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In defense of adaptive preferences

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Abstract

An adaptive preference is a preference that is regimented in response to an agent’s set of feasible options. The fabled fox in the sour grapes story undergoes an adaptive preference change. I consider adaptive preferences more broadly, to include adaptive preference formation as well. I argue that many adaptive preferences that other philosophers have cast out as irrational sour-grapes-like preferences are actually fully rational preferences worthy of pursuit. I offer a means of distinguishing rational and worthy adaptive preferences from irrational and unworthy ones. The distinction is based on the agent’s own appraisal of the adaptive preference.

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Notes

  1. Throughout, I shall use “preference” broadly, to include desire generally as well as preference in the decision theorist’s sense of a binary relation over possible states of affairs. Context will provide any necessary disambiguation.

  2. See Welsch (2005) for an interesting formal model of upgrading and downgrading.

  3. The claim that our ordinary preferences give us defeasible reasons for action is not uncontroversial, but I cannot pause here to defend it. Some have claimed that some preferences—for example the sudden urge to drink cyanide—do not give us any reasons for action, even defeasible ones. On this point see Copp (1993).

  4. Some authors, including Ann Levey (2005), construe adaptive preferences more broadly to include “any preferences formed in response to past choices and available options” (2005, p. 133). Levey cites her love of meatloaf, because she grew up eating her mother’s excellent meatloaf (p. 134), and her aversion to high heels and make-up, because her early attempts to learn the relevant practices were ridiculed by her brothers when she was a girl (p. 131). These can be shown to be non-examples of adaptive preference formation in my sense by the reasoning used in my examples of preferences for cultural food and career. Nevertheless, we will see in Sect. 5.1 that the general sensitivity our preferences show to past choices plays an important role in my argument for the presumption in favor of the rationality of adaptive preferences.

  5. For instance, Sandven (1999a, b) provides several examples of adaptive preferences that seem rational (including examples that have inspired mine of tennis and grieving above), but he offers no philosophical account of what separates rational and irrational adaptive preferences.

  6. Walker (1995, p. 464) makes this point in connection with an agent whose preferences are shaped by oppressive circumstances.

  7. Indeed, I believe that second-order preferences do not have any special role to play in instrumental rationality, as I argue in “Second-Order Preferences and Instrumental Rationality” (unpublished manuscript).

  8. The essentials of this objection are due to Rickard (1995, pp. 282–283).

  9. It is also important to distinguish preference changes due to false beliefs about the qualities of the objects that are feasible or infeasible from the cases under discussion here. In the sort of case under discussion here, the preference change is due to downgrading the infeasible or upgrading the feasible. Oddly enough, as the fable of the fox is most commonly told, the fox’s irrationality is due to a false belief that the grapes that are just out of reach are sour. Many authors have failed to recognize this distinction, including Zimmerman (2003). His examples include a fox who “forms the motivated false general belief that all vermilion grapes are sour” (p. 231) and a job seeker otherwise similar to Zvi, but who “has managed to get himself to believe … falsehoods” (p. 223) about a job he decides not to pursue. Of course, on a different natural reading, the fox changes his tastes so that the inaccessible grapes—however sour they are—are too sour for his tastes. This reading is supported by the moral to the fable, that “it is easy to despise what you cannot get.” See Elster (1983, p. 123) and Bovens (1992, p. 58) on this point.

  10. I cannot resist the temptation, however, to acknowledge a helpful point from a reviewer. It need not be full-fledged objectivism that provides the opposing view here. Instead, the opposing view might only be that one’s talents and potential determine the worthiness of one’s desires, so that someone who sets extremely low aspirations in order to avoid frustration wastes her life. For a good articulation of this point, see Kraut (1979), especially sections IV and V. I still want to resist this opposing view, of course.

  11. Brännmark (2006, pp. 74–75) makes a similar objection against “deliberative underpinning” accounts such as Frankfurt’s (1971) account of the endorsement of desires by second-order desires and Brandt’s (1978) rational desire theory.

  12. Nevertheless, the notion of reflective endorsement is not without other difficulties. Presumably, not just any sort of reflection will count, as one can easily imagine someone reflectively endorsing, say, his own intransitive preferences or other irrational things. At the opposite extreme, to require that the reflection be full-blown critical reflection that includes full information about the relevant alternatives would clearly be too much. See Sobel (1994) and Rosati (1995) for two excellent accounts of the challenges any such full information account would have to overcome. Thus, more work remains to be done to provide a more adequate notion of reflective endorsement. Thanks to Eric Cave and a reviewer for this journal for pressing me on this point.

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Acknowledgements

My thanks go to Rick Harnish for introducing me to the psychological literature on subjective well-being, and for written feedback and several fruitful discussions on an earlier version. I am also grateful to Luc Bovens and Eric Cave for written feedback.

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Correspondence to Donald W. Bruckner.

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Bruckner, D.W. In defense of adaptive preferences. Philos Stud 142, 307–324 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-007-9188-7

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