Difficult choices: to agonize or not to agonize?

Social Research, Spring, 2007 by Edna Ullmann-Margalit

Note, however, that to the extent that we consider these choices difficult, we do so because we recognize that these choices involve consequences of significant moment for the lives of a huge number of people, and because they have an urgent moral dimension to them. These choices, agonizingly difficult as they may be, do not pose a theoretical difficulty to rational choice theory as such. Unlike the self-regarding big decisions discussed earlier, they do not involve points of discontinuity in the personality identity of the persons making them.

Multidimensional choices

* Shall I spend my week's vacation in Paris or in Venice?

* Shall I go on a ski vacation or buy a new laptop computer?

These questions exemplify multidimensional choices. The problem with these choices arises if and when the alternatives they present cannot be put on a single scale and cannot be compared along a single dimension. For example, when deciding which apartment to buy, is a spare bedroom more important than a shorter commute to work? Are better schools in the area more important than a sun balcony or lack of noise from the street?

When many considerations have to be taken into account and somehow properly weighted, the choice is difficult. The difficulty increases the more dimensions there are and the higher the stakes. Multidimensional choices bring home to us the importance of finding out what we really care about. They force us to focus on what our "true" priorities, or preferences, are.

Faced with such a choice we may sometimes realize that the notion that all we have to do is to discover our preexisting preferences is a myth: deliberation may not be enough and we may have to make up our preferences by fiat--or look for force majeure. Raz observes that not only does one care about which option to choose even when the options are incommensurable, but one can indeed agonize over incommensurable options, if the reasons on either side are deep and important (Raz, 1986: 332). In choice situations in which the alternatives are not commensurate, it is not an easy or a straightforward matter to follow rational choice theory's exhortation to maximize value.

Multidimensional choices are difficult choices in theory, and often in practice too. On the level of theory, one complication is that they sometimes invite systematically intransitive choices. "Intransitivity often occurs when a subject forces choices between inherently incompatible alternatives. The idea is that each alternative invokes 'responses' on several different 'attribute' scales and that, although each scale itself may be transitive, their amalgamation need not be" (Luce and Raiffa, 1967: 25). This phenomenon takes place on the level of individual choice as well with regard to group choice. (6) Cycles of intransitive choices, whether vicious or not, have been amply documented, classified, studied, and analyzed. Indeed, the observation--sometimes referred to as Condorcet's paradox--that the requirement of transitivity is inconsistent with the majority-vote rule was made already in the eighteenth century. Moreover, such cycles can occur where the context "is transparent and the decisionmaker is reflective" (Bar-Hillel and Margalit, 1988: 119), where the violation of the consistency requirement is not attributable to factors such as cognitive limitations, emotional interferences, taste-change over time, etc.