I argue that a practical deliberator may have good reasons not to consider some option even though that option is what there is most reason, all things considered, for her to do. The most interesting reasons not to consider an option arise in cases where an agent cannot be compensated in kind for the loss of goods that she values. Where this is the case, an attitude of conservatism is warranted: it is reasonable to begin deliberation by considering only ‘no-regrets’ (...) options, and to proceed to considering other possibilities only when the cost of continuing to consider only no-regrets options has become intolerably high. The account that I develop illuminates intuitions that help motivate deontological moral thought, and it can shed light on the complaint that there is something wrong with the way in which schematic thought experiments are frequently used in philosophy to drive moral theorizing. (shrink)

There is growing interest among pharmaceutical policymakers in how to “disinvest” from subsidized medicines. This is due to both the rapidly rising costs of healthcare and the increasing use of accelerated and conditional reimbursement pathways which mean that medicines are being subsidized on the basis of less robust evidence of safety and efficacy. It is crucial that disinvestment decisions are morally sound and socially legitimate, but there is currently no framework to facilitate this. We therefore reviewed the bioethics literature in (...) order to identify ethical principles and concepts that might be relevant to pharmaceutical disinvestment decisions. This revealed a number of key ethical considerations—both procedural and substantive—that need to be considered when making pharmaceutical disinvestment decisions. These principles do not, however, provide practical guidance so we present a framework outlining how they might be applied to different types of disinvestment decisions. We also argue that, in this context, even the most rigorous ethical reasoning is likely to be overridden by moral intuitions and psychological biases and that disinvestment decisions will need to strike the right balance between respecting justifiable moral intuitions and overriding unjustifiable psychological impulses. (shrink)

Stimuli that relate to the self tend to be better liked. The Self-Referencing (SR) task is a paradigm whereby one target categorised through the same action as self-stimuli (i.e. possessive pronoun...

Loss aversion can occur in riskless and risky choices. We present novel evidence on both in a non-student sample (660 randomly selected customers of a car manufacturer). We measure loss aversion in riskless choice in endowment effect experiments within and between subjects and find similar levels of average loss aversion in both. The subjects of the within study also participate in a simple lottery choice task which arguably measures loss aversion in risky choices. We find substantial heterogeneity in both measures (...) of loss aversion. Loss aversion in riskless choice and loss aversion in risky choice are strongly positively correlated, but on average riskless loss aversion is higher than risky loss aversion. We find that in both choice tasks, loss aversion increases in age, income, and wealth, and decreases in education. Our results provide novel supportive input to the debate about the reality of loss aversion. (shrink)

In this paper, Knetsch's exchange paradigm is analyzed from the perspective of pragmatics and social norms. In this paradigm the participant, at the beginning of the experiment, receives an object from the experimenter and at the end, the same experimenter offers to exchange the received object for an equivalent object. The observed refusal to exchange is called the endowment effect. We argue that this effect comes from an implicature made by the participant about the experimenter's own expectations. The participant perceives (...) the received item as a gift, or as a present, from the experimenter that cannot be exchanged as stipulated by the social norms of western politeness common to both the experimenter and the participant. This implicature, however, should not be produced by participants from Kanak culture for whom the perceived gift of a good will be interpreted as a first act of exchange based on gift and counter-gift. This exchange is a natural, frequent, balanced, and indispensable act for all Kanak social bonds whether private or public. Kanak people also know the French social norms that they apply in their interactions with French people living in New Caledonia. In our experiment, we show that when the exchange paradigm takes place in a French context, with a French experimenter and in French, the Kanak participant is subject to the endowment effect in the same way as a French participant. On the other hand, when the paradigm is carried out in a Kanak context, with a Kanak experimenter and in the vernacular language, or in a Kanak context that approaches the ceremonial of the custom, the endowment effect is no longer observed. The same number of Kanak participants accept or refuse to exchange the endowed item. These results, in addition to providing a new explanation for the endowment effect, highlight the great flexibility of decisions according to social-cultural context. (shrink)