Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-4hhp2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-22T02:47:19.041Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

2 - Deciding to Opt

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 June 2023

Cass R. Sunstein
Affiliation:
Harvard University, Massachusetts
Get access

Summary

What do people care about? Psychological work on well-being has long emphasized (1) happiness, sometimes described as “pleasure,” and (2) eudaimonia, sometimes described as “flourishing” and associated with a sense of purpose or meaning. More recent work has explored (3) “psychological richness,” understood to call for a diversity of experiences and perspectives, including experiences that challenge and alter one’s preferences and values. This work is directly relevant to certain admittedly rare decisions that might alter our “core” – our conception of our identity and what we care most about. As examples, consider a decision to become a monk, to change one’s nationality, to have a child, or to get divorced. “Opting” situations raise serious challenges for decision theory, because one’s preferences and values cannot be held constant. If people’s preferences would be different depending on whether they opt, which choice is best? The right choice, I suggest, requires a shift from preference satisfaction to welfare. To decide whether to opt, people must ask: What would make their lives better? That question immediately leads to another one: What is the right conception of welfare? That might be a hard question, but it is the correct one; pleasure, purpose, and psychological richness are relevant to the answer.

Type
Chapter
Information
Decisions about Decisions
Practical Reason in Ordinary Life
, pp. 33 - 43
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Deciding to Opt
  • Cass R. Sunstein, Harvard University, Massachusetts
  • Book: Decisions about Decisions
  • Online publication: 29 June 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009400480.003
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Deciding to Opt
  • Cass R. Sunstein, Harvard University, Massachusetts
  • Book: Decisions about Decisions
  • Online publication: 29 June 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009400480.003
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Deciding to Opt
  • Cass R. Sunstein, Harvard University, Massachusetts
  • Book: Decisions about Decisions
  • Online publication: 29 June 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009400480.003
Available formats
×