Australasian Journal of Philosophy

ISSN: 0004-8402 (Print) 1471-6828 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rajp20

Reasoning under Scarcity

Jennifer M. Morton

To cite this article: Jennifer M. Morton (2016): Reasoning under Scarcity, Australasian Journal
of Philosophy, DOI: 10.1080/00048402.2016.1236139

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00048402.2016.1236139

Published online: 03 Oct 2016.

Submit your article to this journal

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rajp20

Download by: [Eastern Michigan University] Date: 05 October 2016, At: 05:36
AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY, 2016
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00048402.2016.1236139

Reasoning under Scarcity

Jennifer M. Morton
City College of New York—CUNY

ABSTRACT
Practical deliberation consists in thinking about what to do. Such deliberation is
deemed rational when it conforms to certain normative requirements. What is often
ignored is the role that an agent’s context can play in so-called ‘failures’ of rationality.
In this paper, I use recent cognitive science research investigating the effects of
resource-scarcity on decision-making and cognitive function to argue that context
plays an important role in determining which norms should structure an agent’s
deliberation. This evidence undermines the view that the norms of ‘ideal’ rationality
are necessary and universal requirements on deliberation. They are a solution to the
problems faced by cognitively limited agents in a context of moderate scarcity. In a
context of severe scarcity, the problems faced by cognitively limited agents are
different and require deliberation structured by different norms. Agents reason
rationally when they use the norms best suited to their context and cognitive
capacities.

ARTICLE HISTORY Received 8 October 2015; Accepted 2 September 2016

KEYWORDS rational requirements; practical reasoning; rationality

1. Introduction
Consider Herb, who is stuck in a debt trap. He borrows money to pay his rent, works a
low-income job, and at the end of the month barely has enough to pay back his debt
plus the exorbitant interest. The next month, he repeats the cycle. Now, suppose you
find out that Herb buys a latte every day. If he were to save those four dollars, he would
be able to reduce the amount that he had to borrow every month. Imagine, also, that
Herb is eligible for a tax credit which he doesn’t take. If he were to fill out the necessary
paperwork in a timely way, he would be even less indebted. Finally, suppose that Herb
often ends up paying parking fines because he tends to run late. If he moved his car on
time, his debt would be reduced even further. In fact, if he were to slightly adjust his
behaviour in all of these ways, he would be out of debt in a matter of months. Is Herb
irrational for buying lattes, not filling out the tax forms, or failing to move his car on
time?
Many philosophers, psychologists, and economists would answer this question in
the affirmative. If one of Herb’s long-term goals is to find a way out of poverty, and he
prefers it to having his daily latte, not dealing with the drudgery of tax forms, or not
being on time to move his car, then he is irrational in so far as he is reasoning and
behaving in ways that undermine that goal. An ideally rational agent pursues the long-
term goals that are important to him and does not fall prey to short-sighted behaviour
that undermines their pursuit. This view of what ‘ideal’ rationality requires is prevalent
© 2016 Australasian Association of Philosophy
2 JENNIFER M. MORTON

in the philosophical literature on practical reasoning. We can recognize some version of

it in Michael Bratman’s planning theory of agency [1987: 2–3, 28–35], John Rawls’s
rational life plans [1971: 358–72], and Christine Korsgaard’s practical identities [1996:
90–130], among others. It also underlies the thinking of policymakers who aim to rem-
edy social problems by incentivizing or penalizing behaviour through policies that
assume the sort of long-term deliberation that is part and parcel of ‘ideal rationality’
(for example, tax incentives, medical spending accounts, fines).
Herb’s story is familiar and the ‘irrationality’ exhibited prevalent. But is it truly
irrational? In this paper, I defend the view that, although the reasoning exhibited in
this case does not conform to a view of ‘ideal’ rationality prevalent in the literature, it
can nonetheless be rational for agents in situations like that of Herb’s—namely, in pov-
erty—to reason in a way that neglects long-term planning in favour of the short-term.
This is not to say that all of the aforementioned actions that Herb takes are good ones
or that in some cases he doesn’t reason irrationally. Rather, the claim is that the habit-
ual mode of deliberation that Herb engages in is rational.
In order to defend this view, I will argue that context matters in determining which
1
norms a rational agent should use in reasoning. Relying on recent cognitive science
research investigating the effect of resource-scarcity on decision-making and cognitive
functioning [Shah, Mullainathan et al. 2012; Mani, Mullainathan et al. 2013; Mullaina-
than and Shafir 2013], I argue that the ‘ideal’ of practical rationality is a solution to the
problems faced by cognitively limited agents in a context of moderate scarcity. In a con-
text of severe scarcity, agents face different problems and thus require a different kind
of deliberation. The norms of rational deliberation that apply to an agent are a function
of her cognitive capacity, context, and ends. Therefore, according to my view, although
it is true that all agents are necessarily subject to norms of rationality in deliberating, it
is not true that all agents are subject to the same norms.
In section 2, I argue that practical reasoning is a kind of habitual mode of thinking
about what to do, guided by norms that function in the background in a stable and
unreflective way. In section 3, I review the cognitive science evidence on resource-scar-
city’s effect on problem-solving and cognitive control. In section 4, I consider five pos-
sible diagnoses of how scarcity affects an agent’s deliberation: (4.1) it leads to
widespread irrationality; (4.2) it changes the agent’s ends; (4.3) it undermines the
agent’s instrumental beliefs; (4.4) it ‘exhausts’ the agent’s will; or (4.5) it changes the
structure of the agent’s deliberation. I argue that we should resist the first diagnosis.
And I suggest that, although diagnoses (4.2)–(4.4) are true for a wide range of cases,
(4.5) provides a more compelling and unified account. In section 5, I argue that the
short-sighted and habitual mode of deliberation exhibited by those in conditions of
scarcity is rational, and I put forward the Ecological View of the requirements of practi-
2
cal reason. In the final section, I argue that paying attention to the context of reason-
ing is important, given the role that theories of rational deliberation play in philosophy
and public policy.

