Choosing Well: The Good, the Bad, and the Trivial
by Chrisoula Andreou
Choosing Well book cover.
In Choosing Well: The Good, the Bad, and the Trivial* Chrisoula Andreou, Professor in the Department of Philosophy, highlights the challenges of making effective choices.
Chrisoula Andreou
Choosing well can be quite the challenge and, in many cases, seemingly modest claims paper over philosophically interesting complications. Consider, for instance, the idea that one should not “sweat the small stuff” or, more formally, that one should treat trivial effects as trivial. This seems like solid, or at worst superfluous, advice, but, when you think about it, not sweating the small stuff can be a recipe for disaster. Why? Because big stuff is made of small stuff and, presumably, we should sweat the big stuff, which suggests that we really should sweat the small stuff after all. Consider some examples familiar from everyday life on the many ways in which we often voluntarily inch toward terrible results. We eat too much, save too little, and wreak havoc on the environment; but, in many cases, each step toward unhealthy weight gain, destitution, and environmental destruction seems trivial in terms of making things worse than they are. Perhaps, paradoxically, it does not make sense to consistently treat trivial effects as trivial. One thing that is clear is that choosing well and theorizing about choosing well can be quite tricky. To put the point more positively, getting a handle on what choosing well involves can be of great philosophical and practical import.
My book focuses on the challenges associated with effective choice over time. It includes both theoretical and practical discussions, and indeed seeks to illustrate the power of theoretical models in illuminating debate about practical problems. Ultimately, my reasoning leads me to a revisionary way of understanding instrumental rationality. The key take-home messages of the book can be roughly captured as follows: Challenging choice situations can prompt disorderly preferences, even among rational agents. The subjective responses instrumental rationality is accountable to will thus not always be neat. Fortunately, rationality can handle quite a lot of messiness. This is important, since rationality wouldn’t be all that helpful if, whenever messiness threatened, we had to rush to its rescue rather than look to it for guidance.
*This is a modified excerpt from Chrisoula Andreou, Choosing Well: The Good, the Bad, and the Trivial. Oxford University Press, 2023.