Harry G. Frankfurt has presented a case of a counterfactual intervener CI with knowledge and power to control an agent so he will do A. He concludes that if the agent prefers to do A and there is no intervention by CI, the agent has acted of his own free will and is morally responsible for doing A, though he lacked an alternative possibility. I consider the consequences for freedom and moral responsibility of CI having a complete plan P for (...) all actions of an agent, Lucky, who luckily has preferences that accord with P, and I extend the argument to all citizens of a land, Luckyland, who are like Lucky. I argue the citizens of Luckyland have free will but lack moral responsibility because of the connection between moral responsibility, reactive attitudes and future action. Furthermore, the presence of CI and his plan P may allow free will but is incompatible with freedom of preference. Preference concerns alternatives excluded by CI. I argue that a special higher order preference for the preference structure, a power preference, ends the regress of higher order preference and explains the first order preference. Causal determinism is compatible with freedom of preference explained by a power preference when a power preference would also explain an alternative preference. The remoteness argument for incompatibility fails because of a lack of transitivity causal explanation. The power preference is the self-explained source of freedom of preference. That basic freedom may be limited by government knowledge of our preferences, even if, like Lucky, our preferences do not provoke intervention and we conform of our own free will. (shrink)

The standard view holds that the degree to which an individual's preferences are satisfied is simply the degree to which the individual prefers the prospect that is realized to the other prospects in her preference domain. In this article, I reject the standard view by showing that it violates one fundamental intuition about degrees of preference satisfaction.

Non-compensatory aggregation rules are applied in a variety of problems such as voting theory, multi-criteria analysis, composite indicators, web ranking algorithms and so on. A major open problem is the fact that non-compensability implies the analytical cost of loosing all available information about intensity of preference, i.e. if some variables are measured on interval or ratio scales, they have to be treated as measured on an ordinal scale. Here this problem has been tackled in its most general formulation, that (...) is when mixed measurement scales (interval, ratio and ordinal) are used and both stochastic and fuzzy uncertainties are present. Objectives of this article are first to present a comprehensive review of useful solutions already proposed in the literature and second to advance the state of the art mainly in the theoretical guarantee that weights have the meaning of importance coefficients and they can be summarized in a voting matrix. This is a key result for using non-compensatory Condorcet consistent rules. A proof on the probability of existence of ties in the voting matrix is also developed. (shrink)

Two studies investigated the development of infants' visual preferences for the human body shape. In Study 1, infants of 12,15 and 18 months were tested in a standard preferential looking experiment, in which they were shown paired line drawings of typical and scrambled bodies. Results indicated that the 18-month-olds had a reliable preference for the scrambled body shapes over typical body shapes, while the younger infants did not show differential responding. In Study 2, 12- and 18-month-olds were tested with (...) the same procedure, except that the typical and scrambled body stimuli were photographic images. The results of Study 2 again indicated that only the 18-month-olds had a reliable preference for the scrambled body shapes. This finding contrasts sharply with infants' precocious preferences for human faces, suggesting that infants' learning about human faces and human bodies follow different developmental trajectories. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. (shrink)

This article discusses approaches to the problem of the number of preference orderings that can be constructed from a given set of alternatives. After briefly reviewing the prevalent approach to this problem, which involves determining a partitioning of the alternatives and then a permutation of the partitions, this article explains a recursive approach and shows it to have certain advantages over the partitioning one.

This is the second of two chapters on preference democracy. It points out that theories of liberal democracy necessarily require systematic responsiveness to popular wishes, in ways that make them fundamentally ‘preference‐respecting’, but that there are many different kinds of preferences and correspondingly many different ways of respecting them. Different models of democracy are better at providing certain sorts of respect for certain sorts of preferences than others, and which model of democracy liberal democrats want to adopt therefore (...) depends on which sorts of preferences they want to accord which sort of respect. The central claim of this chapter is that the author's preferred model of ‘democratic deliberation within’ is preference‐respecting in the right way, and that it therefore deserves a key role in any larger system of democratic accountability. The different sections of the chapter are: Respecting Preferences, Not Just Recording Them; Permissible Paternalism; Assessing Alternative Models of Preference‐Respecting Democracy; The Virtues of Sporadic Assessments: Preference‐Respecting Arguments for Indirect Democracy; and Combining ‘Democratic Deliberation Within’ and Trustee‐style Representative Democracy. (shrink)

