Difficult choices: to agonize or not to agonize?

Social Research, Spring, 2007 by Edna Ullmann-Margalit

These questions exemplify big decisions. As a first approximation, I characterize a big decision as personal and transformative: a decision taken at a major crossroad of one's life and likely to transform one's future self in a significant way. Decisions such as whether to marry, to migrate, or to leave the corporate world in order to become an artist might be examples. (3)

Big decisions in the sense meant here are points of no return. In making a big decision, one is embarking upon a road that is one way only, leaving burning bridges behind. Also constitutive of the concept of a big decision is the aspect of awareness: the person facing it is conscious of its being such and is open-eyed about it. A big decision thus involves alternatives that are likely to change one's beliefs and desires (or utilities) and are perceived as such by the person making the decision, in real time. Inasmuch as one's beliefs and desires shape the "rational core" of the rational decision maker, we may say that a person making a big decision emerges from it as a different person.

By transforming the sets of one's core beliefs and desires, a big decision brings about a personality shift that alters the person's cognitive and evaluative systems. There is no continuity in his personality identity and hence there is a problem about his being consistent in his choices. While New Person's new sets of beliefs and desires may well be internally consistent, inconsistency now exists between New Person's system of beliefs and desires, taken as a whole, and Old Person's system taken as a whole.

So the notion of the big decision as here expounded poses another difficulty to rational choice theory. Given that the rationality of decision making and of choice is predicated on the continuity of personality identity over time, (4) big decisions raise the problem of how to assess their rationality, involving as they do choices that straddle two discontinuous personalities. Note however that the problem as posed relates to the theoretical, not to the practical, aspect of big decisions qua rational choices. It does not question the decisionmaker's actual ability to make a choice, or his subsequent ability to assess himself as happy or unhappy with his choice. (I say more on the practical aspect of coping with big decisions at the end.)

In addition to the difficulty they pose for rational choice theory, big decisions often count as cases of difficult choices within that theory. Relevant considerations here are, first, that big decisions by definition involve consequences of significant moment to the decisionmaker's own life and, second, that they obviously demand from the decisionmaker that he take his time in making them in more than a calculative sense.

Big decisions as so far described are self-affecting personal decisions. One may also consider big decisions that are other-regarding, such that have a transformative effect upon the lives of others. Other-regarding big decisions are typically taken in virtue of one's official position or institutional role; for example, a statesman's (such as Olmert's) decision to go to war---or indeed to stop a war. Truman's decision to use the atom bomb at Hiroshima is a dramatic case in point exemplifying big decisions of this sort, one that may be considered paradigmatic of difficult choices. Or consider the headline proclaiming not long ago in the Los Angeles Times, "Pope Benedict Faces 'Difficult Choice' In Determining Whether to Recommend Condoms as HIV Prevention Method" (Boulay, 2006). (5)