Hitos históricos en el desarrollo del concepto de ciudadanía

Maximization is one of the central requirements of standard decision theory in the context of certainty. It appears to be easily justified under the assumption of preference-based instrumental rationality. This chapter considered arguments to the effect that instrumental rationality in fact requires us to violate maximization in cases where our preferences shift temporarily. I argued that these arguments fail under the assumption of preference-based instrumental rationality, and, save for a special case, are redundant if we abandon this assumption.30

For temptation cases, the implication is that an important kind of argument for the rationality of resisting temptations fails. But our last considerations suggest another way of responding to the temptation cases that is still instrumentalist in character. And that is to show that it will often be the case in temptation cases that the agent’s desires in fact support resisting the temptation. The agent’s momentary preferences merely do not reflect that.

Two things need to be noted about such a response: The first is that if we take this route, we can no longer give an argument that instrumental rationality requires that agents resist temptation, unless having the desire in question is itself required for instrumental reasons rooted in the agent’s other ends.31

30_{This is not to preclude that other types of cases may in fact give us reason to abandon maximization. Gauthier’s inter-}

temporal Prisoner’s Dilemma may be such a case, and so could the toxin puzzle presented by Kavka (1983). As Tenenbaum and Raffman (2012) argue, dynamic choice problems involving vague ends may also lead us to abandon maximization. In fact, the next chapters will take up some of their argument to show that no instrumental justification can be given for maximization once we abandon preference-based instrumental rationality.

After all, instrumental rationality cannot demand that the agent have any particular desires. It hence cannot require the agent to have desires that support resisting the temptation, even at the time of temptation. The best we can do is to argue that agents ordinarily have desires that support resisting temptations in a wide variety of cases.

The desires we appeal to here could be specific to each temptation case, or they could be desires that speak in favour of stable preferences more generally. The next two chapters will argue that instrumental arguments for the transitivity of preference only go through for agents who in fact have a general desire that favours stability of preference. While I will identify the best case that can be made for such a desire, I will argue that we are not rationally required to have it, at least not by instrumental rationality.

For standard decision theory, the implication of my argument in this chapter is that maximization remains unchallenged under the assumption of preference-based instrumental rationality. To make instru- mental arguments in favour of resisting temptation possible, preference-based instrumental rationality needs to be given up. In that case, maximization can at best only hold conditionally: An agent ought to maximize if her preferences correctly capture her desires. The next chapters will show that abandoning preference-based instrumental rationality has more far-reaching consequences.

be self-governed, and this desire could support an instrumental argument in favour of resisting temptation. Moreover, there is, for what Bratman calls ‘planning agents’, rational pressure to be self-governed. And at least part of this rational pressure is instrumental in nature.

Preference-Based Instrumental

Rationality and the Money Pump

Argument

3.1

Introduction

Most decision theorists want to defend decision theory as a theory of instrumental rationality. As we have argued, they typically view the agent’s preferences over fully specified outcomes as the standard of instrumental rationality: Actions are rational if they serve the agent’s preferences well. Preference- based instrumental rationality makes it apparently easy for us to justify maximization, one of the central requirements of standard decision theory in the context of certainty. If instrumental rationality consists in doing well by my preferences, then it seems like I shouldn’t choose an action to which another one would have been preferred.

In the last chapter, I argued that one common objection to maximization fails under the assumption of preference-based instrumental rationality. We cannot argue that in the context of temptation, it is sometimes instrumentally rational to act counter-preferentially. In fact, if we want to give an instru- mentalist argument for the rationality of resisting temptation, then we need to abandon preference-based instrumental rationality. This chapter shows that we are justified in doing so for independent reasons.

I here turn to the other core requirement of standard decision theory in the context of certainty, namely the requirement that our preferences should form a weak ordering over outcomes. One important part of this requirement is that preferences should be transitive. On the face of it, this looks like a non- instrumental requirement of rationality. It is a requirement on what kinds of preferences an agent may hold. But instrumental rationality was supposed to be silent on what ends an agent may have. In fact, Hampton (1994) rejects the Humean interpretation of standard decision theory on that basis.

There is, however, one prominent instrumentalist defence of transitivity. I will here consider whether this defence can establish standard decision theory as a theory of instrumental rationality after all. This defence comes in the form of money pump arguments. These are arguments to the effect that agents with intransitive preferences will accept series of choices that have them pay for ending up with what they started with. This is argued to be instrumentally irrational.

This chapter shows that money pump arguments do not go through on the assumption of preference- based instrumental rationality. I argue that for this and other reasons, there is a decisive case for abandoning this notion of instrumental rationality. Its basic flaw, I claim, is that the objects of the preferences that guide choice in standard decision theory in the context of certainty are fully specified outcomes. Yet, the objects of our basic desires are more simple states of affairs.

The next chapter will show that abandoning preference-based instrumental rationality has far-reaching consequences. In particular, abandoning it again puts into question maximization. I will argue that the best instrumentalist case that can be made for the core requirements of standard decision theory under certainty only applies to agents who already have a specific kind of desire.