Abstract

We show that State Dominance for individual prospects has implausible implications given two seemingly innocuous assumptions. The first of these assumptions is that rational people can change their attitudes to risk. The second assumption is that there is a possible life and two points in time such that the life is made neither better nor worse when non-equivalent wellbeing levels at these two points in time are permuted. In the presence of these two assumptions, State Dominance implies that a person’s attitude to risk has no bearing on how preferable prospects are for her. So, we face an inconsistency between a set of prima facie plausible assumptions about attitudes to risk and how lifetime betterness relates to betterness at different times.