received view on the foundations of decision theory offered by Leonard Savage in Savage (1972). Craig Fox and Amos Tversky have, nevertheless, offered an indirect defense of Savage. They provided in Fox and Tversky (1995) an explanation of Ellsberg’s two-color problem (...)
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  • Implications of behavioral consistency in dynamic choice under uncertainty.Valentino Dardanoni - 1990 - Theory and Decision 29 (3):223-234.
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  • Rationalizing two-tiered choice functions through conditional choice.Jeffrey Helzner - 2013 - Synthese 190 (6):929-951.
    Set-valued choice functions provide a framework that is general enough to encompass a wide variety of theories that are significant to the study of rationality but, at the same time, offer enough structure to articulate consistency conditions that can be used to characterize some of the theories within this encompassed variety. Nonetheless, two-tiered choice functions, such as those advocated by Isaac Levi, are not easily characterized within the framework of set-valued choice functions. The present work proposes conditional choice functions as (...)
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