Choice Group Seminar by Akshath Jitendranath (Paris School of Economics): ‘What Are We Talking About When We Are Talking About Hard Choices?’

Abstract: This paper introduces and argues for the classical view of hard choices. This view is characterised by the following pair of claims: (i) substantively, a hard choice is a situation where an agent’s given reasons for action will fail to determine what, all things considered, the agent ought to do; (ii) this substantive claim is captured, formally, by the fact that the choice function can be empty for some choice situation. My main argument for this view is an argument by elimination. That is, I consider and eliminate the main alternatives to the classical view of hard choices that are due to Ruth Chang, and Isaac Levi. Against Chang’s claims—which we may call the revisionary view of hard choices—I argue that hard choices are not situations that show us that rational choice theory is conceptually ill-equipped to study rational decision making, as Chang has influentially claimed. In fact, almost exactly the opposite may be the case: the arguments that Chang presents display an insufficient appreciation of rational choice theory. Call Levi’s position the view from rational choice theory. It consists in advancing the claim that we need not model a hard choice as some situation where a choice function can be empty. This is because we can invoke weaker decision procedures. I show that the weaker decision procedure that Levi invokes rests on some controversial axiological presuppositions

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