Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (MCMP)
print


Breadcrumb Navigation


Content

Workshop on Philosophy and Decision Theory (15. July 2022)

This workshop focuses on topics of individual and collective decision theory, and the philosophy of mind and action. This event brings together researchers from Bayreuth University and LMU Munich. Talks focus on a diverse set of questions concerning social deliberation and aggregation in collective decision-making; and collectivistic reasoning, uncertainty, ambiguity and determinism in (individual) decision-making.

Speakers

  • Leyla Ade (Bayreuth University): The Stability of Team Reasoning
  • Paolo Galeazzi (Bayreuth University): Games with Different Decision Criteria
  • Mario Günther (LMU Munich): Legal Proof is Rational Belief of Guilt
  • Anita Keshmirian (LMU Munich): Moral Decisions in (and for) Groups
  • Patricia Rich (Bayreuth University): Tastes like Chicken: A Meta-utility Theory of Decision under Ambiguity
  • Toby Solomon (LMU Munich): Libertarian Decision Theory
  • Minkyung Wang (LMU Munich): Aggregating Credences into a Belief: Impossibility Results

Venue

Georgenstr. 11, Room 009, 80799 München

Registration

The workshop is open to all. Please register by sending an email to Hein Duijf h.duijf@lmu.de with the subject “Registration workshop”.

*Dinner*
There will be a workshop dinner after the talks. The dinner is open to all, but we can only cover the costs for the speakers. To make reservations, registration is mandatory and can be done by sending an email to Hein Duijf h.duijf@lmu.de with the subject "Dinner registration" by Wednesday 13 July at the latest. The location will be announced in due time.

Program

(updated July 14)

TimeEvent
09:00 - 9:45 Paolo Galeazzi (Bayreuth University): Games with Different Decision Criteria
09:45 - 10:30 Leyla Ade (Bayreuth University): The Stability of Team Reasoning
10:30 - 11:00 Coffee Break
11:00 - 11:45 Patricia Rich (Bayreuth University): Tastes like Chicken: A Meta-utility Theory of Decision under Ambiguity
11:45 - 12:30 Minkyung Wang (LMU Munich): Aggregating Credences into a Belief: Impossibility Results
12:30 - 14:00 Lunch Break
14:45 - 14:45 Mario Günther (LMU Munich): Legal Proof is Rational Belief of Guilt
14:45 - 15:30 Toby Solomon (LMU Munich): Libertarian Decision Theory
15:30 - 16:00 Coffee Break
16:00 - 16:45 Anita Keshmirian (LMU Munich): Moral Decisions in (and for) Groups
18:00 Dinner

Abstracts

Leyla Ade (Bayreuth University) The Stability of Team Reasoning

The question of the stability of team reasoning has been answered in multiple, even opposing ways. Some have answered this question using evolutionary game theory. These approaches differ conceptually in their understanding of team reasoning as well as their adaption of the theory to an evolutionary setting. We identified four possibly dimensions which help to categorize the evolutionary analysis of team reasoning: (1) the unit of selection, (2) the notion of fitness for team reasoners, (3) the stage of decision making, and (4) the ludic ecology. In this talk, I want to point to some conceptual questions raised in the theory of team reasoning when analyzing its stability. I will explain the mentioned dimensions and present existing results, including theoretical analyses, e.g. Newton (2017); Lecouteux (2015); Amadae and Lempert (2015), as well as preliminary agent-based simulations. Further I will discuss aspects of the theory, which are relevant for a wholesome understanding of its stability. top

Paolo Galeazzi (Bayreuth University): Games with Different Decision Criteria

In this talk I will argue that interactions where agents are allowed to adopt different decision criteria have been overlooked in the game-theoretic literature. In particular, I will focus on both an evolutionary and an epistemic perspective on games and I will show that introducing heterogeneity in the criteria adopted by the agents may lead to new interesting results.
top

Mario Günther (LMU Munich): Legal Proof is Rational Belief of Guilt

We argue that legal proof is tantamount to rational belief of guilt. A defendant should be found guilty just in case it is rational to believe that the defendant is guilty. Our notion of rational belief implies a threshold view on which belief requires high credence, but mere statistical evidence does not give rise to belief. top

