DISAGREEING OVER EVALUATIVES: PREFERENCE, NORMATIVE AND MORAL DISCOURSE

Choice and Normative Preference

Due to factors such as temptation, choices may not respect normative preference (the agent’s own, subjective view of what constitutes his welfare). Nevertheless, the evidence on preference reversals suggests a means of recovering normative preference from choice. A de…nition of normative preference in terms of choices between su¢ ciently delayed alternatives is formulated and studied. Mild cond...

Moral Learning: Conceptual foundations and normative relevance

What is distinctive about a bringing a learning perspective to moral psychology? Part of the answer lies in the remarkable transformations that have taken place in learning theory over the past two decades, which have revealed how powerful experience-based learning can be in the acquisition of abstract causal and evaluative representations, including generative models capable of attuning percep...

Temptation with uncertain normative preference

We model a decision maker who anticipates being tempted but is also uncertain about what is normatively best. Our model is an extended version of Gul and Pesendorfer’s (2001) with three time periods: in the ex ante period the agent chooses a set of menus, in the interim period she chooses a menu from this set, and in the final period she chooses from the menu. We posit axioms from the ex ante p...

Moral discourse, bioethics, and the law.

Moral Discourse: Error-Ridden or Relatively Defensible?