O conceito de racionalidade e os paradoxos da teoria da decisão

Abstract

In this work, the theme of decision is bounded to the domain of an individual action, even though the idea of an individual comprises entitiessuch as a company or a nation. The main question is: What is behind the decision? The answer will be investigated in theoretical currents that faced each other along the 20th century. It has been discussed if the rational decision can just be explained by an internal consistence of preferences, or if it is necessary to consider the context and other variables. A testing field was supplied by game theory that allows the simulation of situations where individuals have partly common and partly conflicting interests, which leads to a paradox: if each one acts according to his own interests, the result will be disastrous for all of them. The central discussion is performed around the strategic options offered by the prisoner's dilemma, a game that intends to represent the conflicts of interest in human relationship. The technically correct solution for this dilemma is instrumental, that is, it indicates the means (the action) for the accomplishment of a certain end (the maximization of the expected utility) for each participant. Several philosophers look for a different solution for this dilemma, justifying a more cooperative action. Among them, Nozick proposes a new model, the decision-value, in which the instrumentalutility continues to be the fundamental part, but an additional symbolic utility, that is the value of an action as a symbol, must be added. This new portion can mark an ethical attitude of the agent, by showing which kind of person he wants to be or the state of things he wants to realize it would be the same thing as searching for another end, different from that one related to the maximization of expected utility. Depending on the context, the new portion could be sufficiently strong to invert the result that would be obtained by an exclusively instrumental utility.