Anita Keshmirian (LMU Munich): Moral Decisions in (and for) Groups

Moral judgments have a very prominent social nature, and in everyday life, they are continually shaped by discussions with others. Psychological investigations of these judgments, however, have rarely addressed the impact of social interactions. To examine the role of social interaction on moral judgments within small groups, we had groups of 4 to 5 participants judge moral dilemmas first individually and privately, then collectively and interactively, and finally individually a second time. We employed both real-life and sacrificial moral dilemmas in which the character’s action or inaction violated a moral principle to benefit the greatest number of people. Participants decided if these utilitarian decisions were morally acceptable or not. In Experiment 1, we found that collective judgments in face-to-face interactions were more utilitarian than the statistical aggregate of their members compared to both first and second individual judgments. This observation supported the hypothesis that deliberation and consensus within a group transiently reduce the emotional burden of norm violation. In Experiment 2, we tested this hypothesis more directly: measuring participants’ state anxiety in addition to their moral judgments before, during, and after online interactions, we found again that collectives were more utilitarian than those of individuals and that state anxiety level was reduced during and after social interaction. The utilitarian boost in collective moral judgments is probably due to the reduction of stress in the social setting.top

Patricia Rich (Bayreuth University): Tastes like Chicken: A Meta-utility Theory of Decision under Ambiguity

We present a theory of decision-making under ambiguity which unifies many existing models and captures special cases of others. The theory includes a representation of an agent's preferences as a (meta-)utility function of the worst-case and best-case expected utilities of each act, which serve as (meta-level) goods in an ordinal utility function of the type familiar from microeconomics. Ambiguity attitude is then readily characterized by the marginal rate of substitution between lower and upper expected utility. In our representation, several common models turn out to be special cases of constant elasticity of substitution meta-utility; these models differ in terms of just two parameters, capturing relative optimism/pessimism and the curvature of the indifference curves. In sum, we can model and interpret observed choice behavior, including heterogeneous responses to ambiguity, in one simple and flexible framework, which provides novel insights into ambiguity attitudes.
top

Toby Solomon (LMU Munich): Libertarian Decision Theory

Causal Decision Theory has difficulty dealing with the possibility that our choices are predetermined. Many have responded to this problem by suggesting that rational decision-making in some sense presupposes that our choices are free. In this paper I offer a new decision theory—Libertarian Decision Theory—which formalises this idea. I show how Libertarian Decision Theory is able to solve Causal Decision Theory's problem with predetermination while maintaining consistency with deliberation-compatibilism. Causal Decision Theory's problems don't end with predetermination, however. The possibility that our choices are a matter of chance, and that they are constrained but not fully determined by the past and the laws of nature, will raise exactly the same difficulties. I will argue that Libertarian Decision Theory naturally deals with these cases as well. Distinguishing Libertarian Decision Theory from views in a similar vein—the thesis that deliberation is incompatible with predicting our own actions and the thesis that rational decision-makers treat their present options as ultimate evidential contingencies—will allow Libertarian Decision Theory to appeal to a dynamic conception of deliberation that can solve difficulties Causal Decision Theory has with unratifiable options.top

Minkyung Wang (LMU Munich): Aggregating Credences into a Belief: Impossibility Results

We propose a new research topic of how we should aggregate multiple individual credences on logically connected issues into a collective binary belief: heterogeneous belief aggregation. We argue that heterogeneous belief aggregation is worth studying because there are many situations where credences and binary beliefs are more appropriate as inputs and outputs of aggregation procedures, respectively. The main problem is that it is vulnerable to a dilemma like the discursive dilemma or the lottery paradox: issue-wise independent procedures might not ensure deductive closure and consistency. Confronting this situation, we employ the axiomatic approach to deal with general aggregation procedures as in judgment aggregation and social choice theory. We investigate which kinds of individual and collective rationality requirements and which properties of aggregation procedures should be imposed on heterogeneous belief aggregation, and which of their combinations are impossible to achieve, which leads to three kinds of impossibility results. Furthermore, we analyze the similarities and differences between our proofs and other related proofs and conclude that the problem of heterogeneous belief aggregation is not reducible to the other related problems. Moreover, we show that our methods can be applied to other similar impossibilities.

Location