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Colburn on Covert Influences

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2011

DONALD W. BRUCKNER
DONALD W. BRUCKNER*
Affiliation:
Penn State University, New [email protected]
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Abstract

In ‘Autonomy and Adaptive Preferences’, Ben Colburn claims that preferences formed through covert influences are defective. I show that Colburn's argument fails to establish that anything is wrong with preferences formed in this manner.

Type
Discussion
Information
Utilitas , Volume 23 , Issue 4 , December 2011 , pp. 451 - 457
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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References

1 Utilitas, 23 (2011), pp. 52–71, at 68. All unadorned page references in the text are to this article.

2 Indeed, Colburn has offered such a response in a very careful and constructive referee report on an earlier version of my article.

3 Colburn considers such a case as I have discussed in the text, in which the real causal reasons for the formation of the preference for ice-cream are revealed to the agent, but she retains it anyway (p. 65). It seems to me that his discussion there may also trade on an ambiguity between causal and justificatory reasons. As well, further complications arise in interpreting what he says there, complications arising from a distinction he ignores between the causal explanation for the genesis of a preference and the causal explanation for the retention of a preference. Nothing material to the major elements of my critique hinges on how we interpret Colburn's analysis of this case, so I refrain from discussing the interpretative possibilities in the text.

4 In Colburn's feedback on my critique and on p. 65 of his paper, there are indications that he is sympathetic to the addition of this repudiation condition.

5 An anonymous referee points out that adaptive preference formation – in the broadest sense of altering one's preferences in light of available options – need not be restricted to covert influences, i.e. that there can exist adaptive preferences not formed by covert influences. So once we have restricted adaptive preferences to covert influences, both Colburn and I have left the adaptive preferences debate behind. It does seem that Colburn intended to say that all adaptive preferences are due to covert influences (p. 52), but perhaps we can interpret him most charitably to say that of all preferences formed in the light of available options (‘adaptive preferences’ in the referee's broad sense), the ones that have something wrong with them are the ones that are due to covert influences. So we can read Colburn as trying to provide an analysis of what is wrong with a certain subset of adaptive preferences in the referee's broad sense. Thus, it is not clear that the adaptive preference debate has been left behind. Indeed, see the Conclusion for further tie back.

6 I have argued this more fully in my ‘In Defense of Adaptive Preferences’, Philosophical Studies 142 (2009), pp. 307–24. If I were to revise that discussion in light of Colburn's paper and my critique, I would be more explicit that the reflection must be on both the content of the preference and the process by which it was formed.