Hi Anthony. Here is a summary of Adam Elga’s argument. Below is an outline of Adam’s argument against the plan strategy. Which part of it do you reject?
2. PLAN — When you act, you simultaneously form a plan binding your later choices to cohere with it (reject Bet A → plan to accept Bet B → follow through), but without changing any beliefs. Elga refutes this with the case of Sally, who cares only about money and has a highly unsharp credence about rain. Compare two scenarios: in the first she rejected Bet A and is now offered Bet B; in the second she’s offered Bet B alone. PLAN permits rejecting Bet B in the second but not the first. Yet the monetary consequences of accepting and of rejecting Bet B are identical across the two scenarios, and her beliefs are identical, and money is all she cares about—so the situations are alike in every respect she cares about. Rationality can’t impose different requirements on choices that are identical in all relevant respects. To the rejoinder “but rejecting Bet B would break her plan,” Elga replies that either plan-breaking is something Sally finds costly (contradicting the stipulation that it’s costless for her), or it isn’t—in which case “Don’t break plans!” is as groundless a constraint as “Don’t break mirrors!” He flags but sets aside the resolute-choice tradition (Gauthier, McClennen) that would defend plan-following.
I’m proposing binding commitments, not plans. As I say, there’s no choice to be made after committing to C and rejecting bet A. So I reject the claim that the commitment response requires “imposing different requirements on choices that are identical in all relevant respects”.
I see. Below is how Claude thinks Adam would object. Any reactions?
Elga’s strongest corrected replies
[“corrected” because Claude initially said something that did not make sense. I pointed this out, and asked Claude to update what would be Adam’s objections. The updated objections below make sense to me.]
1. The commitment doesn’t pay the original bill; it relocates it. Elga’s challenge was: how do unsharp credences themselves constrain rational action? Notice what C concedes. At the B-node the agent’s credences-plus-maximality still say rejecting B is permissible — that is why she has to lock the option out in advance. So the imprecise state still delivers the wrong local verdict; C works by overriding it. What constrains action, then, isn’t the unsharp credence at all — it’s a self-binding policy bolted on top, one that mimics a determinate dominance-avoiding disposition. So the credence is idle with respect to the very choice that saves the agent, and indeed must be countermanded. That is confirmation of Elga’s thesis (no acceptable account of how unsharp credences constrain action), not a refutation of it.
2. Required or merely permitted? For C to rescue UNSHARP, reject-both has to become impermissible. But is enacting C rationally required? If it’s only permitted, then not-committing is also permitted, and DiGiovanni’s own horn 2 says that a non-committing agent who then rejects both has done nothing locally irrational — so the manifestly-bad outcome is still reachable by a permissible route, and UNSHARP still licenses it. So C must be required. But then the requirement has to come from somewhere, and it can’t come from the local maximality verdicts (which permit not-committing and permit rejecting B). It comes from a dominance-avoidance-over-policies norm — i.e., from evaluating the sequence ex ante. That is just the policy-level / SEQUENCE evaluation. C’s distinctive contribution is only that, by physically removing the later choice, it dodges the identical-choices objection that Elga levelled at policy-level evaluation. So the commitment isn’t an independent third option; it’s ex-ante maximality plus a lock-out whose sole job is to keep Sally from getting a grip.
3. And that lock-out is itself the concession. Here is the line that doesn’t depend on any of my earlier missteps. Elga’s target is UNSHARP: it is consistent with perfect rationality to have unsharp credences. DiGiovanni’s defense requires that the perfectly rational unsharp agent be a resolute self-binder who must delete options from her own future choice set to avoid a foreseeable dominated outcome. But an agent who has to handcuff herself against what her own beliefs-plus-decision-rule count as permissible is displaying a belief state so defective that it needs handcuffs — and a sharp agent needs none. The need for C is a symptom of the defect, not a vindication of its compatibility with perfect rationality. DiGiovanni’s footnote reply — that adopting sharp credences is merely “more psychologically tractable,” and resolute choice achieves the same thing — misses this: the point isn’t tractability, it’s that the resolute imprecise agent’s good behavior is entirely explained by the commitment (which behaves like a determinate disposition), while the imprecision contributes nothing positive a sharp state couldn’t and must be overridden at the crux. A state that must be overridden to avoid disaster, and adds nothing a sharp state lacks, has no claim to being what ideal rationality delivers.
