Choice Group

If you ask someone to divide a pie between two imaginary recipients, they are likely to recommend a 50/50 split. Philosophers like Brian Skyrms and Jason Alexander have employed evolutionary game theory to explain why such "fair" divisions are almost universally observed in experimental work, and to explain the ubiquity of stated norms of fairness in human societies. When one moves away from an idealized lab setting, however, resource division is rarely governed by these stated norms. In this talk, Cailin O’Connor will use evolutionary game theory to show why unequal patterns of division often emerge between social groups.

Roberto Veneziani and Marco Mariotti analyse the liberal ethics of noninterference in social choice. A liberal principle, capturing noninterfering views of society and inspired by John Stuart Mill's conception of liberty, is examined. The principle expresses the idea that society should not penalise individuals after changes in their situation that do not affect others. An impossibility for liberal approaches is highlighted: every social decision rule that satisfies unanimity and a general principle of noninterference must be dictatorial. This raises some important issues for liberal approaches in social choice and political philosophy.

Lara Buchak defends a decision theory designed to allow for rational risk avoidance, and shows that it entails that rational agents can be instrumentally required to avoid evidence. We argue that, if Buchak's theory is correct, then rational agents can also be epistemically required to avoid evidence. We also argue that both of these consequences rely only on very weak assumptions about how rational agents respond to evidence.

Definitions of death are said to be important because they tell us at what point someone dies, which ethicists need to know in order to work out when someone loses the intrinsic moral status of the living. This paper argues we need not know what death is or when it occurs in order to answer these ethical questions. Questions about the significance of death are really questions about the significance of the various specific losses that figure in definitions of death. Which of those losses amounts to death makes no difference.

In the dynamic choice literature, temptations are usually understood as temporary shifts in an agent’s preferences. What has been puzzling about these cases is that, on the one hand, an agent seems to do better by her own lights if she does not give into the temptation, and does so without engaging in costly commitment strategies. This seems to indicate that it is instrumentally rational for her to resist temptation. On the other hand, resisting temptation also requires her to act contrary to the preferences she has at the time of temptation. But that seems to be instrumentally irrational as well. I here consider the two most prominent types of argument why resisting temptation could nevertheless be instrumentally rational, namely two-tier and intra-personal cooperation arguments.

Two agents are faced with a choice between two options. They are uncertain about which option is the right one and are endowed with a personal bias, each in favor of a different option. They first acquire independent information by observing a private signal with known quality. They then need to reveal their private signal to the other agent, but may decide to manipulate some of the evidence the signal provides, in order to persuade the other agent in the direction of their own bias. In this talk Davide Grossi presents a Bayesian model capturing this form of persuasion, analyses the strategies available to the agents and characterises the possible outcomes of the interaction.

In this week's meeting of the Choice Group, Colin Elliot (Tilburg) discusses two of the more controversial aspects of Bruno de Finetti's subjective Bayesianism – the role of operationalism and the status of de Finetti's theory as a theory of rationality – and Jurgis Karpus (KCL) presents a game-theoretic account of self-control.

De Finetti is one of the founding fathers of the subjective school of probability, where probabilities are coherent degrees of belief. De Finetti held that probabilities are inherently subjective and he argued that none of the objective interpretations of probability makes sense. While his theory has been influential in science and philosophy, it has encountered various objections. We argue that these objections overlook central aspects of de Finetti’s philosophy of probability and are largely unfounded. We propose a new interpretation of de Finetti’s theory that highlights these aspects and explains how they are an integral part of de Finetti’s instrumentalist philosophy of probability. We conclude by drawing an analogy between misconceptions about de Finetti’s philosophy of probability and common misconceptions about instrumentalism.

