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Indecision and Buridan’s Principle

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Abstract

The problem known as Buridan’s Ass says that a hungry donkey equipoised between two identical bales of hay will starve to death. Indecision kills the ass. Some philosophers worry about human analogs. Computer scientists since the 1960s have known about the computer versions of such cases. From what Leslie Lamport calls ‘Buridan’s Principle’—a discrete decision based on a continuous range of input-values cannot be made in a bounded time—it follows that the possibilities for human analogs of Buridan’s Ass are far more wide-ranging and securely provable than has been acknowledged in philosophy. We are never necessarily decisive. This is mathematically provable. I explore four consequences: first, increased interest of the literature’s solutions to Buridan’s Ass; second, a new asymmetry between responsibility for omissions and responsibility for actions; third, clarification of the standard account of akrasia; and, fourth, clarification of the role of credences in normative decision-theory.
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Synthese (2022) 200:353
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03843-3
ORIGINAL RESEARCH
Indecision and Buridan’s Principle
Daniel Coren1
Received: 5 January 2022 / Accepted: 4 August 2022 / Published online: 19 August 2022
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2022
Abstract
The problem known as Buridan’s Ass says that a hungry donkey equipoised between
two identical bales of hay will starve to death. Indecision kills the ass. Some philoso-
phers worry about human analogs. Computer scientists since the 1960s have known
about the computer versions of such cases. From what Leslie Lamport calls ‘Buri-
dan’s Principle’—a discrete decision based on a continuous range of input-values
cannot be made in a bounded time—it follows that the possibilities for human analogs
of Buridan’s Ass are far more wide-ranging and securely provable than has been
acknowledged in philosophy. We are never necessarily decisive. This is mathematically
provable. I explore four consequences: first, increased interest of the literature’s solu-
tions to Buridan’s Ass; second, a new asymmetry between responsibility for omissions
and responsibility for actions; third, clarification of the standard account of akrasia;
and, fourth, clarification of the role of credences in normative decision-theory.
Keywords Akrasia ·Decision ·Agency ·Responsibility ·Omission ·Jean Buridan
1 Introduction
Buridan’s Ass is well-known to philosophers. Consider a hungry donkey equidistant
from two identical bales of hay. Since the donkey chooses one bale over the other only
if one bale is bigger or closer, the donkey will starve to death.1Some philosophers
have worried that human analogs of Buridan’s Ass may pose practical and theoretical
challenges. A human version is standardly understood as a state of affairs in which
“a person has multiple available courses of action, which she believes to have no
differences between them relevant for belief about which one she ought to take, and
1It is argued in Rescher (1960) that the problem is wrongly ascribed to Buridan. It may be that Buridan’s
Ass is so-called not because Buridan came up with it but, rather, because it made trouble for “the most
important philosopher at the most important university in the world for three decades in the mid-fourteenth
century” (Pasnau 2017: 59).
BDaniel Coren
Daniel.coren@colorado.edu
1Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, USA
123
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