The Ethics of Rational Decision

In recent years a great deal of attention has been paid by social scientists and others to the problem of the theory of decisions. The decision is a basic concept of social systems, especially in social dynamics. It represents perhaps the most important single class of events, an event being defined as a kind of step-function which separates one position of a social system from the next in point of time. Some events are not the result of human decision at all, such as aging or accidents; some are the results of previous decisions, such as depreciation of a previously created capital structure; but when all these are removed, there remains an important category of events which constitute a deliberate change in state of a social system as a result of human action.

Address presented at the 27th National Meeting of the Operations Research Society of America, Boston, Massachusetts, May 7, 1965.