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asr comments on Open thread, August 19-25, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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What happens if my valuation is noncircular, but is incomplete? What if I only have a partial order over states of the world? Suppose I say "I prefer state X to Z, and don't express a preference between X and Y, or between Y and Z." I am not saying that X and Y are equivalent; I am merely refusing to judge.
My impression is that real human preference routinely looks like this; there are lots of cases people refuse to evaluate or don't evaluate consistently.
It seems like even with partial preferences, one can be consequentialist -- if you don't have clear preferences between outcomes, you have a choice that isn't morally relevant. Or is there a self-contradiction lurking?
If the result of that partial preference is that you start with Z and then decline the sequence of trades Z->Y->X, then you got dutch booked.
Otoh, maybe you want to accept the sequence Z->Y->X if you expect both trades to be offered, but decline each in isolation? But then your decision procedure is dynamically inconsistent: Standing at Z and expecting both trade offers, you have to precommit to using a different algorithm to evaluate the Y->X trade than you will want to use once you have Y.
I think I see the point about dynamic inconsistency. It might be that "I got to state Y from Z" will alter my decisionmaking about Y versus X.
I suppose it means that my decision of what to do in state Y no longer depends purely on consequences, but also on history, at which point they revoke my consequentialist party membership.
But why is that so terrible? It's a little weird, but I'm not sure it's actually inconsistent or violates any of my moral beliefs. I have all sorts of moral beliefs about ownership and rights that are history-dependent so it's not like history-dependence is a new strange thing.
You could have undefined value, but it's not particularly intuitive, and I don't think anyone actually advocates it as a component of a consequentialist theory.
Whether, in real life, people actually do it is a different story. I mean, it's quite likely that humans violate the VNM model of rationality, but that could just be because we're not rational.