Sometimes you will be faced with hard choices: which few classes to take in your very last term in college; whether to accrue debt to pursue a professional degree; whether to have children. These choices can be hard because of agreat number of options, thedifficulty of comparing them, orlimitations on your information. They’re extra painful when stakes are high. It’s pretty amazing that such difficult decisions get made at all.

From one perspective, though, these decisions aren’t special. This perspective makesalldecisions look amazing, even the ‘easy’ ones. This is a wacky consequence of an otherwise intuitive philosophical perspective on decisions. This perspective says that decisions are just verdicts about the balance ofallthe reasons for and against a choice. It makes all decision-making look amazing because there are a mind-boggling number of reasons for and against any decision at all—and it’s really hard to compare them.

这是一个例子。假设你在商店里，决定买两种洗衣粉中的哪一种。相同尺寸的清洁剂A售价9.5美元，清洁剂B售价10美元。所以你有理由买a，因为它更便宜。但是你更喜欢B在衣服上的味道，所以你有理由买B，但是a会让你的床单有点脆。B公司使用了更符合伦理的制造方法。A对环境更好。B的忠诚计划每买十次就会给你一张优惠券。A是你所有朋友都用的洗涤剂。B让你想起了你爷爷的房子。 The list goes on and on.

Every choice you make sits in an intricate web of reasons just like this one. There are an immense number of reasons for and against any choice, and it’s difficult to weigh them against one another. But that’s not to say we take them all into account when deliberating. Doing that would be bonkers. It would require immense amounts of research and time-consuming calculation that we don’t usually do in deliberation.

(Here, notice, I am assumingrealism about objective reasons: there are reasons for and against choices, and these reasons exist whether or not you yourself know about them.)

If we don’t deliberate in this ridiculously complex way, though, whatdo我们该怎么办呢?Usually we don’t try to take into accountevery single支持和反对选择的理由。我们有简单的经验法则，局部技巧和启发式，让我们更快地选择。

For example, you can simply buy the breakfast cereal you enjoy the most (ignoring, for example, the impact on the climate), or you can watch the movie your guest most wants to watch (ignoring the price of renting this movie or another).

Evensophisticated recommendationsabouthow to make difficult decisionsare essentially better heuristics for making choices. Nobody recommends that you look atall你可以的原因。它让人不知所措，效率低下，而且似乎完全没有必要。

But this creates a philosophical problem. We make decisions all the time, but wedon’tmake verdicts on the balance of all the reasons there are. That means that the intuitive theory—the one that says decisions are verdicts on the balance of all the reasons for and against a choice—has to be wrong.

It’s frustrating that this intuitive theory is wrong, because it getsone关键的点。To see why, we need to see that decisions—whatever else they happen to be—are certainlycommitmentsto doing things. When you decide, you close off alternatives, and decline to deliberate any more. When you’ve decided, but you don’t do what you’ve decided, something has gonewrong:要么你不理智，要么你已经迷失了方向。在正常情况下，你决定做什么就做什么。

The intuitive theory, implausible as it is, helps make good sense of these commitments. It makes sense to shut down other options, and end deliberation, if you take yourself to have picked the best option, upon considering the balance ofall the reasons there are.

Now we’ve rejected the intuitive theory, we need another way of explaining the commitment aspect of a decision. If you decide something based on quick and easy heuristics, why does your commitment make sense—even toyou? Why feel the pull of your commitment at all, if you just used this quick and dirty trick to make this choice?

Here’s a tempting answer: you feel the pull because you’d already decided that usingthisheuristic is the way to makethischoice. For instance, you’d already decided that picking the yummiest breakfast cereal is the way to decide on a cereal.

这似乎是对的，但有无限倒退的危险。We can simply ask: how did you decide thatthiswas the way to make this choice? That’s a decision too, and it needs an explanation if the original decision needs an explanation.

Any philosopher must admit that our quick everyday choices—our choices of laundry detergent, breakfast cereal, or movies—count as decisions. But it’s not clear how we evercommit这样的选择。我们也不清楚我们当初是如何以如此快速和简单的方式做出决定的，而忽略了以效率的名义做的这么多事情。我们是如何决定以这种方式做决定的?