Evidential decision theory would say that you shouldn’t smoke because smoking gives you evidence that you’ll have a shorter life.
Not so important, but I feel obliged to mention that this has been argued against by e.g. Eells (1982) and Ahmed (2014). In short, smoking will plausibly be preceded by a desire to smoke, and at the point of observing your own desire to do so, smoking or not does not provide additional evidence of cancer.
Disagree, or at least it doesn’t have to be like that: I think deciding to smoke can give further evidence for the strength of the desire which at least could be further evidence that you are genetically predisposed to cancer if a common genetic cause between desire to smoke and getting cancer exists.
Seems like you are thinking of a case without full introspection. Both Eells and Ahmed provide convincing tickle defences in this case as well. See Oesterheld (2022) for a review of the arguments (especially sections 6.3 and 6.4).
At this point I have to admit that we’ve gotten beyond my knowledge of this stuff, and I can’t really follow your comment! Though when I glanced at the Oesterheld I think I get what’s going on, sort of, though it’s not clear to me why decision theory should start with the assumption of perfect introspection, and I also suspect you can come up with a case where your X-ing provides evidence that Y bad thing will happen but does not causally influence Y, that gets around this while still looking bad for evidential decision theory. But that’s only a guess, as again, I have no background on this stuff beyond generic philosophy education.
As Ahmed notes (chapter 4.3.1), if the lesion doesn’t work through your beliefs and desires, smoking is not a genuine option, and so this is not an argument against evidentialism.
It’s Schwarz.
Not so important, but I feel obliged to mention that this has been argued against by e.g. Eells (1982) and Ahmed (2014). In short, smoking will plausibly be preceded by a desire to smoke, and at the point of observing your own desire to do so, smoking or not does not provide additional evidence of cancer.
Disagree, or at least it doesn’t have to be like that: I think deciding to smoke can give further evidence for the strength of the desire which at least could be further evidence that you are genetically predisposed to cancer if a common genetic cause between desire to smoke and getting cancer exists.
Seems like you are thinking of a case without full introspection. Both Eells and Ahmed provide convincing tickle defences in this case as well. See Oesterheld (2022) for a review of the arguments (especially sections 6.3 and 6.4).
At this point I have to admit that we’ve gotten beyond my knowledge of this stuff, and I can’t really follow your comment! Though when I glanced at the Oesterheld I think I get what’s going on, sort of, though it’s not clear to me why decision theory should start with the assumption of perfect introspection, and I also suspect you can come up with a case where your X-ing provides evidence that Y bad thing will happen but does not causally influence Y, that gets around this while still looking bad for evidential decision theory. But that’s only a guess, as again, I have no background on this stuff beyond generic philosophy education.
Yeah, though we can imagine that everyone feels similar urge to smoke, but it’s only the people with the lesion who ultimately decide to smoke.
As Ahmed notes (chapter 4.3.1), if the lesion doesn’t work through your beliefs and desires, smoking is not a genuine option, and so this is not an argument against evidentialism.