Hard Choices
Decision Making under Unresolved Conflict

This book explores the consequences of denying the assumption and develops a general approach to decision-making under unresolved conflict.

Isaac Levi (Author)

9780521386302, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 27 April 1990

264 pages
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm, 0.362 kg

"...a valuable and challenging contribution to choice theory." Ethics

It is a commonplace that in making decisions agents often have to juggle competing values, and that no choice will maximise satisfaction of them all. However, the prevailing account of these cases assumes that there is always a single ranking of the agent's values, and therefore no unresolvable conflict between them. Isaac Levi denies this assumption, arguing that agents often must choose without having balanced their different values and that to be rational, an act does not have to be optimal, only what Levi terms 'admissible'. This book explores the consequences of denying the assumption and develops a general approach to decision-making under unresolved conflict. Professor Levi discusses conflicts of value in several domains - those arising in moral dilemmas, the drawing of scientific inferences, decisions taken under uncertainty, and in social choice. In each of these he adapts his theoretical framework, showing how conflict may often be reduced though not always altogether eliminated.

Preface
1. Moral struggle
2. Dilemmas
3. Values in scientific inquiry
4. Choice and foreknowledge
5. Value structures
6. Values revealed by choices
7. Uncertainty as a source of conflict
8. Conflict and social agency
9. Distributing benefits
10. Utilarianism and conflict
11. Social choice theory
12. Conflict and inquiry
Notes
Bibliography
Name index
Subject index.

Subject Areas: Philosophy: logic [HPL]