Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-68945f75b7-w588h Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-09-04T00:12:39.215Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

8 - Reasoning with preferences?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 January 2010

By
John Broome
Edited by
Reiko Gotoh  and
Paul Dumouchel
Reiko Gotoh
Affiliation:
Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto
Paul Dumouchel
Affiliation:
Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto
Get access

Summary

Reasoning and requirements of rationality

Preferences lie at the heart of economic theory. Amartya Sen's work, starting with his remarkable book Collective Choice and Social Welfare, has taken the formal study of preferences to a new level of sophistication. Sen has exposed many of the standard presumptions of economics to careful criticism. Economists generally take it for granted that the preferences of rational people satisfy various formal conditions – transitivity is the most prominent of them. Sen has examined each of these conditions, and asked whether the preferences of a rational person must indeed satisfy them.

This paper approaches the formal properties of rational preferences from a different direction. It does not directly ask what conditions, if any, a rational person's preferences must satisfy. Instead, it asks how a rational person could bring her preferences to satisfy those conditions, whatever they may be. Suppose for example that rational preferences must be transitive; then this paper looks for a process through which a person may come to make her preferences transitive.

If there is such a process, it will be reasoning; I am looking for a process of reasoning with preferences. This investigation supports Sen's program indirectly. If some condition is genuinely required by rationality, one would expect there to be some way in which a rational person could bring herself to satisfy it. If there is no such way to satisfy it, that suggests the condition may not be required by rationality after all.

Type
Chapter
Information
Against Injustice
The New Economics of Amartya Sen
 , pp. 161 - 186
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bennett, Jonathan 1990. ‘Why is belief involuntary?’, Analysis, 50 (2): 87–107.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bratman, Michael E. 1987. Intention, Plans and Practical Reason, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Broome, John 2005. ‘Does rationality give us reasons?’, Philosophical Issues, 15 (1): 321–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Broome, John 2007. ‘Wide or narrow scope’, Mind, 116: 359–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carroll, Lewis 1895. ‘What the tortoise said to Achilles’, Mind, 4: 278–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grice, Paul 2001. Aspects of Reason (with an introduction by Richard Warner), Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hare, R. M. 1952. The Language of Morals, Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Harman, Gilbert 1986. Change in View: Principles of Reasoning, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Kolodny, Niko 2005. ‘Why be rational?’, Mind, 114: 509–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Olsaretti, Serena (ed.) 2006. Preferences and Well-Being (Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements, 81), Cambridge University Press.CrossRef
Pettit, Philip 2006. ‘Preference, deliberation and satisfaction’, in Olsaretti, (ed.), Preferences and Well-Being, pp. 131–54.
Piller, Christian 2006. ‘Content-related and attitude-related reasons for preferences’, in Olsaretti, (ed.), Preferences and Well-Being, pp. 155–82.
Rabinowicz, Wlodek 2000. ‘Money pump with foresight’, in Almeida, Michael J. (ed.), Imperceptible Harms and Benefits, Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 123–54.Google Scholar
Scanlon, T. M. 1998. What We Owe to Each Other, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Sen, Amartya 1970, Collective Choice and Social Welfare, San Francisco: Holden-Day.Google Scholar
Sen, Amartya 1993, ‘Internal consistency of choice’, Econometrica, 61: 495–521.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Williams, Bernard 1973. ‘Deciding to believe’, in his Problems of the Self, Cambridge University Press, pp. 136–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×