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Nozick, Ramsey, and Symbolic Utility

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2008

WESLEY COOPER
WESLEY COOPER*
Affiliation:
University of [email protected]
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Abstract

I explore a connection between Robert Nozick's account of decision value/symbolic utility in The Nature of Rationality1 and F. P. Ramsey's discussion of ethically neutral propositions in his 1926 essay ‘Truth and Probability’,2 a discussion that Brian Skyrms in Choice and Chance3 credits with disclosing deeper foundations for expected utility than the celebrated Theory of Games and Economic Behavior4 of von Neumann and Morgenstern. Ramsey's recognition of ethically non-neutral propositions is essential to his foundational work, and the similarity of these propositions to symbolic utility helps make the case that the latter belongs to the apparatus that constructs expected utility, rather than being reducible to it or being part of a proposal that can be cheerfully ignored. I conclude that decision value replaces expected utility as the central idea in (normative) decision theory. Expected utility becomes an approximation that is good enough when symbolic utility is not at stake.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 20 , Issue 3 , September 2008 , pp. 301 - 322
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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References

1 Nozick, Robert, The Nature of Rationality (Princeton, 1993)Google Scholar.

2 F. P. Ramsey, ‘Truth and Probability’, The Foundations of Mathematics and Other Logical Essays (New York, 1960).

3 Skyrms, Brian, Choice and Chance (Belmont, Calif., 2000)Google Scholar.

4 Von Neumann, J. and Morgenstern, O., Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (Princeton, 2004)Google Scholar.

5 Ramsey, ‘Truth and Probability’, pp. 18–19.

6 Skyrms, Choice and Chance, p. 142.

7 Skyrms, Choice and Chance, p. 142.

8 Skyrms, Choice and Chance, p. 142.

9 Skyrms, Choice and Chance, p. 141.

10 Searle, John, The Construction of Social Reality (New York, 1995), p. 138Google Scholar.

11 Searle, Construction, p. 138.

12 Brink, David, Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics (Cambridge, 1989), p. 231CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Nozick, Robert, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, MA, 1981), ch. 1, ‘The Identity of the Self’Google Scholar.

14 See the discussion of Ainslie in Nozick, Rationality, ch. 1, ‘Overcoming Temptation’.

15 Jeffrey, Richard, The Logic of Decision (Chicago, 1983)Google Scholar.

16 Resnick, Michael, Choices: An Introduction to Decision Theory (Minneapolis, 1987), p. 16Google Scholar.