6 - Satisficing: Not Good Enough

Summary

Introduction

The idea of satisficing either expresses the correct but relatively banal insight that the pervasive need to trade off incommensurable values puts optimizing deliberation out of reach, or else it articulates a specific, non-optimizing strategy of decision. In company with the proponents of satisficing, I believe that optimizing is seldom an apt concept for modeling deliberation. As a broad approach to human rationality emphasizing, as H. A. Simon famously did, that our limitations as deliberators mean that optimizing is rarely a rational strategy, satisficing constitutes a valuable insight; however, when satisficing is worked up into a competing strategy of decision — as it has been by a number of recent philosophers — the idea of satisficing gets into trouble, as I will show. The core idea of satisficing is that “one ceases to search for alternatives when one finds an alternative” that one deems to be “good enough.” Working this idea up into a decision-making strategy requires specifying a suitable metric of what is “good enough.” As I shall argue, showing a suitable deference to the banal facts about tradeoffs among incommensurable values while at the same time having to remain distinct from optimizing pushes the proponent of satisficing as a decision-making strategy to specify what is “good enough” in terms of a highly idealized account of what someone's preferences are.