4. The “you’re just coercing the future self too” charge fails on a disanalogy. DiGiovanni’s sharpest jab is that Elga’s own prescription — “adopt sharp credences” — is itself a way of making your future self’s beliefs deviate from what they’d count as locally rational, so it’s no more legitimate than demanding C. But there’s an asymmetry. “Adopt sharp credences” is not an instruction to the B-node self to act against its own current verdict; it’s a claim about which belief state to occupy. The sharp agent at the B-node does not override anything — her local verdict, given her precise p, already tells her what to do, and it already coheres with her A-node verdict, automatically, with no binding. The imprecise agent’s trouble is that her local verdicts are not automatically time-coherent, so she must either coerce herself (commit) or behave incoherently across time. Elga’s SHARP diagnoses the fault as lying in a belief state whose local verdicts fail to cohere, and the fix is precision, not coercion. So “adopt sharp credences” means “have a state that doesn’t need forcing” — which is the opposite of forcing.
The honest bottom line
Once the strict-rules horn is off the table, Elga doesn’t have a clean knockdown of the committed imprecise agent. What he has is (2) and (3): the demand that C be required rather than permitted, and the charge that the very need to self-bind is a mark against perfect rationality. DiGiovanni can keep resisting by insisting that “imprecise credences + resolute choice” is simply a coherent rival package to “sharp credences,” and that the Dutch book indicts only the third combination — imprecision plus inability to commit plus act-by-act choice. At that point you’re back at the bedrock intuition Elga admits he can only pump: whether a fully-informed, money-only agent who ends up foreseeably dominated has thereby shown a rational defect, or has merely done something a differently-organized agent could have avoided. This is exactly the resolute/sophisticated/myopic fork from the money-pump literature you already know from Gustafsson — and DiGiovanni’s own note that his argument “has a very similar structure” to money-pump arguments is him planting his flag on the resolute side.
So the corrected verdict is narrower than what I gave before: the commitment move genuinely escapes both the Sally objection and the strict-rules horn, and Elga’s live reply is not “that collapses into sharp betting” (it doesn’t) but “requiring self-binding to avoid dominance is itself incompatible with the perfect rationality UNSHARP asserts — and the credence is doing no work in the rescue anyway.”
(I generally find LLM-written philosophy critiques overstate various things, which I don’t think are worth the time to engage with. Just briefly replying here to the substantive points.)
“The imprecise credence itself doesn’t guide the action w.r.t. the second bet” does not imply “you shouldn’t have imprecise credences in general”. Elga’s argument doesn’t tell us at all that we should, say, “go with our best guess” about altruistic interventions.
I don’t understand the critique. If C does “dodge the objection”, that’s an important advantage of C! And a commitment is a substantively different move from choosing what to do about bet B once bet A has already been dealt with, so it’s not an ad hoc dodge.
Again, see (1). Whether the commitment (without the imprecise credences) suffices to avoid this particular Dutch book tells us nothing about whether, when we’re making altruistic decisions, we should adopt precise credences and EV-max w.r.t. them. Claude’s point about “adds nothing a sharp state lacks” ignores all the positive epistemic motivations for imprecision I’ve argued for in the sequence.
Following (3): There are positive epistemic motivations for imprecise credences. So yes, Elga is asking the impreciser to override what they consider locally (epistemically) rational.
“The imprecise credence itself doesn’t guide the action w.r.t. the second bet” does not imply “you shouldn’t have imprecise credences in general”. Elga’s argument doesn’t tell us at all that we should, say, “go with our best guess” about altruistic interventions.
