Rational Attitudes to Risk

While reviewing central approaches in the philosophical literature on risk-attitudes, this Element argues for two related pluralistic theses, one conceptual and one normative. The conceptual thesis is that different types of attitudes, some of which are desires and some of which are not, count as risk-attitudes. An agent's attitude toward the risk involved in an uncertain prospect is characterized as the collection of mental states that affect the agent's evaluation of the prospect's possible outcomes, in the context of that specific prospect. The normative thesis is that the rationality conditions governing risk-attitudes have a conditional form: they allow for a wide range of preferences, provided that the agent has reasons to adopt particular risk-attitudes. The axiom systems used in different decision-theoretic models are understood not as expressing universally applicable normative constraints, but rather as characterizations of types of situations in which the reasons to adopt certain risk-attitudes exhibit specific structures.