More attention has been devoted to providing evolutionary accounts of the development of beliefs, or belief-like states, than for desires or preferences. Here I articulate and defend an evolutionary rationale for the development of psychologically real preference states. Preferences token or represent the expected values available actions given discriminated states of world and agent. The argument is an application of the ‘environmental complexity thesis’ found in Godfrey-Smith and Sterelny, although my conclusions differ from Sterelny’s. I argue that tokening expected (...) utilities can, under specified general conditions, be a powerful design solution to the problem of efficiently allocating the capacities of an agent. Preferences are for efficient action selection, and count as a ‘fuel for success’ in the sense urged by Godfrey-Smith for true beliefs. They will tend to be favoured by selection when environments are complex in ways that matter to an organism, and when organisms have large behavioural repertoires with heterogeneous returns and costs.The rationale suggested here is conditional, especially on contingencies in what design options are available to selection and on trade-offs associated with the costs of generating and processing representations of value. The unqualified efficiency rationale for preferences suggests that organisms should represent expected utilities in a comprehensive and consistent way, but none of them do. In the final stages of the paper I consider some of the ways design trade-offs compromise the implementation of preferences in organisms that have them. (shrink)

One of the reasons for adopting hyperbolic discounting is to explain preference reversals. Another is that this value structure suggests an elegant theory of the will. I examine the capacity of the theory to solve Newcomb's problem. In addition, I compare Ainslie's account with other procedural theories of choice that seem at least equally capable of accommodating reversals of preference.

More philosophical effort is spent articulating evolutionary rationales for the development of belief-like capacities than for precursors of desires or preferences. Nobody, though, seriously expects naturally evolved minds to be disinterested epistemologists. We agree that world-representing states won’t pay their way without supporting capacities that prioritise from an organism’s available repertoire of activities in light of stored (and occurrent) information. Some concede that desire-like states would be one way of solving this problem. Taking preferences as my starting point instead of (...) belief-like states, I defend two conclusions. First, psychologically real preference states, which approximately token expected utilities, have a quite general evolutionary rationale. They are a solution to the problem of efficiently allocating capacities with incompatible uses. This argument is a version of the Environmental Complexity Thesis. Second, preferences can plausibly function and naturally evolve without belief-like states, even though the converse claim is incredible. Preferences, that is, can mediate between discriminations of occurrent states (‘internal’ or ‘external’) and the processes selecting activity without mediation by stored indicative representations. By tokening expected utilities of actions conditional on discriminated state, they can increase the rate at which the ‘right thing’ is done at appropriate times, and they can do this without the support of belief-like, world-representing states. Preferences, even incomplete and noisy sets of them, are a fuel for success that will tend to be favoured when environments are complex in ways that matter to an organism, and when the organisms have complex behavioural repertoires with heterogenous returns and costs. (shrink)

When considering the role of prayer in the lives of believers, most theists agree that one important effect is the psychological impact on the person who is praying. Nevertheless, the way many of us pray, by primarily or solely focusing on our welfare and the welfare of our loved ones, agitates the human tendency towards exclusion. If we take seriously God’s commandment to love the neighbor as the self, we should use prayer, instead, as a prime opportunity to help cultivate (...) a moral character that embraces more inclusion. In this paper, I use Søren Kierkegaard’s Works of Love as a framework for working towards this more inclusive view of prayer—one that widens our moral circle and awareness to include all human beings, and not just the select ones we have chosen to prefer above all others. It does not follow that we are prohibited from praying for our own welfare or the welfare of our loved ones, but it does mean that using prayer in a way that only (or primarily) shows concern for those whom we prefer is morally problematic. (shrink)