1
I will use ‘deliberation’ and ‘reasoning’ interchangeably throughout, for rule-guided thinking concerned with
deciding what to do or believe.
2
The view I offer here is similar to that proposed in psychology by Gerd Gigerenzer [1991, 1996] and his collabo-
rators [Todd and Gigerenzer 2000; Goldstein and Gigerenzer 2002; Todd and Gigerenzer 2007]. However, their
account is based on an evolutionary argument; my view is not.
 AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY 3

2. The Norms of Practical Deliberation

Deliberation consists in thinking that aims to reach a conclusion regarding what to do
or believe. Such reasoning is deemed irrational when it doesn’t conform to various nor-
3
mative requirements. In the practical case, the focus of this paper, this is often taken
to mean that the agent must avoid certain combinations of attitudes: having intentions
that are mutually inconsistent given one’s beliefs, intending an end without intending
the necessary means, intending an end that one believes that one has most reason not
to intend, and so forth [Broome 2013: 149–75]. Much of the recent literature has been
devoted to providing a normative justification that would support criticizing agents
4
who fail to live up to these norms.
Constitutivists argue that it is part and parcel of being an agent that one is commit-
ted to regulating one’s intentions to satisfy the requirements of practical rationality
[Korsgaard 2009: 46–68]. Cognitivists argue that intentions are necessarily linked to a
belief about what the agent will do, and so are subject to theoretical requirements on
those beliefs [Wallace 2001; Setiya 2007]. Instrumentalists argue that reasoning accord-
5
ing to these requirements advances some end(s) [Gauthier 1994, 1996]. Others argue
that conforming to rational requirements allows us to govern ourselves over time [Brat-
man 2009a, 2009b, 2012]. Each of these accounts has been subject to important objec-
tions [Korsgaard 1997; Bratman 1999; Enoch 2006; Paul 2009]. The apparent futility of
justifying the requirements of practical rationality has led Niko Kolodny [2005, 2007,
2008a, 2008b] and Joseph Raz [2005] to dismiss rational requirements as a myth.
The assumption by defenders (and foes) of rational requirements is that these
norms must be specified in such a way that they are immune to counter-example—
that is, they should always lead the agent to the action that she has most reason to
pursue. The theory I develop in this paper challenges this assumption. Instead of
focusing on how to craft these norms precisely, I start by considering the practical
question of what role these norms play in the reasoning of cognitively limited agents
like ourselves.
Lewis Carroll’s classic [1895] paper ‘What the Tortoise Said to Achilles’ shows that
we should not take the norms of inference to function as additional premises in theo-
retical reasoning, lest we become stuck in an infinite regress. Similar arguments have
been given with respect to the principle of instrumental reason [Railton 1996; Dreier
2001]. Suppose that Hannah intends to attend medical school and believes that
applying is a necessary means to attending, but fails to intend to apply. Supplying
Hannah with an additional premise that tells her to comply with the principle of
instrumental reason is futile. Like Carroll’s tortoise, she can simply keep demanding
additional premises without ever reaching the required conclusion. She is stuck in a
regress.

3
Recent work in this area has focused on whether the requirements of practical reason are narrow or instead
wide in scope—whether they require you to adopt particular attitudes in virtue of having other attitudes (i.e.
to intend what you believe to be the necessary means to your ends) or to avoid certain combinations of atti-
tudes (i.e. satisfying the requirement by either intending the necessary means, giving up on the end, or chang-
ing your belief concerning the connection between the means and the end). I follow the wide-scope
formulation, although I do not argue for it here (see Broome [2007]).
4
I use ‘practical norms’, ‘rational requirements’, and ‘normative requirements’ interchangeably throughout the
paper.
5
Bratman’s [1987] earlier work also seems to endorse such a view.
4 JENNIFER M. MORTON

Jamie Dreier [ibid.: 42] has taken this sort of argument to show that the principle of
instrumental reason has a ‘ground-level normative status’. No further justification can
be given—as long as we are reasoning, we have to accept it. The problem is that Dreier’s
argument does not show that this particular norm has this status. What it shows is that
an agent who is reasoning must do so according to some norms that operate in the
background to license steps in the reasoning process, not as further premises [Brunero
2005]. Otherwise, the agent will get ‘stuck’ and will be unable to reach a conclusion via
reasoning.
Once one sees that the norms of practical rationality function in the background in
this way, one might be tempted to think that their role must be constitutive. In support
of this point, some philosophers [Schapiro 2001; Ferrero 2009] have drawn a parallel
between practical norms, which they take to be constitutive of practical reasoning, and
the rules of a game, which constitute the kind of game that it is. Just as one cannot fail
to be committed to the rules of chess while playing chess, one cannot put into question
the rules of practical reason while counting as an agent. Several philosophers have
argued quite persuasively that the constitutivist cannot support this ambitious conclu-
sion [Enoch 2006], but the analogy contains a kernel of truth.
If we are to play a game well, we must accept some rules while we play a particular
iteration without bringing them up for reconsideration. However, this does not fore-
close the possibility of evaluating the rules of a game before we play a game (or which
game we should play). Therefore, the conclusion to be drawn is not that the rules of the
game constitute it and so cannot be questioned intelligibly. Rather, the claim is modest
and practical. If the rules of a game are to serve their function while we play, then they
should have limited immunity from reconsideration and a defeasible stability in virtue
of this.
Now we are in a position to see how the analogy translates to the case of practical
reason. In so far as an agent is deliberating about what to do, she will have to take some
norms for granted in the background without bringing them up for reflection, and this
6
will give those norms defeasible stability. This doesn’t imply that these norms cannot
be evaluated or modified; it implies that, in order for them to play their role in reason-
ing they have to be able to function in this way. The norms that structure reasoning,
according to this picture, work very much like those structuring a habit—deliberation
is an habitual mode of thinking about what to do.
There are good reasons why the norms that we use in deliberation should function
in this way for agents like us. If in every new situation we had to reconsider and reeval-
uate the norms that we used for deliberating, we would either be stuck, like Carrol’s tor-
toise, in an infinite regress or find ourselves using up considerable cognitive resources
to determine what the appropriate deliberative norms are, without reaching a conclu-
sion about what to do. Of course, as I will discuss in more detail later, there are also
costs to habitual thinking. Fallacious yet habitual thinking that might be useful in some
7
contexts can lead us astray. Nonetheless, as we have seen, the norms governing delib-
eration function best when they license steps in the reasoning process in a stable and
unreflective way. Now we must turn to considering the role that context plays in deter-
mining which norms we should employ.