It follows from plausible claims about the laws of physics and the narrowness of the most relevant reference class that the positive chances between 0.0 and 1.0 that lotteries yield are almost certainly merely epistemic rather than objective. It is, for example, merely a matter of our ignorance that a given fair coin toss confers a 0.5 chance of landing heads. In actual objective fact, the chances of its landing heads are almost certainly either 0.0 or 1.0. I argue that, even if all chances between 0.0 and 1.0 are merely epistemic rather than objective, the provision of such merely epistemically equal positive chances of an indivisible, life-saving resource to those with equal claims renders things fairer by providing the equal distribution of something that it is rational to value equally.

We study the problem of making interpersonal well-being comparisons when individuals have heterogeneous – possibly incomplete – preferences. We present a robust – also incomplete – criterion for well-being comparisons that states that one individual is better off than another one if the intersection between the extended upper contour set of the better off individual and the extended lower contour set of the worse off individual is empty. We implement the criterion in the consumption-health space using an online survey with 2,260 respondents in the United States to investigate how incomplete the resulting interpersonal well-being comparison actually is. To chart the contour sets of the respondents, we propose a new “adaptive bisectional dichotomous choice” (ABDC) procedure that is based on a limited number of dichotomous choices and some mild non-parametric assumptions on the preferences. While the ABDC procedure does not reject that the preferences of a large majority of the respondents satisfy these assumptions, it has sufficient power to reject several standard parametric assumptions such as linearity or Cobb-Douglas preferences for an overwhelming number of respondents. Finally, we find that about one fifth of all pairs of respondents can be ranked in a robust way with the proposed criterion. A more complete version of the criterion is able to rank more than 60% of all pairs.

Todd Karhu: "Not All Killings Are Equally Wrong" Abstract: TBC   Philippe van Basshuysen: "Game theoretic models: use and usefulness" Abstract: TBC   #LSEChoiceGroup

Abstract: Civilian Immunity (“Immunity”) is the legal protection that civilians enjoy against the effects of hostilities under the laws of armed conflict. On the one hand, Immunity involves an absolute prohibition against directly targeting civilians. On the other hand, it states stringent conditions for the permissibility of harming civilians incidentally. Immunity thus distinguishes between two different ways of inflicting harm…

This paper will compare expert views from economics and philosophy across the different quantitative measures on individual determinants of the SDR. This will allow drawing conclusions on how representative those economic experts with policy influence are. Besides these quantitative analyses, we will put a specific focus on comparing the qualitative issues raised by both experts groups, which may point in important directions where scientific research on discounting may be undertaken in the future and policy might have to be revised.

Deren Olgun: "Reasons make actions rational" Abstract: When is something a reason for you to act?  All existing answers to this question either run into conflict with ordinary language in the cases in which we are mistaken (e.g. 'non-psychologism') or in the cases in which we aren't (e.g. 'psychologism') or they fail to offer a univocal characterisation of the relation (e.g.…

We present a new “reason-based” approach to the formal representation of moral theories, drawing on recent decision-theoretic work. We show that any moral theory within a very large class can be represented in terms of two parameters: (i) a specification of which properties of the objects of moral choice matter in any given context, and (ii) a specification of how these properties matter. Reason-based representations provide a very general taxonomy of moral theories, as differences among theories can be attributed to differences in their two key parameters. We can thus formalize several distinctions, such as between consequentialist and non-consequentialist theories, between universalist and relativist theories, between agent-neutral and agent-relative theories, between monistic and pluralistic theories, between atomistic and holistic theories, and between theories with a teleological structure and those without. Reason-based representations also shed light on an important but under-appreciated phenomenon: the “underdetermination of moral theory by deontic content”.

Jonathan Parry is a Birmingham Fellow in Global Ethics, specialising in moral and political philosophy. He is also Deputy Director of the University of Birmingham's Centre for the Study of Global Ethics.

Abstract: According to subjectivism about normative reasons for action, there is a reason for you to perform an action if and only if (and because) your performing it would promote the satisfaction of one of your desires. Presentist versions of subjectivism, on which present reasons are grounded in present desires, are threatened by Parfit's Agony Argument: they imply that there might…