Economists typically assume that preferences are fixed-that people know what they like and how much they like it relative to all other things, and that this rank-ordering is stable over time. But this assumption has never been accepted by any other discipline. Economists are increasingly having difficulty arguing that the assumption is true enough to generate useful predictions and explanations. Indeed, law and economics scholars increasingly acknowledge that preferences are constructed, and that the law itself can help construct preferences. Still, (...) fixed preferences are often treated as a normative ideal: Even if people don't have fixed preferences, they should. Behavioral law and economics scholars offer approaches to deal with this normative shortcoming. My article argues that preference construction, properly understood, is not normatively undesirable. Having fixed preferences means having a complete and stable rank ordering of what we want that dictates our choices. But we often do not have such an ordering, and rationally so. My article argues instead for an alternative process-based, account of preference construction. Rather than having a complete rank ordering, we have ways of making choices. We construct narratives, using evaluative criteria against a backdrop of wants, desires and inclinations, some of which we rank order and some of which we do not. The evaluative criteria embed a consideration of transaction costs: critically, where a decision is not very consequential, a formulaic decision rule that permits a ready choice among roughly comparable alternatives may serve our purposes better than a more considered alternative-by-alternative assessment. Our wants, desires and inclinations are for both traditional objects of choice and higher order values and desires; they are both previously constructed and constructed and elicited in the choice-making process. My article makes the case for such an account's potential explanatory power, as well as its tractability. (shrink)

An individual is said to have a taste for a particular menu, i.e. a subset of available commodities, if he is indifferent between all commodity bundles that contain the same quantity for each commodity which actually is in the menu, whatever the rest of the bundle. Then, a taste is directly defined as a deep property of preferences. As a first result, it is shown that a complete and transitive preference relation over the commodity bundles is equivalent to regular (...) tastes where regularity means that tastes can be derived from a pure qualitative relation between the different commodities. Besides, a preference family based on preference relations corresponding to each particular commodity is said to be rationalizable if there exists a metapreference over commodity bundles which consistently summarizes the preference family and then allows to decide. As a second result, it is shown that if a preference family is rationalizable, then the tastes are organized thanks to a reflexive and transitive qualitative relation between the different commodities. (shrink)

Economists use tastes as a source of information about personal welfare and judge the effects of policies upon preference satisfaction; neoclassical welfare economics is the analytical embodiment of this preference sovereignty norm. For an initial distribution of wealth, the welfare-maximizing outcome is the one that exhausts all possible gains from trade. Gains from trade are defined relative to fixed ordinal preferences. This analytical apparatus consists of both the Pareto principle, which implies that externality-free voluntary trades increase welfare, and (...) applied costbenefit analysis, which attempts to weight costs and benefits when evaluating policies that are not Pareto improvements. (shrink)

This document is a brief summary of the literature. It presents two arguments for thinking that it is irrational to have cyclic preferences — to prefer option A over B, B over C, but C over A. It then presents four counterexamples, where this seems rational.

This paper argues that Isaac Levi's account of preference reversals is only a limited success. Levi succeeds in showing that an agent acting in accord with his theory may exhibit reversals. Nevertheless, the specific account that Levi presents in order to accommodate the behavior of experimental subjects appears to be disconfirmed by available evidence.

The article studies preferences of agents in a setting with imperfect information. For such a setting, the authors propose a new class of preferences. It is said that an agent prefers one statement over another if, among all indistinguishable worlds, the agent prefers the worlds where the first statement is true to those where the second one is true. The main technical result is a sound and complete logical system describing the interplay between a binary modality capturing preferences and the (...) knowledge modality. The proof of completeness is using a newly proposed “tumbled pairs” technique. (shrink)

Incidences of organizational wrongdoing have become wide spread throughout the whole business world. The management of organizational wrongdoings is of growing concern in organizations globally, since these types of acts can be detrimental to financial well being. Wrongdoing occurs within organizational settings and organizational members commonly have knowledge of and thus the opportunity to report the wrongdoing. An employee’s decision to report individual or organizational misconduct, i.e. blow the whistle, is a complex phenomenon that is based upon organizational, situational and (...) personal factors. The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between value orientations of individuals and choices for particular whistleblowing modes. Our results show that there are significant relationships between these variables. We contribute to the extant literature by choosing Turkey as context as most studies have been conducted in the US and Europe, and little has been reported about the actions taken by employees in non-Western cultures when they observe wrongdoing in their organizations. (shrink)

