Gustav Alexandrie

I broadly agree with all of Sami's points. However, on this terminological issue I think it is a bit less clear cut. It is true that many decision theorists distinguish between "dutch books" and "money pumps" in the way you are suggesting, and it seems like this is becoming the standard terminology in philosophy.  That said, there are definitely some decision theorists that use "Dutch book arguments" to refer to money pump arguments for VNM axioms. For example, Yaari writes that "an agent that violates Expected Utility Theory is vulnerable to a so-cal... (read more)

Thanks!

i’m wary about it. like, how alien is this idealised human? why does it have any moral authority?

I don't have great answers to these metaethical questions. Conditional on normative realism, it seems plausible to me that first-order normative views must satisfy the vNM axioms. Conditional on normative antirealism, I agree it is less clear that first-order normative views must satisfy the vNM axioms, but this is just a special case of it being hard to justify any normative views under normative antirealism.

In any case, I suspect that we are close to reaching bedrock in this discussion, so perhaps this is a good place to end the discussion.

I appreciate the reply!

"the rationality conditions are pretty decent model of human behaviour, but they're only approximations. you're right that if the approximation is perfect then aggregativism is mathematically equivalent to utilitarianism, which does render some of these advantages/objections moot. but I don't know how close the approximations are (that's an empirical question)."

I'm not sure why we should combine Harsanyi's Lottery (or LELO or whatever) with a model of actual human behaviour. Here's a rough sketch of how I am thinking about it: Morali... (read more)

Thanks for writing this! 

I only skimmed the post, so I may have missed something, but it seems to me that this post underemphasizes the fact that both Harsanyi's Lottery and LELO imply utilitarianism under plausible assumptions about rationality. For example, if the social planner satisfies the vNM axioms of expected utility theory, then Harsanyi's Lottery implies that the social planner is utilitarian with respect to expected utilities (Harsanyi 1953). Likewise, if the social planner's intertemporal preferences satisfy a set of normatively plausible ... (read more)