6
However, we might engage in a new kind of deliberative process employing different norms.
7
Thanks to an anonymous referee for this point.
 AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY 5

3. Scarcity’s Effect on Reasoning

People who are poor often make decisions that dig them deeper into poverty. They tend
to play the lottery, borrow too much at high interest rates, and fail to enrol in assistance
programs that might help them [Shah, Mullainathan et al. 2012]. One might be
tempted to describe their decision-making as irrational, given that most people in pov-
erty are seeking to escape their impoverishment whereas the pattern of behaviour
described above appears to undermine that end. This is not, strictly speaking, a viola-
tion of the principle of instrumental reason specified in terms of necessary means, but
it can be seen as a violation of the broader kind of instrumental rationality that is often
invoked or assumed by many social scientists, psychologists, philosophers, and
policymakers.
Social scientists have debated the nature of this correlation—whether people are
poor in virtue of irrational decision-making or whether poverty itself plays a role in
leading those who are poor to make seemingly irrational decisions. Sendhill Mullaina-
than and Eldar Shafir have conducted a number of elegantly conceived studies to inves-
tigate the effects of resource-scarcity on problem-solving and cognitive control [2013].
Although more would need to be said to draw definitive connections between these
findings and the complex problem of poverty, they strongly suggest that poverty itself
might contribute to this seemingly irrational decision making.
The availability of resources in an agent’s context matters a great deal for instrumen-
tal deliberation. The fewer resources that an agent has, the more limited the means that
she can employ to pursue the satisfaction of her ends. We can define resource-scarcity
as constituting a relatively narrow gap between the resources available to the agent in
8
her context and those necessary to satisfy her ends [Mani, Mullainathan et al. 2013].
An agent in resource-moderate conditions has relatively more resources available than
she needs. Although there are many factors that constitute the agent’s context, such as
social and political conditions as well as the natural environment, I focus on resource-
scarcity in what follows. In the final section, I reflect on the broader political implica-
tions of this research for poverty-relief programs.
Anandi Mani, Mullainathan, and their collaborators [ibid.] conducted a study on
464 sugarcane farmers in 54 villages in rural India, whose income varied naturally dur-
ing the harvest cycle. This allowed them to compare the effects of scarcity on the same
farmers’ fluid intelligence (using Ravens Matrices) and cognitive control (using a ver-
9
sion of the Stroop Test) before and after the harvest cycle. Controlling for nutrition,
stress, and work fatigue, they found that the farmers solved fewer Ravens Matrices,
took longer to solve the Stroop test, and made more errors pre-harvest than post-har-
vest. The researchers conducted a similar study on high- and low-income shoppers at a
New Jersey mall by priming them with financial concerns before administering the
tests. Low-income shoppers who had been primed to worry about a large expenditure
before the tests performed worse than high-income shoppers who had been similarly
primed (and worse than low- and high-income shoppers who had not been similarly

8
Mullainathan and Shafir give a colloquial definition of scarcity as ‘having less than you feel you need’ [2013: 4].
9
A Raven’s Matrix is a non-verbal test in which a subject is asked to select a picture to complete a pattern given
by a series of pictures. It is used to test problem-solving skills. A Stroop test measures cognitive control by ask-
ing, for example, a subject to name the colour of a series of letters that spell the name of a different colour.
There are many variations of this test; in most, the subject is required to exert cognitive control when faced
with incongruent stimuli.
6 JENNIFER M. MORTON

primed). The researchers offered financial incentives to the shoppers but ‘despite the
incentives, and the fact that they presumably needed the money more, the poor per-
formed worse overall’ [ibid.: 978]. These findings suggest that resource-scarcity affects
the agent’s problem-solving and cognitive control.10
Note that most of these tests require that the agent engage in a complex task that
requires both cognitive and practical skills. The agent has to exert executive control to
sit in a chair and focus on the test, use her problem-solving skills to find a solution, and
do well enough to receive the financial incentives offered by the researcher.11 It’s very
hard to disentangle the cognitive from the practical in this research, at least in the way
that this is done in much of the philosophical literature on practical-versus-theoretical
rationality.12 Although I will discuss the possibility of attributing some of these errors
to the agent’s beliefs, it would be misleading to read the findings as offering a sharp
divide between these two aspects of an agent’s psychology.
A second set of experiments recreated scarcity in the lab [Shah, Mullainathan et al.
2012]. The researchers had participants play a game similar to Angry Birds called
Angry Blueberries.13 Some participants were given more shots (the resource-moderate
condition) than others (the resource-scarce condition). Some were also given the
option of borrowing from later rounds, while others were not. Intriguingly, participants
who had fewer shots were more efficient per shot from the very first shot than those
who had more shots at their disposal. However, participants in the resource-scarce con-
dition tended to borrow more than those who had more resources, often in a counter-
productive way. The researchers [ibid.: 684] suggest that ‘the more focused the
[resource] poor were on the current round, the more they neglected (and borrowed
away from) future rounds.’14 They found a similar pattern when they replicated the
experiments by using time as the scarce resource in a game of Family Feud. Time-
scarce participants focused so much on each round of the game that they neglected pre-
views of the next question that would have significantly helped them do better.
Although these findings are merely suggestive, as they do not resemble the real-
world conditions in which most of us deliberate, what they suggest is that participants
in conditions of resource-scarcity do better with respect to immediate goals in so far as
they use their resources to achieve those goals more efficiently, but worse with respect
to long-term goals. When circumstances change to moderate-resource availability, sub-
jects’ decision-making more closely conforms to reasoning sanctioned by traditional
theories of rationality.
However, in order to show that these experimental findings are relevant to assessing
the rationality of resource-scarce people’s decision-making outside the lab, we need to
turn to a study of street vendors at a market in India. More than half of these vendors
are in a borrowing trap—they must borrow the capital that they use each day at a very
high interest rate. Yet, according to the researchers, it would take the vendors only a
month of making small daily sacrifices to accumulate the money that they would need

10
Given that the participants are offered financial incentives to do well, it appears that this effect on their prob-
lem-solving in turn affects their capacity to respond to the financial incentives.
11
The difficulty in disentangling these elements appears to affect even the results of tests that purport to test only
fluid intelligence, such as IQ tests [Duckworth, Quinn et al. 2011].
12
To reiterate, my focus in this paper is on practical rationality, not theoretical rationality.
13
Angry Birds is a game in which participants accumulate points by shooting a bird at a target.
14
It should be noted that the experiment recreated conditions of scarcity in the lab setting, but did not use partic-
ipants (as far as I know) who were themselves resource-poor outside the lab setting.
 AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY 7

