Why Should We Team Reason?

Abstract

Abstract:Team reasoning is thought to be descriptively and normatively superior to the classical individualistic theory of rational choice primarily because it can recommend coordination on Hi in the Hi-Lo game and cooperation in Prisoner's Dilemma-type situations. However, left unanswered is whether it is rational for individuals to become team members, leaving a gap between reasons for individuals and reasons for team members. In what follows, I take up Susan Hurley's attempt to show that it is rational for an individual to become a team member. I argue that her account fails to show that becoming a team member is necessary to gain the advantages of coordination in Hi-Lo games or cooperation in Prisoner's Dilemma-type situations, and that individuals will often fare better reasoning as individual agents than as members of a team. I argue further that there is a more general problem for team reasoning, specifically that the conditions needed to make it rational for a team member to employ team reasoning make becoming a team member unnecessary.

Número completo

“…La teoría del RE, tal como la proponen Bacharach y Sugden, no brinda una respuesta acerca de cuándo la racionalidad requiere de un jugador que adopte el RE (esta crítica ha sido formulada entre otros por Browne, 2018). Eso es correcto, pero la idea de que este es un problema presupone algo así como la doctrina Harsanyi (ver próxima sección), es decir, que cada juego tiene una solución racional única, que es trabajo del teórico encontrar o anunciar.…”

Effective Altruism and Systemic Change

“…This gives us an individualistic reason to choose option A. More generally, whether or not it is true that EA agents who endorse the individualistic act-utilitarian principle alone would choose the optimal outcome all the time, Browne (2018) has argued that the conditions necessary for team reasoning to operate, and thus for the agents to choose the optimal action via team reasoning, are also sufficient to make the agents choose the optimal action on individualistic grounds alone. Indeed, it seems irrational for an agent to employ team reasoning if she knows that the other agents are not going to do so.…”