The Luck of the Draw: The Role of Lotteries in Decision Making
Peter Stone
Abstract
From the earliest times, people have used lotteries to make decisions—by drawing straws, tossing coins, picking names out of hats, and so on. (This practice is sometimes known as sortition, or selection by lot.) They have placed citizens on juries, drafted men into armies, assigned students to schools, and selected lifeboat survivors to be eaten. Lotteries make a lot of sense in all these cases, and yet there is something absurd about them. They seem absurd because they do not make decisions based upon reasons. Indeed, they actively prevent reasons from being used. How can we resolve this para ... More
From the earliest times, people have used lotteries to make decisions—by drawing straws, tossing coins, picking names out of hats, and so on. (This practice is sometimes known as sortition, or selection by lot.) They have placed citizens on juries, drafted men into armies, assigned students to schools, and selected lifeboat survivors to be eaten. Lotteries make a lot of sense in all these cases, and yet there is something absurd about them. They seem absurd because they do not make decisions based upon reasons. Indeed, they actively prevent reasons from being used. How can we resolve this paradox? This book offers a solution. Normally we want to make our decisions based upon reasons. But sometimes, we do not. Sometimes, in fact, we want to exclude reasons from decision‐making entirely. This is what lotteries can do. And they can perform this valuable service for us in a surprisingly large number of situations. There are times when we have reasons not to use reasons, and these are times when we need lotteries. The book examines a wide variety of examples of lottery use, demonstrates how all of them involve the exclusion of reasons from decision‐making, and develops the implications of this view for our thinking about the nature of rationality, allocative justice, and democracy.
Keywords:
lottery,
random selection,
sortition,
reason,
decision‐making,
rationality,
justice,
allocation,
democracy
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2011 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199756100 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2011 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199756100.001.0001 |
