RATIONAL CHOICE THEORY

Rational choice theory, also known as normative decision theory, is the branch of philosophy and social science that seeks to provide a systematic account of how agents should choose from among alternative options in given contexts. Rational choice theory has ancient roots. Aristotle, and later Hobbes and Hume, are but a few of the giants of moral and political philosophy who discuss and apply important elements of normative decision theory. But rational choice theory became a field in its own right only in the twentieth century with the development of the first mathematically rigorous accounts of rational choice. Since the 1950s, rational choice theory has played an important role in the analysis of the social contract, understood in its most generic sense as a system of norms and institutions that can regulate the conduct of a society’s members. I review three main ways moral and political philosophy and rational choice theory interact. I discuss how some use individual rational choice under a special circumstance, a veil of ignorance, to argue for proposed principles of distributive justice. I discuss how some analyze certain moral norms using game theory, the formal theory of decisions that interact and produce social outcomes. I discuss how some use the Nash bargaining problem as a tool for analyzing parts of the social contract.