Gabriele Scotto
University of Turin
Standard decision theory and rational choice theory are well-developed tools that can help an agent in his or her everyday decisions. People can use decision theory in ordinary situations, such as buying a basket of bananas or oranges or selling an old car for a new one. Nevertheless, some scholars have questioned whether standard approaches can also be valid for difficult and important decisions such as, for instance, becoming parents, choosing one career or another, moving to a new continent or tasting a food never tried before [Ulmann-Margalit, 2006; Paul, 2014]. According to their view, in fact, these big decisions would imply what they call personally transformative experiences and epistemically transformative experiences, i. e. experiences for which decision theories cannot be used. While some authors argue that there really are no valid solutions [Ulmann-Margalit, 2006], for others there are stratagems that would replace, or strengthen, standard rational choice models [Paul, 2014]. However, it has been shown instead how standard approaches can still be valid if adapted internally, without needing to adopt an alternative decision theoretic framework. This solution is known as the fine-graining response, which provides a way to assign utility values to the possible outcomes of transformative experiences [Pettigrew, 2015]. Paul has objected that this solution compromises the authenticity of an agent’s decisions. The intent of this paper is to defend Pettigrew’s solution against this objection, showing that standard models of decision theory can still be valid also for transformative experiences without unduly compromising the agent’s authenticity.
Chair: Mathilde Cappelli
Time: September 12th, 10:00 – 10:30
Location: SR 1.006
SOPhiA 2026 