It seems to me there is another principle that needs to be considered in practical ethics.
When we are confronted with a situation with two mutually exclusive options, standard utility calculation normally allows that they may be of equal value. Standard economics agrees, allowing two goods to be of equal value. But an agent always chooses one or the other. Even when dealing with fungible commodities — say, two identical five-pound bags of rice on a shelf — we always do, in practice, end up choosing one or the other. Even if we flip a coin or use some other random decision procedure, ultimately one good ends up in the shopping cart and the other good ends up staying on the shelf.
To avoid Buridan’s Ass situations, we must always end up ranking one good above the other. Otherwise we end up with neither good, which is worse than choosing arbitrarily.
“Should two courses be judged equal, then the will cannot break the deadlock, all it can do is to suspend judgement until the circumstances change, and the right course of action is clear.” — Jean Buridan
If choice A has utility 1, choice B also has utility 1, and remaining in a state of indecision has utility 0, then we can’t allow the equality between A and B to result in us choosing the lower utility option.
This is especially important when time comes into play. Consider choosing between two mutually exclusive activities, each of which produces 1 util per unit time. The longer you spend trying to decide, the less time you have to do either one.
One solution to this seems to be to deny equality. Any time we perform a comparison between two utilities, it always returns < or >, never =. Any two options are ranked, not numerically evaluated.
In this system, utilities do not behave like real numbers; they are ordered but do not have equality.
It seems to me there is another principle that needs to be considered in practical ethics.
When we are confronted with a situation with two mutually exclusive options, standard utility calculation normally allows that they may be of equal value. Standard economics agrees, allowing two goods to be of equal value. But an agent always chooses one or the other. Even when dealing with fungible commodities — say, two identical five-pound bags of rice on a shelf — we always do, in practice, end up choosing one or the other. Even if we flip a coin or use some other random decision procedure, ultimately one good ends up in the shopping cart and the other good ends up staying on the shelf.
To avoid Buridan’s Ass situations, we must always end up ranking one good above the other. Otherwise we end up with neither good, which is worse than choosing arbitrarily.
“Should two courses be judged equal, then the will cannot break the deadlock, all it can do is to suspend judgement until the circumstances change, and the right course of action is clear.” — Jean Buridan
If choice A has utility 1, choice B also has utility 1, and remaining in a state of indecision has utility 0, then we can’t allow the equality between A and B to result in us choosing the lower utility option.
This is especially important when time comes into play. Consider choosing between two mutually exclusive activities, each of which produces 1 util per unit time. The longer you spend trying to decide, the less time you have to do either one.
One solution to this seems to be to deny equality. Any time we perform a comparison between two utilities, it always returns < or >, never =. Any two options are ranked, not numerically evaluated.
In this system, utilities do not behave like real numbers; they are ordered but do not have equality.