Research

When you are indifferent between two options, it’s rationally permissible to take either. One way to decide between two indifferent options is to flip a fair coin, taking the one 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 2013) and have a strictly convex risk-function --- the answer will often be no: the REU of deciding by coin-flip will be lower than the REU of choosing one of the options outright (so long as at least one of the options is a nondegenerate gamble). To what extent, if at all, is this a worry for Risk-Weighted Expected Utility Theory? I argue that this fact adds some additional bite to the well-known worries about diachronic consistency afflicting views, like Risk-Weighted Expected Utility Theory, that violate Independence. And that, while these worries are ultimately surmountable, surmounting them comes at a price.

Are mandatory lockdown measures, which place restrictions on one’s freedom to move and assemble, justifiable? Offhand, such measures appear to compromise important rights to secure goals of public health. Proponents of such measures think the trade-off is worth it; opponents think it isn’t. However, one might think that casting the debate in these terms concedes too much to the opponents. Mandatory lockdown measures don’t infringe important rights because no one has a right to impose a risk of grievous harm on others—and, in the context of a pandemic, participating in the prohibited activities (e.g., going out to the bar) does just that.

This chapter explores whether this defense of mandatory lockdown measures holds up. It, first, considers whether we have a right against risk imposition—and, if so, how such a right is best understood. It then considers the objection that, even if there is such a right, people who voluntarily choose to engage in the prohibited activities—at least if fully appraised of the risks involved—effectively waive it. The chapter argues that this objection fails.

In his article “Utility Cascades”, Max Khan Hayward (as a response to my "Consider the Ostrich") argues that act-utilitarians should sometimes either ignore evidence about the effectiveness of their actions or fail to apportion their support to an action's effectiveness. His conclusions are said to have particular significance for the effective altruism movement, which centers seeking and being guided by evidence. Hayward's argument is that act-utilitarians are vulnerable to succumbing to “utility cascades”, that these cascades function to frustrate the ultimate goals of act-utilitarians, and that one apposite way to avoid them is by “ostriching”: ignoring relevant evidence. If true, this conclusion would have remarkable consequences for act-utilitarianism and the effective altruism movement. However, Hayward is mistaken – albeit in an interesting way and with broader significance for moral philosophy. His argument trades on a subtle mischaracterization of act-utilitarianism. Act-utilitarians are not especially vulnerable to utility cascades (or at least not objectionably so), and they shouldn't ostrich.

How should you evaluate your choices when you’re unsure what their outcomes will be? One popular answer is to rank your options in terms of their expected utilities. But what should you do when you think that the value of their respective outcomes might be incommensurable? In the face of incommensurable values, it no longer makes sense to speak of ranking your options according to expected utility. Are there any general principles to guide us when facing decisions of this kind? If only! This chapter develops an impossibility result: it holds that there are a handful of independently plausible constraints that no such decision theory can jointly satisfy. The result, while depressing, can be used to helpfully classify extant approaches based on which of the constraints they violate.

Business and Economic textbooks warn against committing the Sunk Cost Fallacy: you, rationally, shouldn't let unrecoverable costs influence your current decisions. In this paper, I argue that this isn't, in general, correct. Sometimes it's perfectly reasonable to wish to carry on with a project because of the resources you've already sunk into it. The reason? Given that we're social creatures, it's not unreasonable to care about wanting to act in such a way so that a plausible story can be told about you according to which your diachronic behavior doesn't reveal that you've suffered, what I will call, diachronic misfortune. Acting so as to hide that you've suffered diachronic misfortune involves striving to make yourself easily understood while disguising any shortcomings that might damage your reputation as a desirable teammate. And making yourself easily understood to others while hiding your flaws will, sometimes, put pressure on you to honor sunk costs.

I argue that any plausible decision theory for agents with incomplete preferences which obeys the Never Worse Principle will violate Transitivity. The Never Worse Principle says that if one option never does worse than another, you shouldn’t disprefer it. Transitivity says that if you prefer X to Y and you prefer Y to Z, then you should prefer X to Z. Violating Transitivity allows one to be money pumped. Although agents with incomplete preferences are already, in virtue of having incomplete preferences, vulnerable to being money pumped, I argue that the money pump argument for Transitivity is more serious than the one for Completeness.

