 Why is the requirement of probabilistic independence problematic? For one thing, in many real-world decision circumstances, it is hard to frame the decision model in such a way that states are intuitively probabilistically independent of acts. For instance, suppose an agent enjoys smoking, and is trying to decide whether to quit or not. How long she lives is amongst the contingencies that affect the desirability of smoking. It would be natural to partition the set of states according to how long the agent lives. But then it is obvious that the options she is considering could, and arguably should, affect how likely she finds each state of the world, since it is well recognised that life expectancy is reduced by smoking. Savage would thus require an alternative representation of the decision problem—the states do not reference life span directly, but rather the agent’s physiological propensity to react in a certain way to smoking.