A PDF of this blogpost is available here.
Once again, I find myself stumbling upon a philosophical thought that seems so natural that I feel reasonably confident it must have been explored before, but I can't find where. So, in this blogpost, I'll set it out in the hope that a kind reader will know where to find a proper version already written up fully.*
I'd like to develop a type of objection that might be raised against a theory of rational decision-making. Here, I'll raise it against Lara Buchak's risk-weighted expected utility theory, in particular, but there will be many other theories to which it applies.
In brief, the objection applies to decision theories that are not self-recommending. That is, it applies to a decision theory if there is a particular instance of that theory that recommends that you use some alternative decision theory to make your decision; if you were to use this decision theory to choose which decision theory to use to make your choices, it would tell you to choose a different one, and not itself. We might naturally say that a decision theory that is not self-recommending in this sense is not a coherent means by which to make decisions, and that seems to be a strong strike against it.
 |
A self-recommending Timothy Dalton
|