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Rationality - commitments and procedural rationality

4 important questions on Rationality - commitments and procedural rationality

Principle of postponement (Rawls)

If in the future we may want to do one of several things but are unsure which, then, other things being equal, we are to plan now so that these alternatives are both kept open. The specific sub-plans of the life plan are filled in at appropriate time.

Coping with their bounded cognitive abilities.
Several procedures are used to transform intractable decision problems into tractable ones:

* look only for satisfactory choices instead of optimal choices
* sub-optimization: a decision maker who finds optimization impossible may instead solve a simpler, approximate optimization problem
* approach of muddling through: the decision maker focuses only on those policies that differ incrementally from existing policies
* divide up the decision-making task among many specialists, coordinating their work by means of a structure of communication and authority relations.

There are several reasons why rules are non-rational in many circumstances:

* rules are typically advanced in isolation from one another rather than as parts of a comprehensive system
* rules often conflict with one another
* rules are typically formulated as if they are unicersally true
* rules are often not sufficiently specific to provide guidance

The zone where rational utility-maximizing decisions are relevant is extremely limited:

* normative-affective factors determine to a considerable degree which sources of information is used
* normative-affective factors color various facts

The question on the page originate from the summary of the following study material:

Economics, Ethics and the Market Introduction and Applications | 9781134133253 | Johan J Graafland

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