ABSTRACT
Moral and political philosophy is motivated in large part by attempts to rationally justify the choices individuals make and the institutions that can, and often do, govern them. But what counts as a rational justification of a choice or an institution? 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. As the names suggest, decision theory has a descriptive as well as a normative side. Descriptive decision theory seeks to explain and to predict how agents do choose. Decision theory has ancient roots. Plato and 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 and descriptive decision theory. But decision 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 and a body of experimental studies that tested these accounts.
