Lu, Yucheng
(2018)
ON DICING WITH DEATH: DEFENDING CAUSAL DECISION THEORY AGAINST UNCANNY CORRELATION.
[Preprint]
Abstract
This paper defends Causal Decision Theory(CDT) against an alleged counterexample. In Dicing with Death (2014), Arif Ahmed devises a decision scenario where the recommendation given by Causal Decision Theory apparently contradicts our intuition about the correct course of action to take. Similar to many other alleged counterexamples to CDT, Ahmed’s story features an adversary (Death himself, in this case) with fantastic predictive power. Unlike many other alleged counterexamples, however, Ahmed explicitly includes fundamental use of randomization as a possible action for the agent. This dissertation critically assesses these two features of Ahmed’s story. It argues that Death’s fantastic predictive power in this case cannot be taken for granted and some explanations must be given, otherwise the decision scenario Ahmed proposes would be incoherent or at least incomplete. After considering a few such explanations, however, it becomes unclear if the initial intuition which CDT apparently contradicts still holds up. This dissertation concludes that biting the bullet can perhaps be a legitimate response from CDT to many similar cases where evidentially correlated but causally isolated acts seem to force CDT to give counterintuitive recommendations.
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