Could you give me an idea of what you mean by e.g. a causal account of why:
People that don’t shoplift lose more identity by shoplifting than they gain in stolen product.
That means I disagree with the claim that each person is made strictly better off by their local decision to shoplift. If they were actually made better off, they would shoplift. Actions reveal preferences.
This is the issue I got into in the Parfitian filter article I wrote. (And later in some exchanges with Perplexed.)
Basically, the problem with your second paragraph is that actions do not uniquely determine preferences. (See in particular the a/b theory comparisons in the article.) There are an infinite number of preference sets—not to mention preference/belief sets—that can explain any given action. So, you have to use a few more constraints to explain behavior.
That, in turn, leads you to the question of whether an agent is pursuing a terminal value, or an instrumental value in the belief that it will satisfy a terminal value. And that’s also what makes it hard to say in what sense a shoplifter makes himself better off—does he satisfy a terminal value? Believe he’s satisfying an instrumental value? Correctly or incorrectly?
However, I don’t know of a concise way to point to the (purported) benefits of shoplifting.
So we’re left with a number of hypotheses: it could be that people overestimate the risks of shoplifting. Or that they never consider it. Or that they have a more complex way of evaluating the benefits (which your “identity loss” approach is a good, insightful example of).
So, there’s more to it than a simple action → preference mapping, but likewise, there’s more to the decision theory than these “local monetary gains”. Regardless, we have a case where people are doing the equivalent of repeatedly playing Newcomb’s problem and one-boxing “even though the box is already filled or not”, and it would be interesting to look at the mechanisms at play in such a real-life situation.
People that don’t shoplift lose more identity by shoplifting than they gain in stolen product.
That means I disagree with the claim that each person is made strictly better off by their local decision to shoplift. If they were actually made better off, they would shoplift. Actions reveal preferences.
This is the issue I got into in the Parfitian filter article I wrote. (And later in some exchanges with Perplexed.)
Basically, the problem with your second paragraph is that actions do not uniquely determine preferences. (See in particular the a/b theory comparisons in the article.) There are an infinite number of preference sets—not to mention preference/belief sets—that can explain any given action. So, you have to use a few more constraints to explain behavior.
That, in turn, leads you to the question of whether an agent is pursuing a terminal value, or an instrumental value in the belief that it will satisfy a terminal value. And that’s also what makes it hard to say in what sense a shoplifter makes himself better off—does he satisfy a terminal value? Believe he’s satisfying an instrumental value? Correctly or incorrectly?
However, I don’t know of a concise way to point to the (purported) benefits of shoplifting.
So we’re left with a number of hypotheses: it could be that people overestimate the risks of shoplifting. Or that they never consider it. Or that they have a more complex way of evaluating the benefits (which your “identity loss” approach is a good, insightful example of).
So, there’s more to it than a simple action → preference mapping, but likewise, there’s more to the decision theory than these “local monetary gains”. Regardless, we have a case where people are doing the equivalent of repeatedly playing Newcomb’s problem and one-boxing “even though the box is already filled or not”, and it would be interesting to look at the mechanisms at play in such a real-life situation.
Why is this a problem? [edit] To be clearer, I get why actions to do not uniquely determine preferences, but I don’t yet get why I should care.
Sorry for the thread necromancy, but this has an easy answer: read the rest of my comment, after the part you quoted.