Practical Reason and Permissible Preference

How should you choose when you do not know how to evaluate your options? Suppose, for example, that a consequentialist theory evaluates your options one way, a deontological theory evaluates them another way, and you do not know which of these theories is correct. What should you do? An influential answer is that you should choose based on the expected value of your options given your credence over evaluative theories. However, all such views face the problem of intertheoretic value comparison, and some face the problem of demandingness. We here propose a new view that avoids both problems. We call it the permissible preference view, because it holds, roughly, that an option is permissible if and only if it could be rationally chosen by someone with permissible preferences.