Defending Instrumental Rationality against Critical Theorists

Instrumental Desires , Instrumental Rationality

The requirements of instrumental rationality are often thought to be normative conditions on choice or intention, but this is a mistake. Instrumental rationality is best understood as a requirement of coherence on an agent's non-instrumental desires and means-end beliefs. Since only a subset of an agent's means-end beliefs concern possible actions, the connection with intention is thus more obl...

Instrumental Rationality

0. Is there any distinctive aspect of rationality that deserves the label of ―instrumental rationality‖? Recently, Joseph Raz (2005) has argued that instrumental rationality is a ―myth‖. In this essay, I shall give some qualified support to Raz‘s position: as I shall argue, many philosophers have indeed been seduced by certain myths about instrumental rationality. Nonetheless, Raz‘s conclusion ...

Epistemic Rationality as Instrumental Rationality: A Critique

My aim in this paper is to explore the relationship between epistemic rationality and instrumental rationality. By epistemic rationality, I mean, roughly, the kind of rationality which one displays when one believes propositions that are strongly supported by one's evidence and refrains from believing propositions that are improbable given one's evidence. Prominent epistemologists frequently em...

Evidential Support and Instrumental Rationality

Defending Critical Infrastructure

We apply new bilevel and trilevel optimization models to make critical infrastructure more resilient against terrorist attacks. Each model features an intelligent attacker (terrorists) and a defender (us), information transparency, and sequential actions by attacker and defender. We illustrate with examples of the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the US Border Patrol at Yuma, Arizona, and an ele...