Without Guilt & Justice: Chapter 1, Secs. 7-11

I note with regret that the momentum of book club has already slowed down. Hopefully some of you are still reading and just failing to write. Here's my best attempt to summarize the rest of Chapter 1:

Kaufmann introduces his next five strategies: Manichaeism, moral rationalism, pedantry, "futurism", and marriage.

Manichaeism occurs when the decider loads his discussion of the two sides of an issue such that there is no choice - one side is clearly superior to the other. I consider confirmation bias to be a related phenomenon.

Kaufmann calls moral rationalism "the subtlest [strategy] of the lot". The moral rationalist would claim that one can eventually derive moral rightness/wrongness after careful thought; Kaufmann cites the diversity of moral ideas and even goals across society and states that this cannot be true.

For a moderately related discussion of reason/rationality, here's a recent article from the New York Times I have yet to digest.

Pedantry is next, and here Kaufmann supports my theory that procrastination is a form of decidophobia when he says "as long as one remains absorbed in microscopic distinctions one is in no great danger of coming face to face with fateful decisions."

I refer to the ninth strategy as "futurism". The Nazi example is an extreme example where joining with the "wave of the future" would have been a poor decision, but in many cases - particularly economic bubbles - futurism is very dangerous. I derive the bubble comparison from the example of pets.com, which seems like an obvious example of futurism, and the example leads to a related question: were homebuyers in the United States decidophobic in the last decade?

Finally, the tenth strategy is marriage. I am pretty skeptical of this as a strategy. In the case of religion, the one fateful decision to become a monk removed all future choice options. In the case of marriage, however, the decision to tie the knot does not explicitly shrink your choice set. In fact, if one partner in a marriage makes no decisions, it must be the case that the other partner makes all the decisions! I'm curious how the married members of this reading group feel about the idea that marriage is a strategy for the decidophobic.

In the final section, Kaufmann defends his right to create a new word to describe this phenomenon, then discusses the possibility of reaching full autonomy. I'm not convinced that autonomy is an admirable goal. Humans, after all, have developed as social animals, and group affiliation is an important part of my own identity. Would Kaufmann suggest that we are being decidophobic by reading this book as a group, as opposed to individually? After all, we are giving up some of our autonomy in order to discuss the ideas with one another...

In terms of other discussion questions: which strategy do you use most often? Which strategy do you see most among friends/peers? For me, the answer is probably pedantry - though it's not any of you that is pedantic. Has Kaufmann outlined a complete set of strategies, and is decidophobia an important and neglected phenomenon in the modern world?