in order to be free from debt. To investigate what would happen if the vendors escaped
the borrowing trap, Mullainathan and his colleagues gave half of the vendors the equiv-
alent of the starting capital that they usually borrowed—making them essentially debt-
free. They then tracked the subsequent behaviour of the vendors for a year. The debt-
free vendors managed to stay that way for a few months, but by the end of the year
they were in as much debt as those vendors who hadn’t been given a cash infusion
[Mullainathan and Shafir 2013: 133]. Of course, as the researchers point out, this one
infusion wasn’t enough to push the vendors out of poverty. What happened, they sug-
gest, is that when urgent short-term problems arose—helping out a sick relative or pay-
ing for a wedding gift—the vendors prioritized dealing with those emergencies at the
expense of retaining the capital they needed to stay debt-free. That is, they were still
deliberating in a way that prioritized the short-term, rather than planning for the long-
term.
This last study is crucial, not only because it shows that the lab findings are relevant
to how people reason ‘in the wild’, but because it aligns with the view of deliberation
(defended in the previous section) as an habitual mode of thinking. The way in which
we reason has a robust stability across similar contexts. Mullainathan and Shafir [ibid.:
14–15] conclude that ‘scarcity captures our attention, and this provides a narrow bene-
fit: we do a better job of managing pressing needs. But more broadly, it costs us: we
neglect other concerns, and we become less effective in the rest of life.’ They call this
the scarcity mindset. The empirical research lends strong support to the following five
claims:
CONTEXT SENSITIVITY: The same human agent reasons differently in resource-scarce conditions
than in resource-moderate conditions.
LONG-TERM ADVANTAGE: Agents in resource-moderate conditions are better than agents in
resource-scarce conditions at prioritizing long-term goals in their deliberation.
SHORT-TERM EFFICIENCY: Agents in resource-scarce conditions are better than agents in
resource-moderate conditions at using resources efficiently in pursuing short-term goals.
TRADE-OFF: Long-Term Advantage comes at the expense of Short-Term Efficiency.
ROBUSTNESS: The type of reasoning in which agents engage has stability across similar resource
contexts.

There appears to be some connection between the resources available to an agent in a

context and her reasoning. Reasoning by subjects in the resource-scarce context con-
forms less to the paradigm of ‘ideal rationality’ than does reasoning by subjects who
enjoy more resources. In the remainder of this paper, I will consider whether this con-
nection is merely descriptive or instead reveals something important for a normative
theory of rationality.

4. Rational Requirements under Scarcity

The research appears to show that, under conditions of scarcity, many human agents
shift away from engaging in long-term deliberation in favour of focusing on efficient
short-term deliberation. In many cases, this focus on the short-term would be sanc-
tioned by theories of ideal rationality. If an agent is starving, then she should favour the
short-term goal of procuring food at the expense of devising a long-term plan to escape
poverty. However, the evidence suggests that even in cases in which, by the agent’s own
lights, the long-term goal clearly seems more important than the short-term one, agents
8 JENNIFER M. MORTON

in resource-scarce conditions nonetheless prioritize the short-term. If the objective in

Angry Blueberries or Family Feud is to win as many points as possible in order to
receive a reward, then focusing on the short-term at the expense of the long-term
would be deemed by many theories as irrational. I will argue, contra this intuitive diag-
nosis, that short-term focused deliberation is indeed rational for agents in resource-
scarce conditions even in such cases. But, before I do so, we need to consider some
alternative ways of accounting for the effect of scarcity on reasoning.

4.1 Scarcity Leads to Irrationality

A proponent of ideal rationality could remain undisturbed by the empirical evidence
presented. After all, a theory of rationality is a normative theory whereas the evidence
tells us how people actually reason. Donald Davidson [1970: 42] famously claimed that,
although we might offer psychological explanations of akratic actions, we cannot make
sense of what is essentially irrational: ‘the attempt to read reason into [akratic] behav-
iour is necessarily subject to a degree of frustration.’ A defender of ideal rationality
might argue similarly. We already know from the heuristics-and-biases literature that
people are often irrational [Tversky and Kahneman 1974]: this evidence shows us that
scarcity is a further contributing factor. There is nothing more that a philosophical the-
ory of rationality can say.
I think that we should resist accepting this conclusion before we have considered
alternative explanations. At the very least, it is a point in favour of an alternative theory
if it has something more to say about these cases. Furthermore, we have an additional
reason to resist brandishing the label of ‘irrationality’ to dismiss the deliberation of peo-
ple in resource-scarce conditions. Philosophers who write about rationality are, for the
most part, fortunate enough not to be in the resource-scarce conditions with which we
have been concerned. We have time and resources that allow us to deliberate using
norms that align more closely with those sanctioned by ideal rationality. We should be
wary of automatically importing those ‘intuitive’ assumptions into contexts that are
very different from ours.

4.2 Scarcity Changes the Agent’s Ends

One way to account for the effect of scarcity is to suggest that it leads to preference-
reversal. If you’re starving, buying food matters more than does paying off a debt or
saving towards college. If the agent’s preference-ordering changes, so that satisfying a
short-term goal becomes much more important than satisfying a long-term goal, many
theories will agree that focusing on the short-term is rational. This is an adequate
account of many choices that agents make in conditions of scarcity. However, we
should be careful about how we deploy this explanation.
First, we shouldn’t assume that, because agents in conditions of scarcity pursue their
short-term goals at the expense of their long-term goals, they in fact prefer or value the
former more. Of course, in some cases that might be true, but we are not warranted in
drawing this conclusion merely on the basis of the agent’s behaviour. If we did, we
would be reinterpreting all violations of the instrumental principle as not genuine viola-
tions because the agent is, in fact, doing what she most desires when she acts contrary
to her avowed ends. But, as Christine Korsgaard [1997] argues, this sort of argument
 AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY 9

leads to an account of rationality that is not genuinely normative since no violations of

the instrumental principle are even possible.
Second, the evidence doesn’t support preference-reversal as a general explanation
of the effect of scarcity on the agent’s ends. If we follow this line of argument, we
should conclude, for example, that in the Angry Blueberries or Family Feud experi-
ment the resource-scarce participants experience a preference-reversal such that
they prefer to do well at each shot (or turn) more than they prefer to win at the
overall game. This is counter-intuitive. If preference reversal were the right diagnosis
of how scarcity affects the agent’s ends, then it should be sensitive to how important
the short-term preference is relative to the longer-term one. Yet agents focus on the
short-term in resource-scarce conditions even when the ends at stake are not ones
that they highly value or prefer. Preference-reversal can explain some of these cases,
but, as I will argue, there is a more holistic explanation that takes seriously the habit-
ual nature of deliberation.

4.3 Scarcity Undermines the Agent’s Instrumental Beliefs

A second way to account for the effect of scarcity is to suggest that it undermines
the agent’s capacity to form correct instrumental beliefs. Perhaps agents in conditions
of scarcity are so overwhelmed with their pressing needs that they become less sensitive
to evidence. The empirical evidence offers some support for this hypothesis. As we
have seen, agents perform worse at cognitive control tasks, such as the Stroop test,
under conditions of scarcity. Furthermore, social factors can also affect an agent’s
beliefs about her own effectiveness in certain domains [Steele 2010: 44–62].
Although this diagnosis has a certain intuitive appeal, it doesn’t explain why
agents in resource-scarce conditions are not generally worse-off doxastically. In fact,
the empirical evidence shows that resource-scarce agents are better than resource-
moderate agents at forming beliefs that are relevant to their short-term goals. For
example, low-income people in the Boston train station, although less likely to take
taxis, are three times more likely to know the fare at which the taximeter starts than
those with higher incomes [Mullainathan and Shafir 2013: 94]. They are also less
likely to be taken in by deceptive bulk item discounts [ibid.]. The most plausible
explanation would seem to be that resource-scarce agents pay more attention to
evidence concerning short-term ends at the expense of long-term ones because they
are more focused on satisfying the former. The research does not suggest that agents
in resource-scarce conditions suffer from a general deficit in arriving at correct
instrumental beliefs.

