Temptation and Deliberation

Social Science Research Network, 2017

By "deciding how to decide", I mean using practical reasoning to regulate one's principles of practical reasoning. David Gauthier has suggested that deciding how to decide is something that every rational agent does.[2] Whether or not we agree with Gauthier about agents in general, we might think that his suggestion applies well enough to many of us moral philosophers. We assess rival principles of practical reasoning, which tell us how to choose among actions; and assessing how to choose among actions certainly sounds like deciding how to decide. One of my goals in this essay is to argue, in opposition to Gauthier, that assessing rival principles of practical reasoning is a job for theoretical rather than practical reasoning. How to decide is something that we discover rather than decide. The idea that our principles of practical reasoning can be regulated by practical reasoning is essential to Gauthier's defense of his own, somewhat unorthodox conception of those principles. And although I do not endorse the specifics of Gauthier's conception, I do endorse its spirit. There is a flaw in the orthodox conception of practical reasoning, and Gauthier has put his finger on it. Unfortunately, Gauthier's account of why it is a flaw, and how it should be fixed, ultimately rests on practical considerations, whose relevance is open to question if, as I believe, practical reasoning cannot regulate itself. This essay therefore has a second goal, which complicates matters considerably. Although I want to reject Gauthier's notion that we decide how to decide, I also want to preserve what rests upon that notion, in Gauthier's view: I want to resettle Gauthier's critique of the orthodoxy on a new foundation. I shall try to carry out this delicate operation as follows. First I'll summarize Gauthier's critique of the orthodoxy about practical reasoning. Then I'll introduce Gauthier's alternative conception of practical reasoning and his practical argument for deciding upon it. After explaining why I think that practical reasoning cannot be self-regulated in this manner, I'll explain how I think that it must be regulated instead. Finally, I'll return to Gauthier's critique of the orthodox conception in order to reformulate it in theoretical terms. GAUTHIER'S CRITIQUE OF STRAIGHTFORWARD MAXIMIZATION The target of Gauthier's critique is what he calls the theory of straightforward maximization. The theory of straightforward maximization says that an agent should choose, from among the discrete actions currently available to him, the one that yields the greatest expectation of benefit for him.[3] Gauthier argues that the theory of straightforward maximization must be modified so as to enable rational agents to avoid falling into prisoner's dilemmas. Prisoner's dilemmas get their name from a philosophical fiction in which two people-say, you and I

This paper explores the advantages of a form of non-arbitrary path dependence within social choice called rational persuasion. Persuasion is characterized as conversationally leading one’s protagonist down a particular choice path to a particular result. The choice path is enticing, or rationally persuasive, because it “makes sense” in a way that alternative choice paths do not. It tends to group, or partition, alternative choices in a way that either allows us to think of the partitioned alternatives as instantiations of some concept or presents us with some issue that we recognize as important in the choice situation. Not all partitions of the alternatives do this equally well. Nor are they as easy to talk about under the shared concepts that will organize, and be persuasive in, conversation. In this respect rational persuasion is a partition dependent idea. However, the paper also shows that the partitions have to be presented in a certain order if social choices (and the individual preferences that give rise to them) are going to be sensitive to the issues at stake as well as sensible under them. So, in the final analysis, rational persuasion must not only be partition dependent, but path dependent as well. However, contrary to what Kenneth Arrow suggests in Social Choice and Individual Values, such path dependent social choice is not arbitrary. Indeed, because rational persuasion is a form of social interaction that is both sensible and sensitive to the issues that divide us, persuasion is an exhibition of our collective rationality. It is a mistake, under the idea of a social preference ordering (which precludes path dependent social choice), to define it away as a possible approach to the social choice problem.

KANT, 2020

The article discusses the dichotomies of concepts encountered in socio-economic research when constructing a unified theory of human activity. These include the dichotomy of "action and structure" when it comes to embedding a person in a social order; "Egoism and altruism" in the study of rational human behavior in society, as well as the dichotomy of various forms of action such as instrumental and communication action. In connection with this problem, the question arises of the possibility of their study in the framework of incommensurable forms of rationality - "individual and collective".

2007

The rationality of individual agents is secured for the most part by their make-up or design. Some agents, however – in particular, human beings – rely on the intentional exercise of thinking or reasoning in order to promote their rationality further; this is the activity that is classically exemplified in Rodin's sculpture of Le Penseur. Do group agents have to rely on reasoning in order to maintain a rational profile? Recent results in the theory of judgment aggregation show that under a range of plausible conditions they do. In a slogan: group agents are made, not born.

Economics and Philosophy, 2002

Bayesian decision theory operates under the fiction that in any decisionmaking situation the agent is simply given the options from which he is to choose. It thereby sets aside some characteristics of the decision-making situation that are pre-analytically of vital concern to the verdict on the agent's eventual decision. In this paper it is shown that and how these characteristics can be accommodated within a still recognizably Bayesian account of rational agency.

The rationality of individual agents is secured for the most part by their make-up or design. Some agents, however -in particular, human beings -rely on the intentional exercise of thinking or reasoning in order to promote their rationality further; this is the activity that is classically exemplified in Rodin's sculpture of Le Penseur. Do group agents have to rely on reasoning in order to maintain a rational profile? Recent results in the theory of judgment aggregation show that under a range of plausible conditions they do. In a slogan: group agents are made, not born.

