According to the class of de minimis decision principles, risks can be ignored (or at least treated very differently from other risks) if the risk is sufficiently small. In this article, we argue that a de minimis threshold has no place in a normative theory of decision making, because the application of the principle will either recommend ignoring risks that should not be ignored (e.g., the sure death of a person) or it cannot be used by ordinary bounded and information‐constrained agents.

According to the orthodox treatment of risk attitudes in decision theory, such attitudes are explained in terms of the agent's desires about concrete outcomes. The orthodoxy has been criticised both for con ‡ating two types of attitudes and for committing agents to attitudes that do not seem rationally required. To avoid these problems, it has been suggested that we model risk attitudes in terms of a risk function that is independent of the agent's utility and probability functions. The main problem with that approach is that it suggests that attitudes to risk are wholly distinct from people's (non-instrumental) desires. To overcome this problem, we develop a framework where an agent's utility function is partly de…ned over chance propositions (i.e., propositions describing objective probability distributions), and argue that one should represent di¤erent risk attitudes in terms of di¤erent forms of the utility function over such propositions.

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