4.4 Scarcity ‘Exhausts’ the Agent’s Will

Some psychologists and philosophers have likened the agent’s will to a muscle. Richard
Holton, for example, suggests that the will is a distinctive capacity to resist reconsidera-
tion in the face of temptation [2003, 2009: 112–36]. He writes [2003: 58]
that there is a faculty of willpower—something like a muscle—and that, when desires and reso-
lutions clash, we can succeed in sticking to our resolutions by employing this faculty. Moreover,
employing the faculty is hard work: it requires effort on the part of the agent.
10 JENNIFER M. MORTON

One reason not to appeal to this model directly is that most of the cases we have
been discussing are not ones in which an agent is going against a resolution.15
Nonetheless, this model suggests a possible explanation of scarcity’s effect on
reasoning: resource-scarcity exhausts the agent’s self-regulatory mechanisms, caus-
ing her to perform worse at tasks that require cognitive control, such as the Stroop
test. As it stands, this explanation is inadequate. Resource-scarce agents do not face
more decisions than do those who are resource-moderate; they face different deci-
sions. In fact, in many of the aforementioned experiments the resource-moderate
made more decisions than the resource-poor, yet they performed better on subse-
quent tests of cognitive-control [Shah, Mullainathan et al. 2012: 683]. If the number
of decisions made was depleting their capacity for self-control, one would expect the
opposite result. Alternatively, one might appeal to the difficulty of the decisions
encountered in resource-scarce conditions as the factor that exhausts agents’ self-
regulatory mechanisms.16 To develop this suggestion, more would need to be said
about the relevant difference between the decisions encountered in each set of con-
ditions. Although this offers a plausible development of the Holton model, it shows
that a myopic focus on the satisfaction of short-term goals cannot be accounted for
solely by appeal to an agent’s failure to exercise willpower. An habitual favouring of
the short-term over the long-term might be a response to contextual factors rather
than a failure to stick to one’s long-term plans.
Mullainathan and Shafir’s [2013: 45] closely related proposal is that scarcity so pre-
occupies the mind that those who are poor end up with less effective bandwidth, which
they define as a complex of cognitive capacity and executive control. Agents have fewer
cognitive resources available under resource-poor conditions than under resource-
moderate conditions. This account, like the previous one, doesn’t adequately distin-
guish agents who are adapting to their context from those who are merely failing to rea-
son well because they have less effective bandwidth for other reasons. A sleep-deprived
agent and a resource-scarce agent who both do less well at the Stroop test do so for
importantly different reasons. The latter has less effective bandwidth available for long-
term problem-solving because she is using it to solve short-term problems efficiently.
The reasoning of agents in resource-scarce conditions appears to be adaptive rather
than simply less effective.

4.5 Scarcity Changes the Structure of the Agent’s Deliberation

Agents in resource-scarce conditions often have to make important short-term deci-
sions in a cost-efficient way. They have to figure out how to feed themselves and their
families, secure shelter, and receive urgent medical care on a very limited budget. It is
because these short-term ends are very important (and a condition of the possibility of
achieving any of their long-term goals) that agents are so focused on satisfying them.
As we have seen, the reasoning in many of these cases can be accounted for by most

15
According to Holton, resolutions are policies that are formed precisely to avoid temptation. There is little evi-
dence in these cases that the agents have formed such resolutions or that they see their short-term goals as
‘temptations.’
16
Thanks to Gerard Vong for this suggestion.
 AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY 11

theories of ideal rationality. Yet agents exhibit the same short-term focus even in cases
in which they don’t highly prefer the short-term end, do not lack the relevant instru-
mental beliefs, or aren’t exhausted from having to confront these decisions. What the
evidence appears to show is that the kind of reasoning that agents in resource-scarce
conditions exhibit is stable across resource-scarce contexts even when favouring the
short-term undermines more important long-term ends—it is habitual.
I have argued that the function of reasoning norms is to operate in the background,
licensing steps in reasoning, having limited immunity from reflection, and defeasible
stability. The empirical evidence appears to show that the scarcity mindset operates
similarly—it is an unreflective and stable mode of context-dependent reasoning. Agents
in resource-scarce conditions are deliberating with different norms—ones that give
greater weight to more immediate problems and that are highly sensitive to short-term
efficiency. Those in resource-moderate conditions, in contrast, give more weight to
long-term goals and are less sensitive to short-term efficiency. It is this that accounts
for the stability of agents’ reasoning across similar resource-scarce contexts even in
cases in which ideal theories of rationality would recommend that they favour the
achievement of more important long-term ends.

5. Is It Rational?
Scarcity leads agents to adapt their deliberation to their context—favouring short-
term efficiency at the expense of long-term planning in resource-scarce contexts. In
many cases, this leads agents to act as a standard theory of rationality would recom-
mend. However, because deliberation is habitual, agents will still deliberate in this
way even when doing so undermines their long-term goals in favour of short-term
ones that are less important. In such cases, agents deliberate contrary to what ‘ideal’
rationality would recommend. But why does this descriptive claim challenge a nor-
mative account of rationality? I now turn to arguing in favour of the normative con-
clusion: agents in resource-scarce contexts are being rational in engaging in habitual
deliberation that favours short-term efficiency over long-term planning even in
those cases in which favouring the short-term does not advance long-term goals
that are more important.
As I have suggested, the norms of deliberation can function in the background,
licensing reasoning steps with limited immunity from reflection and limited stability.
My contention here is that there are no norms that can fulfil this function in the delib-
eration of human agents with limited cognitive capacities, like us, and lead us to reliably
reach the conclusion to intend that which we have most reason to do in any context.
The literature on practical rationality gives us at least prima facie evidence that we can
construct a situation in which most proposed ‘ideal’ norms will lead the agent to satisfy
the requirements of rationality but fail to intend doing what she has most reason to
do—evil demons, unalterable intentions, and other philosophical fictions have been
used to make the case [Kolodny 2008a, 2008b; Brunero 2010]. No deliberative habit
will be ‘infallible’ in every context for agents like us. Perhaps there are such norms for
gods or angels with unlimited cognitive capacities, time, and resources, but there are
none for creatures like us. In fact, Nomy Arpaly and Timothy Schroeder [2012: 235]
argue that, for superhuman creatures whose capacity to think and act for good reasons
is flawless, ‘deliberation would be a waste of time’. We rely on deliberation because we
are not superhuman creatures.
12 JENNIFER M. MORTON

