Structured Deliberation

Rather than deciding between all of the options on the menu in one fell swoop, you could instead structure your deliberation by splitting it up into submenus. That is: rather than deliberating about the synchronic, all-at-once decision you actually face, you could instead deliberate about a hypothetical diachronic decision with two choice-points: first, choose a submenu; next, choose an option from that submenu. I defend three theses about this kind of structured deliberation. The first is that structured deliberation can lead you to treat a rational option as irrational. The second thesis is that we nonetheless have a tendency to structure our deliberation about complicated decisions in this way. For this reason, our intuitions about complicated decisions are susceptible to a novel kind of framing effect, in which rational choices can appear irrational if the decision is framed so as to encourage dividing the available options into submenus. I apply this lesson to some recent decisions discussed by Jack Spencer, Ian Wells, and Joe Horton. The third thesis is that structured deliberation will never lead you astray; it may lead you away from a rational choice, but it will never lead you towards an irrational one.