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 those cases of diachronic behavior which strike us as irrational are those in which you had the opportunity to hide something unflattering and fail to do so.

(According to the Philoswiftie syllabus, this paper pairs nicely with Taylor Swift's song "Dear Reader" from her album Midnights (2022).)

You regard two things as on a par when you don't prefer one to other and aren't indifferent between them. What does rationality require of you when choosing between risky options whose outcomes you regard as on a par? According to Prospectism, you are required to choose the option with the best prospects, where an option's prospects is a probability-distribution over its potential outcomes. In this paper, I argue that Prospectism violates a dominance principle --- which I call The Principle of Predominance --- because it sometimes requires you to do something that's no better than the alternatives and might (or even likely) be worse. I argue that this undermines the strongest argument that's been given in favor of Prospectism.

According to some Non-Utilitarians, we shouldn't allow the few to suffer greatly in order to confer comparatively smaller benefits for the many. I argue that Non-Utilitarians who also accept what I call The Principle of Ex Ante Concern (which says, roughly, that if you know, for each person your decision affects, that they would want you to do X were they in your position because doing X is what is expectedly best for them, then you ought to do X) countenance you to play ostrich. In some cases, on these views, you should do something that is guaranteed to make everyone worse-off so that you can avoid receiving morally relevant information. I find this objectionable. And, because I argue that such views should accept The Principle of Ex Ante Concern, I take it to be a reason to reject Non-Utilitarianism.

A familiar way of deciding between indifferent options is to use a randomizing device (like the toss of a coin, or the roll of a die) to aid in the selection. The central aim of this paper is to demonstrate that such behavior is actually deeply puzzling. I argue that tossing a coin is in tension with a number of frameworks for rational choice. I then develop a solution to the puzzle, which posits that tossing a coin allows us to express our indifference between the options, and that we sometimes have good reasons---reasons regarding self- and other- understanding---to want to express such things.

I develop a decision theory for agents with incomplete preferences, by drawing an analogy between the phenomenon of Opaque Sweetening, on the one hand, and the Newcomb Problem, on the other.

In 1935, Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law, and with it a government commitment to provide unemployment insurance to most American workers. Unemployment insurance is a form of temporary wage replacement for workers who are unemployed, so long as they are available, and actively looking, for work. Progressive advocates of more extensive unemployment insurance policies standardly question this condition of being available and looking for work.

This paper entertains a novel justification for the conditional form of unemployment insurance that turns on the relationship between the unemployment rate and inflation, and that answers the progressive concern with welfare and a libertarian worry about unjustified provision. According to the Phillips Curve, there’s an inverse correlation between the unemployment rate and inflation: as unemployment decreases, inflation increases. The idea, roughly, is that the greater the pool of unemployed people looking for jobs, the more competition for jobs there will be, driving down the price of wages and exerting a deflationary effect. When inflation rises, it can be disastrous for everyone—we have strong reasons to avoid significant rises in inflation. In the service of avoiding runaway inflation, we should tolerate the existence of a certain amount of unemployment. In answer to the libertarian’s worry: those who are unemployed at this level are performing a service that benefits the rest of us, and for that reason we owe them reciprocal compensation. An atmosphere of runaway inflation harms the most disadvantaged, avoiding it answers the progressive worry. For unemployment to have a deflationary effect, however, the unemployed must be in active competition with each other and waged labor for jobs. So, we can justify conditional unemployment insurance even on libertarian and progressive grounds.

