| Description |
In this dissertation, I defend the thesis of comparability, understood as the claim that agents are always able to choose by taking one of three deliberative stances: regardless of what the choice options are, agents possess the capacity to prefer one option to another or to be indifferent between them. I will present an interpretation of utility theory to serve as an account of how agents might, as a practical matter, reason their way through any given choice situation. This economic account of choice is explicitly folk psychological insofar as the internal mental states of choosing agents play functional roles in it, though the descriptions of the mental states are intentionally parsimonious. The economic account given therefore steers a course between competing theoretical extremes: revealed-preference theory, which is meant to account for choice without appealing to internal mental states, and value accounts of choice, which attempt to detail the internal mental workings that give rise to agent preferences. In the account I favor, the notion of preference is regarded as a theoretical primitive and value can be understood as a derived concept. Many objections to comparability arise from the assumption that value judgements are necessary in order to compare; I show how such objections are answered if value is understood as being derived from preference instead of vice-versa. Eliminating value as a theoretical necessity for choice does not counter all incomparabilist objections. I provide a response to one of the most trenchant remaining objections, the small improvement argument, which seems to show that any trimodal theory of choice, whether it assumes values are necessary in order to choose or not, can lead to self-defeating choices, and therefore fails as an account of rational choice. I show that the small improvement argument can be answered without abandoning the assumption of comparability. Finally, I consider the constitutive objection to comparability, and note that while it cannot establish that comparability must fail, it does, when understood as a subjective objection, suggest that in addition to having the capacity to compare any two options, agents also possess the capacity to refuse to compare them. |