One’s best guess for the intervention with the highest expected marginal cost-effectiveness (EMCE) may be wrong. However, one should still support it under precise credences? Greater uncertainty about which intervention has the highest EMCE will tend to make interventions decreasing that uncertainty rank higher.
one should still support it under precise credences?
I’m saying that Elga’s argument doesn’t tell us to have precise credences in the first place. It only tells us “you should commit to act in a way that avoids sure losses”.
That makes sense. However, if one cannot make such a commitment, or finds its implications undesirable, Elsa’s argument should update one away from unsharp credences (even if one ends up preferring these all things considered)?
Hi Anthony. Here is a summary of Adam Elga’s argument. Below is an outline of Adam’s argument against the plan strategy. Which part of it do you reject?
I’m proposing binding commitments, not plans. As I say, there’s no choice to be made after committing to C and rejecting bet A. So I reject the claim that the commitment response requires “imposing different requirements on choices that are identical in all relevant respects”.
I see. Below is how Claude thinks Adam would object. Any reactions?
Elga’s strongest corrected replies
[“corrected” because Claude initially said something that did not make sense. I pointed this out, and asked Claude to update what would be Adam’s objections. The updated objections below make sense to me.]
1. The commitment doesn’t pay the original bill; it relocates it. Elga’s challenge was: how do unsharp credences themselves constrain rational action? Notice what C concedes. At the B-node the agent’s credences-plus-maximality still say rejecting B is permissible — that is why she has to lock the option out in advance. So the imprecise state still delivers the wrong local verdict; C works by overriding it. What constrains action, then, isn’t the unsharp credence at all — it’s a self-binding policy bolted on top, one that mimics a determinate dominance-avoiding disposition. So the credence is idle with respect to the very choice that saves the agent, and indeed must be countermanded. That is confirmation of Elga’s thesis (no acceptable account of how unsharp credences constrain action), not a refutation of it.
2. Required or merely permitted? For C to rescue UNSHARP, reject-both has to become impermissible. But is enacting C rationally required? If it’s only permitted, then not-committing is also permitted, and DiGiovanni’s own horn 2 says that a non-committing agent who then rejects both has done nothing locally irrational — so the manifestly-bad outcome is still reachable by a permissible route, and UNSHARP still licenses it. So C must be required. But then the requirement has to come from somewhere, and it can’t come from the local maximality verdicts (which permit not-committing and permit rejecting B). It comes from a dominance-avoidance-over-policies norm — i.e., from evaluating the sequence ex ante. That is just the policy-level / SEQUENCE evaluation. C’s distinctive contribution is only that, by physically removing the later choice, it dodges the identical-choices objection that Elga levelled at policy-level evaluation. So the commitment isn’t an independent third option; it’s ex-ante maximality plus a lock-out whose sole job is to keep Sally from getting a grip.
3. And that lock-out is itself the concession. Here is the line that doesn’t depend on any of my earlier missteps. Elga’s target is UNSHARP: it is consistent with perfect rationality to have unsharp credences. DiGiovanni’s defense requires that the perfectly rational unsharp agent be a resolute self-binder who must delete options from her own future choice set to avoid a foreseeable dominated outcome. But an agent who has to handcuff herself against what her own beliefs-plus-decision-rule count as permissible is displaying a belief state so defective that it needs handcuffs — and a sharp agent needs none. The need for C is a symptom of the defect, not a vindication of its compatibility with perfect rationality. DiGiovanni’s footnote reply — that adopting sharp credences is merely “more psychologically tractable,” and resolute choice achieves the same thing — misses this: the point isn’t tractability, it’s that the resolute imprecise agent’s good behavior is entirely explained by the commitment (which behaves like a determinate disposition), while the imprecision contributes nothing positive a sharp state couldn’t and must be overridden at the crux. A state that must be overridden to avoid disaster, and adds nothing a sharp state lacks, has no claim to being what ideal rationality delivers.