Now imagine designing the norms that will structure a human agent’s habitual
deliberation in a context of resource-scarcity.17 Many urgent problems that the agent
confronts in this context require very efficient use of resources. Occasionally, some
problems require long-term deliberation, but these are few and far between. Presum-
ably, you don’t want to design this agent’s deliberation so as to engage in long-term
deliberation at the cost of not effectively using her resources in the short-term. This
would lead her to do reliably less well than if she were to use efficient short-term delib-
eration. But, you might wonder, why not design this agent to deliberate in such a way
that she uses efficient short-term deliberation when that leads her to do what she has
most reason to do, and uses long-term planning when that is what she has most reason
to do?
We need to think carefully about what this proposal entails. First, this agent would
need to have the time, cognitive resources, and cognitive flexibility to use this more
complex form of deliberation. Second, she would have to reliably distinguish between
resource-scarce conditions in which short-term focused deliberation pays off and
resource-scarce conditions in which it doesn’t, and at least do so more reliably than the
alternative—habitual efficient short-term deliberation. The benefit of having an habit-
ual way of thinking is that it doesn’t require us to do this, which is a better solution for
cognitively limited and fallible creatures like ourselves.
Of course, we do not only confront resource-scarce contexts; at times, we are in
resource-moderate contexts in which long-term deliberation does pay off. So, we want
to introduce enough flexibility into the agent’s deliberation so that she can adapt to the
context—employing long-term deliberation in moderate or resource-rich contexts—
without requiring her to change deliberative norms in every new situation that she con-
fronts. We want to design an agent who is sensitive enough to change her deliberative
norms when she encounters a context in which she would do better using different
norms, but who can rely on those norms in an habitual way. This view of rationality is
captured by the Ecological Theory of Rationality.
Ecological Rationality. An agent A should deliberate using those norms N that allow her to reli-
ably achieve her ends E, given her cognitive capacities, in those contexts C in which she regu-
larly finds herself.18

A version of this theory has proponents in psychology, Gerd Gigerenzer notable among
them, but few in the philosophical literature.19 There are a few things to note about this
theory before we proceed.
First, this theory gives us a way of evaluating the norms that an agent employs in
deliberating, but it is not itself a norm of deliberation. Rather, in order to evaluate the
rationality of an agent’s deliberation, we assess how well certain norms function in
leading the agent to reliably achieve her ends. Given that these norms are supposed to
function in the background as a stable and unreflective mode of deliberation, their
assessment should be done globally, not on a case-by-case basis.20 As sophisticated util-
itarians have argued [Railton 1984], the question of how to evaluate an action is distinct

17
Here I follow the model of creature reconstruction deployed by Michael Bratman [2000] and inspired by H.P.
Grice.
18
I have offered a defence of this view elsewhere [2010].
19
See note 2.
20
Thanks to an anonymous referee for urging me to clarify these connections.
 AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY 13

from the question of how to evaluate an agent’s habitual deliberation.21 We need not,
and should not, use the same norms to evaluate both, because there is no guarantee
that using the norm with which one would evaluate the rightness of an action will lead
an agent to reliably engage in the right actions when used as a principle of deliberation.
Second, the theory requires that, in evaluating these norms, we take into account the
agent’s cognitive capacities and context. As we have seen in the foregoing discussion,
these two factors interact in complex ways. The norms (if any) that would lead agents
with unlimited cognitive capacities to reliably deliberate so as to achieve their ends are
likely to be different than those that would lead us, as cognitively limited agents, to do
so. And the norms that would lead agents to reliably deliberate well in resource-scarce
contexts are also likely to be different from the norms that would lead agents to do so
in resource-moderate contexts. This is because, as the evidence suggests, there is a
trade-off between reasoning in a way that is cost-efficient in dealing with the sort of
short-term problems that come up in resource-scarce contexts and doing so in a way
that allows us to adequately plan for future long-term ends.
Third, it is a feature of this account that identifying the norms that an agent should
employ in deliberation is empirically determined by what would allow that agent to
reliably achieve her goals in her context. Therefore, even if one disagrees that delibera-
tion focused on short-term efficiency would allow an agent in a context of resource-
scarcity to do well, one already subscribes to some extent to the Ecological Theory if
one accepts that the relevant evaluative standard is empirically determined. I should
also note that the theory does not state how finely or coarsely to specify the relevant
context. I take this also to be determined in large part by human cognitive capacity.
Finally, the theory is agnostic as to how to specify the relevant ends— depending on
one’s theory, these might be given by what the agent finds most important, what she
has most reason to do, or what would promote her well-being. Different theories about
the agent’s ends might turn out to imply different norms of rationality.
Since the proposed theory urges us to evaluate deliberation globally, the theory sanc-
tions the use of norms that will in some cases lead the agent to draw a conclusion that
runs counter to what she has most reason to do, unlike the theories of rationality dis-
cussed in section 2. An agent who reliably finds herself in resource-scarce contexts will
occasionally encounter decisions that reward long-term deliberation, but, in deliberat-
ing rationally, she will use the norms of short-term efficiency despite the fact that she
may thereby fail to do what she has most reason to do (for example, a poor person who
fails to respond to a tax incentive that will help her). Similarly, an agent who reliably
finds herself in resource-moderate contexts will occasionally encounter some decisions
that reward short-term efficiency, but, in deliberating rationally, she will use the norms
of long-term planning, although in some cases she will fail to do what she has most rea-
son to do (for example, a well-off consumer who gets taken in by an expensive bulk
‘discount’).22 Now, reconsider Herb. Although his deliberation might appear to us as
short-sighted and irrational, according to the proposed theory it is rational for him,
given his context.

21
Thanks to an anonymous referee for urging me to draw this connection explicitly.
22
Some might be tempted to argue that, if the customer is sufficiently well-off, then she is not being irrational in
failing to deliberate in a cost-efficient way. However, if, by the customer’s own lights, she would rather pay less
for the same product, then she is deliberating in a way that is at odds with her own preferences and is thus,
according to standard theories of rationality, irrational.
14 JENNIFER M. MORTON