Deriving advice that can in fact be utilized by boundedly rational decision makers is a central function of modeling choice making. We illustrate why this role is not being fulfilled well by standard models of full rationality and that theories of bounded rationality are needed not only for better predictions, but also for developing better advice. Our main point is that one cannot succeed here without studying how theories of bounded rationality causally influence the behavior of boundedly rational individuals. In view of such a causal role of theories we discuss how advice of a theory of boundedly rational behavior can become known, be followed among boundedly rational individuals and still be good advice. of explicating them an important one. Second, the actual use of the term "rational" varies so much that even the most careful description will not reveal a common conceptual core. Avoiding part of the challenge, traditional rational choice theorists have not paid much attention to the everyday or common use of the term "rational" or to actual behavior. They established their standards of rationality -thus fixing the meaning of the term "rational" -independently of or even counter to the facts. For instance, even if most individuals used the term "irrational" for characterizing polluting behavior in an n-person "public bads'" experiment, the typical rational choice theorist would tend to classify the participants' behavior as "rational". As a matter of fact, if many people should say that individuals who do not co-operate in a one-off classical two-person prisoners' dilemma situation are behaving "irrationally", this will not make the rational choice theorist think twice. If philosophers like Edward insist that "backward induction" in the finitely repeated prisoners' dilemma must be given up since it just cannot be rational not to co-operate at least to some extent in such situations, the adherent of theories of perfect rationality will remain unmoved. Her concept of "full rationality" is formed "deductively" rather than "inductively" and justified by a priori normative rather than a posteriori descriptive reasoning. Common usage of the terms "rational" and "irrational" as well as philosophical analyses starting from common intuitions seem simply misguided to the traditional rational choice theorist. She would claim that neither actual behavior nor actual usage of terms should determine the "proper" meaning of the term "rational" in a scientific or philosophical context. The "a priori" approach is clearly a possibility. But it must be noted, too, that by establishing standards of rationality independently of or counter to the facts, the rational choice theorist turns "rationality" into what may be called a "counterfactual concept". If we take such an approach to its extreme, we get a very refined rationality-concept that may be appealing to the theorist, in particular the decision and the game theorist. However, it neither relates directly to the understanding of real people, nor does it apply to their behavior, nor can it form

In this paper, I argue that we have obligations not only to perform certain actions, but also to have certain attitudes (such as desires, beliefs, and intentions), and this despite the fact that we rarely, if ever, have direct voluntary control over our attitudes. Moreover, I argue that whatever obligations we have with respect to actions derive from our obligations with respect to attitudes. More specifically, I argue that an agent is obligated to perform an action if and only if it’s the action that she would perform if she were to have the attitudes that she ought to have. This view, which I call attitudism, has three important implications. First, it implies that an adequate practical theory must not be exclusively act-orientated. That is, it must require more of us than just the performance of certain voluntary acts. Second, it implies that an adequate practical theory must be attitude-dependent. That is, it must hold that what we ought to do depends on what attitudes we ought to have. Third, it implies that no adequate practical theory can require us to perform acts that we would not perform even if we were to have the attitudes that we ought to have. I then show how these implications can help us both to address certain puzzling cases of rational choice and to understand why most typical practical theories (utilitarianism, rational egoism, virtue ethics, Rossian deontology, etc.) are mistaken.

Erkenntnis 47(1) (1997): 129–44, 1997

Moral puzzles about actions which bring about very small or what are said to be imperceptible harms or benefits for each of a large number of people are well-known. Less well-known is an argument by Warren Quinn that standard theories of rationality can lead an agent to end up torturing himself or herself in a completely foreseeable way, and that this shows that standard theories of rationality need to be revised. The article shows where Quinn's argument goes wrong, and apply this to the moral puzzles.

Mind & Society, 2007

In the introduction to part I of the symposium (Mind and Society, Vol. 5, 2006) we stated that a rational agent could be thought of as an agent who has good reasons for its actions. In formal analyses of economic, medical, political, military and forensic decisions (and ensuing behaviours) rationality, that is the “goodness” of those reasons, is inextricably intertwined with probability. Typically, those analyses concern decisions in a particular class of uncertain situations, namely “risky” situations, where all the relevant available alternative actions are known, each or most actions are non-deterministic (that is, they can have different outcomes), and the probability of each outcome is known to some degree of approximation. As yet, formal analyses have only begun to scratch the surface of the subtleties implicated in uncertain, but not risky, situations, where the available courses of actions, and/or their possible outcomes, and/or the probabilities of those outcomes, are not all

dialectica, 2006

Philosophical Explorations, 2001

In our intellectual culture, we have a quite specific tradition of discussing rationality in action. This tradition goes back to Aristotle' s claim that deliberation is always about means, never about ends, it continues in Hume's famous claim that, "Reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions", and in Kant' s claim that, "He who wills the end wills the means". The tradition receives its most sophisticated formulation in contemporary mathematical decision-theory. The tradition is by no means unified, and I would not wish to suggest that Aristotle, Hume, and Kant share the same conception of rationality. On the contrary, there are striking differences between them. But there is a common thread, and I believe that of the classical philosophers, Hume gives the clearest statement of what I will be referring to as "the Classical Model". I will mention six assumptions that are largely constitutive of what I call "The Classical Model of Rationality". I do not wish to suggest that the model is unified in the sense that if one accepts one proposition one is committed to all the others. On the contrary, some authors accept some parts and reject others. But I do wish to claim that the model forms a coherent whole, and it is one that I find both implicitly and explicitly influential in contemporary writings. Furthermore, the model articulates a conception of rationality that I was brought up on as a stu-66