Introduction

I will argue that rational satisficing and ethical satisficing suffer from the same problem, namely, that they are in danger of making no sense because their conceptions of the good cannot be made out independently of a conception of the proper aim of actions. In the case of rational satisficing, the main argument comes from the foundations of decision theory. In the case of ethical satisficing, I borrow an argument from Philippa Foot.

In the end it turns out that ethical satisficing survives the problem, whereas rational satisficing does not. I will motivate the distinction by appealing to an intuitive feature of commonsense morality, namely, supererogation.

Rational Satisficing

The literature on rational satisficing is loaded with interesting examples, but none of them has ever struck me as an example of rational satisficing. They always appear to be examples of something else, not always of the same thing, but always of something that defenders of maximizing could accommodate within their theory. One of these is the example of Hannah. Suppose Hannah has put her house on the market, and naturally she wants the best price for it. Because she can't wait indefinitely for bids to come in, she decides to accept the first bid that comes in above a certain satisfactory price that she chooses in advance. Suppose she picks $200,000 as her threshold. If someone offers her $205,000 the first day the ad appears in the local real estate listings, she'll take it.