This paper defends the Minimum Wage against a prima facie powerful argument ('The Objection'): that, while the institution of a Minimum Wage benefits some low-wage workers, it does so at the expense of the even less well-off. Although this is a contested empirical matter, The Objection avers that it’s highly unlikely that the Minimum Wage engenders enough good to outweigh the harm it causes to the least advantaged. And thus---The Objection concludes---we ought to reject the Minimum Wage. In response, we mount a defense of the Minimum Wage. We argue that The Objection under-appreciates both how bad it is to work for wages that fall below those constituting a living wage, and how bad it is to live in a society in which such work is normalized; and, thus, that it mis-identifies who is, and who would be, the least advantaged by the institution of the Minimum Wage.

This paper addresses a puzzle about how to choose between three options when you don’t endorse a single precise way of evaluating them. It considers two different decision rules which disagree in such contexts. One is more permissive than the other. The paper argues that the best argument against the permissive rule fails, but that this argument can be rescued by making an unconventional assumption about how to model deliberation.

Sometimes groups must make a collective decision regarding some matter on which they are deeply divided. In some cases, if given the option, it seems like the group should compromise. In other cases, however, this isn’t the case: the group should eschew compromise in favor of one of the more polarizing options. This paper addresses two related questions: When should a group compromise? And why should they compromise?

One reason a group might be inclined to compromise is if a sufficient number of its members value compromising for its own sake (e.g., “Compromise is a virtue to be cultivated”). Another reason a group might be inclined to compromise is if its members believe that compromising on this decision is a bulwark against future group decisions not going their way (e.g. “You’ve got to give a little to get a little”). However, this paper is concerned with whether a group might have reason to compromise absent reasons of this kind. Suppose, for example, that a group forms to make a one-off decision regarding some matter about which they are deeply divided: roughly half of the members want the group to choose A, and the other half want the group to choose B. Furthermore, suppose that none of the group’s members value compromise for its own sake. Under what conditions, if any, should a group like this compromise?

In this paper, I argue for the following claims about when the group should compromise: if the compromise option, C, is everyone’s “second favorite” (that is, every member of the group prefers C to a 50/50 lottery between A and B), then the group ought to choose it; if the compromise option is everyone’s “second least favorite” choice (that is, every member prefers a 50/50 lottery between A and B to C), then the group ought not to choose it; and, if there’s no consensus about C (that is, it’s some members’ “second favorite” but other members’ “second least favorite” choice), then it’s permissible but not required for the group to choose it.

Why should the group compromise? My argument appeals to a formal result, which follows from three constraints. The first is that the members of the group are instrumentally rational in the sense familiar from expected utility theory. The other two constraints are more controversial. The second says that group members ought to be uncertain about what the group would ultimately decide to do were it faced with a pairwise choice between options about which they are deeply divided. And the third constraint concerns legitimacy: a group decision is legitimate only if it’s made using a procedure that all of its members could agree to. This argument establishes a new decision-rule for rational group agency---one that is novel in both content and approach.

I argue that an interesting aspect of the distinction between lying and mere misleading, ultimately, amounts to a distinction between what we can, in the case of misleading, and cannot, in the case of lying, plausibly get away with. Roughly, an utterance is considered a lie when we think, were it to be discovered that the speaker communicated something she knew she lacked the grounds to believe, she would not be able to maintain plausible deniability about having done something deceptive. On the other hand, an utterance is considered to be merely misleading when we think, were it to be discovered that the speaker communicated something she knew she lacked the grounds to believe, would be able to plausibly deny her deception. I defend this view and draw out some of the ethical consequences of such an account.

My dissertation develops a decision-theoretic account of instrumental rationality (which, very roughly, says that you should align your preferences over your options to your best estimates of how the actual values of those options compare), called The Actual Value Conception of Instrumental Rationality.

In the first chapter, I argue that this account underlies Causal Decision Theory and is incompatible with Evidential Decision Theory.

In the second chapter, I develop a decision theory for agents with incomplete preferences that, unlike its more popular competitors, is consistent with, and motivated by, the picture of instrumental rationality sketched in the first chapter.

In the last chapter, I explore some of the consequences of taking a view like this seriously. In particular, I argue that we should reject the idea that instrumental rationality consists in doing what you have the most reason to do; and I argue that it is sometimes rationally permissible to have non-transitive preferences.