Dr. Akshath Jitendranath’s research was carried out under the supervision of professors Martin van Hees, former Dean of the John Stuart Mill College and now Dean of the Amsterdam University College, and Roland Luttens, Dean of the John Stuart Mill College.
The promotion committee, consisting of professors Catarina Dutilh Novaes, Rene van den Brink (VU Amsterdam), Conrad Heilmann (Erasmus University Rotterdam), Johan E. Gustafsson (University of Texas at Austin), and Sonja Smets (UvA Amsterdam), was impressed by Dr. Jitendranath’s account of hard choices as well as by his animated answers to an hour-full of often probing questions.
Hard choices
In his thesis, Dr. Jitendranath defends a novel account of what constitutes a hard choice. This account improves on existing, dominant theories of hard choice, such as those by Amartya Sen and Ruth Chang, among others. According to Dr. Jitendranath’s account, a hard choice is a situation where an individual’s all-things-considered reasons for action fail to determine what the individual ought to do.
Such situations are numerous and involve the choice between courses of action that are incomparable in important ways: for example, the choice between pursuing a career in a foreign land and caring for a loved one at home, or the choice between fighting for one’s country and staying with one’s family to spend time with one’s children. In all such cases, the thesis argues, an individual’s reasons fail to guide them in what they ought to do. The sources of such failure might be different and more or less severe. Depending on the source and how severe it is, the thesis also develops a novel typology of hard choices that greatly enriches the binary setting in which such choices are standardly analysed.
Internationally recognised work
The work in Dr. Jitendranath’s thesis, which establishes him as one of the rising voices in the literature on hard choices in the tradition of rational choice theory, has already been internationally recognised. In 2023, the paper “Optimization and Beyond”, based on the third chapter of the thesis, won the prestigious Isaac Levi Prize awarded by The Journal of Philosophy, one of the top journals in philosophy. The Prize includes a sum of $10,000 and a publication in the journal.
A living legend of PPE
Dr. Jitendranath’s public defence was witnessed by his loving family, friends, former PPE colleagues, and many of the students he has taught and inspired during his seven years at PPE.
In the laudatio following the award of Dr. Jitendranath’s doctorate, professor Martin van Hees summarised Akshath’s contributions to the life at the John Stuart Mill College by calling Akshath a “living legend of PPE”. “Whenever I heard your deep voice,” professor van Hees added, “I knew one thing to be true: Life is good”. He also recalled Akshath’s journey as a PhD student—he would often “change whole chapters just because we alerted him of a typo”.
Dr. Jitendranath was among the first cohort of Junior Lecturers at the John Stuart Mill College, and has thus been with the College’s PPE programme from its very first year. His mark on PPE was palpable during the post-defence celebrations, when PPE students from each cohort of the programme’s eight-year existence kept dropping by late into the night to congratulate him, catch up on life, and drink to the past and the future. As the Dean of the John Stuart Mill College, Roland Luttens, contended, it felt “almost like a PPE reunion”.
Dr. Jitendranath’s post-PPE life continues to embody his favourite description of his academic identity: “economists think I’m a philosopher, while philosophers think I’m an economist”. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in Philosophy and Economics at the Paris School of Economics.
The staff and students at PPE congratulate Dr. Jitendranath on the successful defence and wish him an academic future full of non-hard choices.
Read Dr. Jitendranath’s PhD thesis from the VU’s research repository.