Comparativism About Instrumental Value

Causal and evidential decision theory each give us a relationship between instrumental rationality and final value. It is less clear what relationship they posit between instrumental rationality and instrumental value. Some have argued that evidential decision theory implies a form of nihilism about instrumental value. This form of nihilism says that there's no fact of the matter about what a choice did to help you achieve your ends. In contrast, it has been suggested that causal decision theory supports a form of absolutistism about instrumental value. Absolutism says that each choice has some absolute amount of instrumental value. Here, I argue against both nihilism and absolutism and explore a third option, which I call 'comparativism'. According to the comparativist, there is a fact about how much more or less helpful your choice was than some alternative choice would have been. But there is no such thing as the amount of helpfulness which your choice has. So there's no absolute quantity of instrumental value. I show that comparativism affords us novel theories of instrumental rationality which avoid problems faced by causal decision theory.