Hard Choices Made Harder [chapter]

Ryan Doody
2021 Value Incommensurability  
Suppose you are deciding between law school and pursuing a PhD in philosophy. This is a hard choice. The life of a philosophy professor -which is what you hope would result from pursuing the degree in philosophyand the life of a successful lawyer -which is what you hope would result from going to law school -manifest significantly different qualities of what you value in a career. Becoming a successful lawyer promises greater financial security, holidays in Majorca, and a revered social status.
more » ... Becoming a philosopher, however, promises greater intellectual satisfaction, lazy mornings, and a great deal of professional autonomy. When it comes to these two careers, you're ambivalent: you don't prefer one to the other, nor are you indifferent between the two. 1 It's hard to choose when you're ambivalent. But this choice is even harder still. For this is also a choice under uncertainty. Merely choosing to pursue a particular career doesn't guarantee success. Going to law school might result in you becoming a successful lawyer. But it might not. Instead, it might result in you flunking out and being buried beneath a mountain of student loans. Similarly, pursuing a PhD in philosophy might result in becoming a professor of philosophy, but this is far from guaranteed. Instead, it might result in a very interesting dissertation on the metaphysics of absences and very troubling absences of tenure-track positions in metaphysics. Both options are a gamble: how things shake out turn on features of the world you're uncertain about. When you are uncertain about what will result from your choices, the standard advice is to maximize expected utility (i.e., for each of your options, you should weigh the value of its possible outcomes by your credence in that outcome being the one that would actually result were you to perform it; the weighted average of these values is an option's expected value; the option with the highest expected value is the one you ought to perform). But if you're ambivalent between the potential outcomes of your options -as you are in this example -this advice is not helpful. Because
doi:10.4324/9781003148012-17 fatcat:byauoyhssrdhvdjc3iuk233ate