4. The “you’re just coercing the future self too” charge fails on a disanalogy. DiGiovanni’s sharpest jab is that Elga’s own prescription — “adopt sharp credences” — is itself a way of making your future self’s beliefs deviate from what they’d count as locally rational, so it’s no more legitimate than demanding C. But there’s an asymmetry. “Adopt sharp credences” is not an instruction to the B-node self to act against its own current verdict; it’s a claim about which belief state to occupy. The sharp agent at the B-node does not override anything — her local verdict, given her precise p, already tells her what to do, and it already coheres with her A-node verdict, automatically, with no binding. The imprecise agent’s trouble is that her local verdicts are not automatically time-coherent, so she must either coerce herself (commit) or behave incoherently across time. Elga’s SHARP diagnoses the fault as lying in a belief state whose local verdicts fail to cohere, and the fix is precision, not coercion. So “adopt sharp credences” means “have a state that doesn’t need forcing” — which is the opposite of forcing.
The honest bottom line
Once the strict-rules horn is off the table, Elga doesn’t have a clean knockdown of the committed imprecise agent. What he has is (2) and (3): the demand that C be required rather than permitted, and the charge that the very need to self-bind is a mark against perfect rationality. DiGiovanni can keep resisting by insisting that “imprecise credences + resolute choice” is simply a coherent rival package to “sharp credences,” and that the Dutch book indicts only the third combination — imprecision plus inability to commit plus act-by-act choice. At that point you’re back at the bedrock intuition Elga admits he can only pump: whether a fully-informed, money-only agent who ends up foreseeably dominated has thereby shown a rational defect, or has merely done something a differently-organized agent could have avoided. This is exactly the resolute/sophisticated/myopic fork from the money-pump literature you already know from Gustafsson — and DiGiovanni’s own note that his argument “has a very similar structure” to money-pump arguments is him planting his flag on the resolute side.
So the corrected verdict is narrower than what I gave before: the commitment move genuinely escapes both the Sally objection and the strict-rules horn, and Elga’s live reply is not “that collapses into sharp betting” (it doesn’t) but “requiring self-binding to avoid dominance is itself incompatible with the perfect rationality UNSHARP asserts — and the credence is doing no work in the rescue anyway.”
(I generally find LLM-written philosophy critiques overstate various things, which I don’t think are worth the time to engage with. Just briefly replying here to the substantive points.)
“The imprecise credence itself doesn’t guide the action w.r.t. the second bet” does not imply “you shouldn’t have imprecise credences in general”. Elga’s argument doesn’t tell us at all that we should, say, “go with our best guess” about altruistic interventions.
I don’t understand the critique. If C does “dodge the objection”, that’s an important advantage of C! And a commitment is a substantively different move from choosing what to do about bet B once bet A has already been dealt with, so it’s not an ad hoc dodge.
Again, see (1). Whether the commitment (without the imprecise credences) suffices to avoid this particular Dutch book tells us nothing about whether, when we’re making altruistic decisions, we should adopt precise credences and EV-max w.r.t. them. Claude’s point about “adds nothing a sharp state lacks” ignores all the positive epistemic motivations for imprecision I’ve argued for in the sequence.
Following (3): There are positive epistemic motivations for imprecise credences. So yes, Elga is asking the impreciser to override what they consider locally (epistemically) rational.
One’s best guess for the intervention with the highest expected marginal cost-effectiveness (EMCE) may be wrong. However, one should still support it under precise credences? Greater uncertainty about which intervention has the highest EMCE will tend to make interventions decreasing that uncertainty rank higher.
I’m saying that Elga’s argument doesn’t tell us to have precise credences in the first place. It only tells us “you should commit to act in a way that avoids sure losses”.
That makes sense. However, if one cannot make such a commitment, or finds its implications undesirable, Elsa’s argument should update one away from unsharp credences (even if one ends up preferring these all things considered)?
What do you think of my arguments under “If they aren’t capable of C”, in the OP?
I agree with Claude’s 4th point.