Nozick, Ramsey, and Symbolic Utility

I explore a connection between Robert Nozick's account of decision value/symbolic utility in The Nature of Rationality 1 and F. P. Ramsey's discussion of ethically neutral propositions in his 1926 essay ‘Truth and Probability’, 2 a discussion that Brian Skyrms in Choice and Chance 3 credits with disclosing deeper foundations for expected utility than the celebrated Theory of Games and Economic Behavior 4 of von Neumann and Morgenstern. Ramsey's recognition of ethically non-neutral propositions is essential to his foundational work, and the similarity of these propositions to symbolic utility helps make the case that the latter belongs to the apparatus that constructs expected utility, rather than being reducible to it or being part of a proposal that can be cheerfully ignored. I conclude that decision value replaces expected utility as the central idea in (normative) decision theory. Expected utility becomes an approximation that is good enough when symbolic utility is not at stake

Decision theory · Economics · Epistemology · Expected utility hypothesis · Mathematical economics · Microeconomics · Normative · Positive economics · Rationality · Subjective expected utility · The Symbolic · Value (mathematics · Von Neumann–Morgenstern utility theorem · Economic Theory and Institutions · Mathematics · Philosophy · Philosophy and History of Science · Pragmatism in Philosophy and Education · Psychology

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