DECISION MAKING IN THE FACE OF PARITY

Abstract

This paper defends a constraint that any satisfactory decision theory must satisfy.I show how this constraint is violated by all of the decision theories that have been endorsed in the literature that are designed to deal with cases in which opinions or values are represented by a set of functions rather than a single one.Such a decision theory is necessary to account for the existence of what Ruth Chang has called "parity" (as well as for cases in which agents have incomplete preferences or imprecise credences).The problem with the all of the decision theories that have been defended to account for parity is that they are committed to a claim I call unanimity: when all of the functions in the set agree that an agent ought to do A, then an agent ought to do A. A decision theory committed to unanimity violates the constraint I defend in this paper.Thus, if parity exists, a new approach to decision theory is necessary.

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