One might argue that, although Herb’s deliberation is excusable, it would be better
and more rational for him to skip the coffee, fill out his tax forms, and avoid the park-
ing tickets. I agree that it would be better for Herb to do these things, but the question
here is that of whether it would be better for Herb to habitually deliberate in a way that
favours long-term planning. The evidence suggests that if Herb engaged in habitual
long-term planning, he would be worse at deliberating in a cost-efficient way concern-
ing his short-term goals which matter quite a bit to his life going well. Consequently,
according to the Ecological Theory, he would be deliberating irrationally.
Alternatively, one might suggest that, although it is better for Herb to cultivate this
deliberative habit, it is better for him to break the habit this one time. But this sugges-
tion misunderstands the nature of deliberation as habitual, and underestimates the
costs of reevaluting the question of how one ought to deliberate. Consider the stock
investor actively picking stocks, trying to outperform the market. Evidence suggests
that such investors do worse than investors who simply leave their money in index
funds. Of course, investors could do better by picking the right stock, but, given the dif-
ficulty of reliably making such a pick, this is a much worse approach than that of the
habitual index fund investor.23 The same is true of our deliberation.
This is not to say that Herb can’t fail to deliberate badly even by this different stan-
dard. We are not redescribing away irrationality. For example, making his own coffee
instead of buying a latte would be a much more efficient use of his resources. Even if
the norms of rationality in resource-scarce contexts are not those of ‘ideal’ rationality,
agents can fail to live up to them by failing to deliberate in ways that efficiently solve
short-term problems. An agent can use her resources in ineffective ways in the short-
term or can neglect urgent problems. Not all deviations from classical ideal rationality
count as adaptive. Agents can still be weak-willed, inefficient, and inconsistent even
while being focused on the short-term.
There are two questions one can ask of the proposed theory at this point. First, what
if Herb only engages in long-term planning occasionally, and this doesn’t negatively
affect his ability to deal with short-term problems? In those exceptional cases, it seems
to me that both modes of deliberation are rationally permissible, as long as Herb’s abil-
ity to engage in efficient short-term deliberation is not affected. But we should note
that these cases are exceptional. In situations of scarcity, agents often do not have the
luxury to indulge in deviations from their habitual modes of deliberation. They lack the
resources and time to make mistakes that might be very costly to them.
Second, what if Herb finds himself in a resource-rich context but deliberates as if he
was in a resource-scarce context? There are two scenarios that we must consider here.
If this is an exceptional one-off case, then it is permissible for Herb to stick to his usual
habit of deliberation.24 However, if this is a new context in which Herb will reliably
find himself, then at some point we should criticize him for not changing his delibera-
tive habits. It is beyond the scope of this paper to determine at what point that is, but it
suggests two important questions for future work. How does an agent change his delib-
erative habits in light of evidence of (in)effectiveness? And when do we hold agents
responsible for failing to adapt in light of such evidence? The insight of the Ecological

23
Thanks to Geoff Sayre-McCord for the analogy.
24
An analogous point could be made about the person who engages in long-term deliberation but finds herself in
an exceptional resource-scarce situation in which short-term efficiency is favoured. ‘Thank you’ to an anony-
mous referee for this point.
 AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY 15

Theory is that it is rational for us to deliberate using those norms that are best suited for
agents with our cognitive capacities, given the contexts in which we reliably find our-
selves. However, when there is a sustained change in context (or cognitive capacity),
the theory implies that those norms should also change.25

6. Implications
Deliberation is something that we do in the non-ideal and messy contexts in which we
live. Theories of rationality that abstract so far from the context of deliberation as to
render it invisible run the risk of ignoring or, worse, of distorting the experiences of
those who exercise their agency in conditions of considerable disadvantage.26 This is
not to endorse relativism about rationality. According to the account that I propose,
there are facts of the matter about how it is better to deliberate in one context as
opposed to another.
Even if proponents of ‘ideal’ rationality remain unconvinced of the theory presented
here, they should at least say more about how context can enable or undermine the
exercise of rational deliberation. In contexts of extreme resource-scarcity, it is often not
sensible to engage in careful long-term planning. In fact, I think that my argument here
lends support to an even more radical view—what is ‘ideal’ about ideal rationality often
has more to do with the agent’s context than with the internal harmony between the
agent’s mental states. In some contexts, such as those of extreme poverty, what rational
agency amounts to is far from the ideal that is prevalent in the philosophical literature.
Agents only start to approximate that paradigm in more ideal social and political con-
texts. If something like this view is right, the divide between political philosophy and
other areas of philosophy that focus on rationality and agency is misguided. Determin-
ing what ideal agency is depends, in large part, on determining what those ideal condi-
tions are.27
If the argument of this paper is correct, there are also important implications for
how we approach various areas of politics and policy in which the ideal paradigm of
rational deliberation is simply assumed. For example, many public policies employ
long-term incentives or penalties to encourage behaviour among the poor that policy-
makers believe will provide a way out of poverty. Agents in resource-scarce conditions
who deliberate in ways that prioritize efficiency in dealing with urgent short-term prob-
lems are unlikely to respond to such incentives. The evidence bears this out. Policy-
makers are baffled by this seemingly ‘irrational’ behaviour, or, worse, they conclude
that the poor do not want to change their situation. They thereby shift responsibility to
the poor for failing to take advantage of the opportunities to escape poverty. I have sug-
gested that many of these agents are reasoning in perfectly rational ways, given their sit-
uation. The irony is that if they were in resource-moderate contexts they would be

25
An additional consideration that I cannot develop here is the issue of recalcitrance. If agents cannot significantly
alter the norms that they use in reasoning, then we would have to take this into account in our evaluation. How-
ever, if agents cannot alter at all the way they deliberate, then there would be no room for a genuinely norma-
tive theory of rationality. Fortunately, the evidence I have presented suggests that this is not the case: agents
do deliberate differently, depending on factors such as availability of resources. ‘Thank you’ to an anonymous
referee for urging me to clarify this point.
26
Compare this with the critique of ideal theories of justice by Charles Mills [2005]
27
Some interpret Marx and Hegel as having a similar position, but it is not prevalent in the contemporary litera-
ture on practical reasoning.
16 JENNIFER M. MORTON

more likely to respond to these long-term incentives, but would be less in need of
them.28

ORCID
Jennifer M. Morton http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0587-9830

