Abstract

I take two passages in a recent paper by Kent Bach—‘Newcomb's Problem: The $1,000,000 Solution,’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy 17 409-25—as occasions for several observations about practical arguments and senses in which they may ‘work’ and be ‘good.’First Passage…one can only be amused by those advocates of BOTH who…realize that takers of BOTH almost always get but $1K whereas takers of ONE almost always get $1M, and proceed to bemoan the fact that rational people do so much worse than irrational ones. Despite their logical scruples, they seem to have a curiously low standard of what constitutes a good argument. Evidently they would rather be right than rich. One would think that a solution requires not merely a seemingly irrefutable argument but an argument that works, one whose use is likely to pay off to the tune of at least $1M.