There are two important aspects of any democratic decision: aggregation of preferences and deliberation about preferences. They are essential and complementary components of any decision making process. While the well-studied process of aggregation focuses on accumulating individual preferences without discussing their origin [4], deliberation can be seen as a conversation through which individuals justify their preferences, a process that might lead to changes in their opinions as they get influenced by one another. Till now, there has been a lot of (...) work on the ‘aggregation’ aspect (e.g., [12, 14, 6]). However, some recent work has focussed on the deliberation aspect as well [8, 9, 10, 15]. Sometimes, deliberation does not lead to unanimity in preferences, but the discussion can lead to some ‘preference uniformity’ (see how deliberation can help in bypassing social choice theory’s impossibility results in [5]), which might facilitate their eventual aggregation. In addition, the combination of both processes provides a more realistic model for decision making scenarios. In light of this status quo, our focus is on the formal study of achieving such preference uniformities, e.g., single-peaked, single-caved, single-crossing, value-restricted, best-restricted, worst-restricted, medium-restricted, or group-separable profiles. In this short abstract we provide our preliminary ideas towards achieving singlepeakedness of preference profiles via deliberation. In what follows, we define two preference upgrade operators based on [8, 9] and provide a preliminary discussion on how single-peaked preference profiles can be achieved through such operations. We will delve into the details of the logical language in the main paper. (shrink)

Scholars disagree about the plausibility of preference purification. Some see it as a familiar phenomenon. Others denounce it as conceptually incoherent, postulating that it relies on the psychologically implausible assumption of an inner rational agent. I argue that different notions of rationality can be leveraged to advance the debate: procedural rationality and structural rationality. I explicate how structural rationality, in contrast to procedural rationality, allows us to offer an account of the guiding idea behind preference purification that avoids (...) inner rational agents. Afterward, I address two pressing challenges against preference purification that emerge under the structural rationality account. (shrink)

This paper revisits Richard Hare's classical and much discussed argument for preference utilitarianism, which relies on the conception of moral deliberation as a process of thought experimentation, with concomitant preference change. The paper focuses on an apparent gap in Hare's reasoning, the so-called No-Conflict Problem. A solution to this difficulty which was proposed in is re-examined and shown to lead to a number of difficulties. The paper therefore also considers an alternative idea, due to Daniel Elstein. This new (...) proposal may well turn out to be the best way of filling the gap in Hare's argument. The paper also examines whether the gap is there to begin with: The problem should perhaps be dissolved rather than solved. This suggestion goes back to an idea of Zeno Vendler. Unfortunately, it turns out that Vendler's move does not save Hare from criticism: It does dissolve the No-Conflict Problem, but at the same time it gives rise to another, potentially more serious difficulty. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 8, August 2020, Page 76-78.

One of the main themes that has emerged from behavioral decision research during the past three decades is the view that people's preferences are often constructed in the process of elicitation. This idea is derived from studies demonstrating that normatively equivalent methods of elicitation (e.g., choice and pricing) give rise to systematically different responses. These preference reversals violate the principle of procedure invariance that is fundamental to all theories of rational choice. If different elicitation procedures produce different orderings of (...) options, how can preferences be defined and in what sense do they exist? This book shows not only the historical roots of preference construction but also the blossoming of the concept within psychology, law, marketing, philosophy, environmental policy, and economics. Decision making is now understood to be a highly contingent form of information processing, sensitive to task complexity, time pressure, response mode, framing, reference points, and other contextual factors. (shrink)

When making substituted judgments for incapacitated patients, surrogates often struggle to guess what the patient would want if they had capacity. Surrogates may also agonize over having the (sole) responsibility of making such a determination. To address such concerns, a Patient Preference Predictor (PPP) has been proposed that would use an algorithm to infer the treatment preferences of individual patients from population-level data about the known preferences of people with similar demographic characteristics. However, critics have suggested that even if (...) such a PPP were more accurate, on average, than human surrogates in identifying patient preferences, the proposed algorithm would nevertheless fail to respect the patient’s (former) autonomy since it draws on the ‘wrong’ kind of data: namely, data that are not specific to the individual patient and which therefore may not reflect their actual values, or their reasons for having the preferences they do. Taking such criticisms on board, we here propose a new approach: the Personalized Patient Preference Predictor (P4). The P4 is based on recent advances in machine learning, which allow technologies including large language models to be more cheaply and efficiently ‘fine-tuned’ on person-specific data. The P4, unlike the PPP, would be able to infer an individual patient’s preferences from material (e.g., prior treatment decisions) that is in fact specific to them. Thus, we argue, in addition to being potentially more accurate at the individual level than the previously proposed PPP, the predictions of a P4 would also more directly reflect each patient’s own reasons and values. In this article, we review recent discoveries in artificial intelligence research that suggest a P4 is technically feasible, and argue that, if it is developed and appropriately deployed, it should assuage some of the main autonomy-based concerns of critics of the original PPP. We then consider various objections to our proposal and offer some tentative replies. (shrink)

