maybe give his AD scaling on W back ? ?<| sep |> If you have intransitive preferences then in theory you can be mugged via a Dutch book argument . Whether this counts as a philosophical reason is sort of up in the air , I think . It depends on what you really mean by ' rational ' and what you want to get out of it . We could imagine a world or Newcomblike game where people with intransitive preferences are explicitly punished . So having intransitive preferences could be an irrational strategy in at least some contexts where the mere existence of preferences is a part of the strategy . At the very least , assume that a very good brain scanner detects your true preferences . But that ' s not very interesting , because it can be the case for any set of beliefs or preferences . Finally , this might be tangential , but an argument floating around for having intransitive moral preferences is to imagine torturing one person for their entire life , versus torturing two people for forty years each , and continually harming more people in lesser ways until you reach a very large number of people getting some kind of mild physical discomfort , so if you want to have transitive moral preferences you will arguably have to be okay with torturing someone for their lifetime in order to prevent Graham ' s number of people from being uncomfortable in their computer chairs .