Human Action, Uncertainty, and the Best Possible World
Human Action, Uncertainty, and the Best Possible World

Author(s): Igor Wysocki
Subject(s): Economy, Political Philosophy, Sociology, Behaviorism
Published by: Addleton Academic Publishers
Keywords: Austrian economics; Human action; Uncertainty and determinism; Laplacian calculator; Libertarian freedom; Predictability of choices;
Summary/Abstract: This chapter attempts to demonstrate – contra Austrian economists – that uncertainty about the future is not a necessary condition of human action. To this end, we first resort to a thought experiment involving consulting a Laplacian calculator, with the Laplacian calculator resting on the assumption of determinism and perfect knowledge and depicting the actor’s actions (including, most interestingly, his future actions). We posit that it is at least possible that the future actions unfolding in the Laplacian calculator will be such that the actor will find them optimal in the sense that, given the actor’s preferences, she would have the most reason to take them. Moreover, to generalize our point, we show that the fact that human action does not imply uncertainty is not predicated on the truth of determinism. For this purpose, we envisage a Laplacian supercalculator, with such a machine representing the knowledge of all possible worlds coupled with the actor’s metaphysical libertarian freedom. Now, given the actor’s actual preferences and the knowledge of all the possible worlds still accessible from the actual world, the actor would simply pick a world best aligned with his actual current preferences. But if so, then again there seems to be a scenario wherein there is no uncertainty even though metaphysical libertarian freedom was assumed. If our thought experiments prove to be coherently described, then ipso facto there seems to be a case against human action as implying uncertainty.

• Details
• Contents