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Options and Diachronic Tragedy

In a tragedy, the protagonist suffers some misfortune. What makes this misfortune tragic is that it is foreseeable well before it occurs. In some tragedies, the misfortune is foreseeable only by the audience. But in others the misfortune is in some sense foreseeable by the protagonist himself. The protagonist can foresee that his own desires will drive him to engineer his ruin but nonetheless fails to depart from this disastrous course. Certain sorts of beliefs and desires, of particular interest to philosophers, are tragic in this second way. They drive you to perform each member of a sequence of actions that you can see will result in a bad outcome, even though there is some alternative sequence of actions that you in some sense could have performed and that would have avoided this bad outcome. In this way, these attitudes lead you to act over time in a manner that is to your own acknowledged, predictable disadvantage. I call this phenomenon Diachronic Tragedy. I begin with a series of cases of Diachronic Tragedy. Each has generated extensive debate, although these debates have been conducted largely independently of one another. In many cases, philosophers have attacked the preferences involved as irrational simply on the grounds that they yield Diachronic Tragedy. Some of these cases have been referred to in the literature as ‘money pumps’ and ‘diachronic dutch books.’ I adopt the term ‘Diachronic Tragedy’ to refer to all cases in which you perform a predictably dispreferred sequence of actions, regardless of whether they involve money (as the term ‘money pump’ suggests) or betting (as the term ‘diachronic dutch book’ suggests).