In his article “Utility Cascades”, Max Khan Hayward 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.