In the last few years, preference logic and in particular, the dynamic logic of preference change, has suddenly become a live topic in my Amsterdam and Stanford environments. At the request of the editors, this article explains how this interest came about, and what is happening. I mainly present a story around some recent dissertations and supporting papers, which are found in the references. There is no pretense at complete coverage of preference logic (for that, see Hanson (...) 2001) or even of preference change (Hanson 1995). (shrink)

This is the first of two chapters on preference democracy, and defends the Enlightenment model of social life, and the form of democratic individualism that flows from it, against communitarian challenges. It begins by briefly characterizing the sort of notions of liberal autonomy that underlie the Enlightenment model, and counterposing that even more briefly to the new communitarian rivals. Next, it describes the sort of ‘community’—a ‘community of interests’—that makes most immediate sense in terms of the Enlightenment model, showing (...) that it is rather more expansive than communitarian caricatures of it might often lead us to suppose. Goes on to discuss various other sorts of ‘community’ to which new communitarian writing sometimes points, and then sketches the sort of accommodation that the liberal Enlightenment model can make to those various forms of communitarian challenge. Lastly, all this is reapplied to democratic theory proper, showing what difference these rival understandings of the nature of community make to how we understand democratic deliberation. (shrink)

This paper revisits Richard Hare's classical and much discussed argument for preference utilitarianism, which relies on the conception of moral deliberation as a process of thought experimentation, with concomitant preference change. The paper focuses on an apparent gap in Hare's reasoning, the so-called No-Conflict Problem. A solution to this difficulty which was proposed in is re-examined and shown to lead to a number of difficulties. The paper therefore also considers an alternative idea, due to Daniel Elstein. This new (...) proposal may well turn out to be the best way of filling the gap in Hare's argument. The paper also examines whether the gap is there to begin with: The problem should perhaps be dissolved rather than solved. This suggestion goes back to an idea of Zeno Vendler. Unfortunately, it turns out that Vendler's move does not save Hare from criticism: It does dissolve the No-Conflict Problem, but at the same time it gives rise to another, potentially more serious difficulty. (shrink)

Preference is a key area where analytic philosophy meets philosophical logic. I start with two related issues: reasons for preference, and changes in preference, first mentioned in von Wright’s book The Logic of Preference but not thoroughly explored there. I show how these two issues can be handled together in one dynamic logical framework, working with structured two-level models, and I investigate the resulting dynamics of reason-based preference in some detail. Next, I study the foundational (...) issue of entanglement between preference and beliefs, and relate the resulting richer logics to belief revision theory and decision theory. (shrink)

We contrast Bonanno’s ‘Belief Revision in a Temporal Framework’ [15] with preference change and belief revision from the perspective of dynamic epistemic logic (DEL). For that, we extend the logic of communication and change of [11] with relational substitutions [8] for preference change, and show that this does not alter its properties. Next we move to a more constrained context where belief and knowledge can be defined from preferences [29; 14; 5; 7], prove completeness of a very expressive (...) logic of belief revision, and define a mechanism for updating belief revision models using a combination of action priority update [7] and preference substitution [8]. (shrink)

In the context of Multiple criteria decision analysis, we present the necessary and sufficient conditions allowing to represent an ordinal preferential information provided by the decision maker by a Choquet integral w.r.t a 2-additive capacity. We provide also a characterization of this type of preferential information by a belief function which can be viewed as a capacity. These characterizations are based on three axioms, namely strict cycle-free preferences and some monotonicity conditions called MOPI and 2-MOPI.