References
Arpaly, Nomy and Timothy Schroeder 2012. Deliberation and Acting for Reasons, The Philosophical
Review 121/2: 209–39.
Bratman, Michael E. 1987 (1999). Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason, Stanford, CA: CSLI
Publications.
Bratman, Michael E. 1999. Cognitivism About Practical Reason, in Faces of Intention, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press: 250–64.
Bratman, Michael E. 2000. Valuing and the Will, Philosophical Perspectives 14: 249–65.
Bratman, Michael E. 2009a. Intention Rationality, Philosophical Explorations 12/3: 227–41.
Bratman, Michael E. 2009b. Intention, Practical Rationality, and Self-Governance, Ethics 119/3:
411–43.
Bratman, Michael E. 2012. Time, Rationality, and Self-Governance, Philosophical Issues 22/1: 73–88.
Broome, John 2007. Wide or Narrow Scope? Mind 116/462: 359–70.
Broome, John 2013. Rationality through Reasoning, Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Brunero, John 2005. Instrumental Rationality and Carroll’s Tortoise, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice
8/5: 557–69.
Brunero, John 2010. Self-Governance, Means-Ends Coherence, and Unalterable Ends, Ethics 120/3:
579–91.
Carroll, Lewis 1895. What the Tortoise Said to Achilles, Mind 4/14: 278–80.
Davidson, Donald 1970 (2001). How Is Weakness of the Will Possible? in Essays on Actions and Events,
Oxford: Clarendon Press: 22–42.
Dreier, James 2001. Humean Doubts about Categorical Imperatives, in Varieties of Practical Reasoning,
ed. Elijah Millgram, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press: 27–48.
Duckworth, Angela Lee, Patrick D. Quinn, Donald R. Lynam, Rolf Loeber, and Magda Stouthamer-
Loeber 2011. Role of Test Motivation in Intelligence Testing, Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences 108/19: 7716–20.
Enoch, David 2006. Agency, Shmagency: Why Normativity Won’t Come from What Is Constitutive of
Action, The Philosophical Review 115/2: 169–98.
Ferrero, Luca 2009. Constitutivism and the Inescapability of Agency, Oxford Studies in Metaethics 4:
303–33.
Gauthier, David 1994. Assure and Threaten, Ethics 104/4: 690–721.
Gauthier, David 1996. Commitment and Choice: An Essay on the Rationality of Plans, in Ethics, Ratio-
nality, and Economic Behaviour, ed. Francesco Farina, Frank Hahn, and Stefano Vannucci, Oxford:
Clarendon Press: 217–43.

28
I’m grateful to the two anonymous referees for this journal, Luc Bovens, Erin Beeghly, Michael Bratman, Rachel
Fredericks, Elizabeth Harman, Judith Lichtenberg, Hanti Lin, Geoff Sayre-McCord, Michael Smith, and Sarah Paul
for their insightful feedback, and to Jason Anderson for editing assistance. I’m indebted to audiences at the
Princeton Workshop in Normative Philosophy, Fordham University’s Ethics and Epistemology Workshop, the
Mentoring Project for Pre-Tenure Women Faculty in Philosophy, the St. Louis Conference on Reasons and Ratio-
nality, the NYC Early Career Ethics Workshop, the CUNY Junior Philosophy Faculty Research Group, the CUNY
Graduate Center Philosophy Colloquium, and the Binghamton University Philosophy Colloquium for their ques-
tions and comments. Research for this paper was carried out while I was a Laurance S. Rockefeller Faculty fellow
at the Princeton Center for Human Values with additional support from the CUNY Scholar Incentive Program.
The final stage of this project was supported by a Philosophy and Psychology of Self-Control Grant [# 49684]
from the Templeton Foundation.
 AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY 17

Gigerenzer, Gerd 1991. How to Make Cognitive Illusions Disappear: Beyond ‘Heuristics and Biases’,
European Review of Social Psychology 2/1: 83–115.
Gigerenzer, Gerd 1996. On Narrow Norms and Vague Heuristics: A Reply to Kahneman and Tversky,
Psychological Review 103/3: 592–6.
Gigerenzer, Gerd and Daniel Goldstein 1996. Reasoning the Fast and Frugal Way: Models of Bounded
Rationality, Psychological Review 103/4: 650–69.
Goldstein, Daniel and Gerd Gigerenzer 2002. Models of Ecological Rationality: The Recognition Heu-
ristic, Psychological Review 109/1: 75–90.
Holton, Richard 2003. How Is Strength of Will Possible? in Weakness of Will and Practical Irrational-
ity, ed. Christine Tappolet and Sarah Stroud. Oxford: Clarendon Press: 39–67.
Holton, Richard 2009. Willing, Wanting, Waiting, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Kolodny, Niko 2005. Why Be Rational? Mind 114/455: 509–63.
Kolodny, Niko 2007. State or Process Requirements? Mind 116/462: 371–85.
Kolodny, Niko 2008a. The Myth of Practical Consistency, European Journal of Philosophy 16/3: 366–
402.
Kolodny, Niko 2008b. Why Be Disposed To Be Coherent? Ethics 118/3: 437–63.
Korsgaard, Christine M. 1996. The Sources of Normativity, ed. Onora O’Neill, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Korsgaard, Christine M. 1997. The Normativity of Instrumental Reason, in Ethics and Practical Reason,
ed. Garrett Cullity and Berys Gaut. Oxford: Clarendon Press: 215–54.
Korsgaard, Christine M. 2009. Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity, Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
Mani, Anandi, Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Shafir, and Jiaying Zhao 2013. Poverty Impedes Cognitive
Function, Science 341/6149: 976–80.
Mills, Charles W. 2005. ‘Ideal Theory’ as Ideology, Hypatia 20/3: 165–83.
Morton, Jennifer M. 2010. Toward an Ecological Theory of the Norms of Practical Deliberation, Euro-
pean Journal of Philosophy 19/4: 561–84.
Mullainathan, Sendhil and Eldar Shafir 2013. Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, New
York: Times Books.
Paul, Sarah K. 2009. Intention, Belief, and Wishful Thinking: Setiya on ‘Practical Knowledge’, Ethics
119/3: 546–57.
Railton, Peter 1984. Alienation, Consequentialism, and the Demands of Morality, Philosophy and Pub-
lic Affairs 13/2: 134–71.
Railton, Peter 1996. In Search of Nonsubjective Reasons, in Reason, Ethics, and Society: Themes from
Kurt Baier with His Responses, ed. J.B. Schneewind, Peru, IL: Carus Publishing: 117–43.
Rawls, John 1971 (2003). A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Raz, Joseph 2005. The Myth of Instrumental Rationality, Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy 1/1: 1–
28.
Schapiro, Tamar 2001. Three Conceptions of Action in Moral Theory, No^ us 35/1: 93–117.
Setiya, Kieran 2007. Cognitivism about Instrumental Reason, Ethics 117/4: 649–73.
Shah, Anuj K., Sendhil Mullainathan, and Eldar Shafir 2012. Some Consequences of Having Too Little,
Science 338/6107: 682–5.
Steele, Claude M. 2010. Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do, New York:
W.W. Norton & Company.
Todd, Peter M. and Gerd Gigerenzer 2007. Environments That Make Us Smart Ecological Rationality,
Current Directions in Psychological Science 16/3: 167–71.
Todd, Peter M. and Gerd Gigerenzer 2000. Precis of Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart, Behavioral
and Brain Sciences 23/05: 727–41.
Tversky, Amos and Daniel Kahneman 1974. Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, Sci-
ence 185/4157: 1124–31.
Wallace, R. Jay 2001. Normativity, Commitment, and Instrumental Reason, Philosophers’ Imprint 1/3,
1–26.