Preferences, welfare, and the status-quo bias

Australasian Journal of Philosophy 88 (3):535-554 (2010)
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Abstract

Preferences play a role in well-being that is difficult to escape, but whatever authority one grants to preferences, their malleability seems to cause problems for any theory of well-being that employs them. Most importantly, preferences appear to display a status-quo bias: people come to prefer what they are likely rather than unlikely to get. I try to do two things here. The first is to provide a more precise characterization of the status-quo bias, how it functions, and how it infects commonly accepted theories of well-being. The second is to give an alternative characterization of an agent's preferences that succeeds in avoiding the status-quo bias

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Dale Dorsey
University of Kansas

Citations of this work

Against Welfare Subjectivism.Eden Lin - 2017 - Noûs 51 (2):354-377.
Subjectivism without Desire.Dale Dorsey - 2012 - Philosophical Review 121 (3):407-442.
Desire-satisfaction and Welfare as Temporal.Dale Dorsey - 2013 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 16 (1):151-171.

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References found in this work

Reasons and Persons.Derek Parfit - 1984 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
From a Logical Point of View.Willard Van Orman Quine - 1953 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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