(None of this may be news to you, either, but potentially of interest to other readers.)
Furthermore, ex ante views will tend to be dynamically inconsistent. For example, you have a lottery where you pick one person to be sacrificed for the benefit of the many, and this looks permissible to everyone ex ante, but once we find out who will be sacrificed, it’s no longer permissible. And it wouldn’t be permissible no matter who we found out would be sacrificed. This violates the Sure-Thing Principle. That being said, I’m not sure I’d call violating the STP enough to rule out a view or principle, but it should count against the view.
To satisfy the STP, you’re also pretty close to maximizing expected utility due to Savage’s Theorem and generalizations. But maximizing expected utility with a specifically unbounded utility functions, like total welfare, also violates a more general version of the Sure-Thing Principle, because of St Petersburg prospects (infinite expected utility, but finite actual utility in each outcome), e.g. Russell and Isaacs, 2021 https://philarchive.org/rec/RUSINP-2 . It also gets worse, because Anteriority (weaker than ex ante Pareto, but generalized to individuals whose existence is uncertain) + Impartiality + Stochastic Dominance are jointly inconsistent due to St Petersburg-like prospects over population sizes, with a few additional modest assumptions (Goodsell, 2021, https://philpapers.org/rec/GOOASP-2 ).
We could idealize and decide as if we had full information, looking for agreement, or just take an ex post view. See Fleurbaey and Voorhoeve, 2013 https://philarchive.org/rec/VOODAY
Yes, that’s another problem indeed—thanks for the addition! Johann Frick (“Contractualism and Social Risk”) offers a “decomposition test” as a solution on which (roughly) every action of a procedure needs to be justifiable at the time of its performance for the procedure to be justified. But this “stage-wise ex ante contractualism” has its own additional problems.
Thanks for sharing! I think Frick’s approach looks pretty promising, although either with limited/partial aggregation or, as he does, recognizing that this isn’t the full picture, and we can have other reasons to balance, to appropriately handle cases with many statistical lives at stake but low individual risks. What additional problems did you have in mind?
Hmm I can’t recall all its problems right now, but for one I think that the view is then not compatible anymore with ex ante Pareto—which I find the most attractive feature of the ex ante view compared to other views that limit aggregation. If it’s necessary for justifiability that all the subsequent actions of a procedure are ex ante justifiable, then the initiating action could be in everyone’s ex ante interest and still not justified, right?
(None of this may be news to you, either, but potentially of interest to other readers.)
Furthermore, ex ante views will tend to be dynamically inconsistent. For example, you have a lottery where you pick one person to be sacrificed for the benefit of the many, and this looks permissible to everyone ex ante, but once we find out who will be sacrificed, it’s no longer permissible. And it wouldn’t be permissible no matter who we found out would be sacrificed. This violates the Sure-Thing Principle. That being said, I’m not sure I’d call violating the STP enough to rule out a view or principle, but it should count against the view.
To satisfy the STP, you’re also pretty close to maximizing expected utility due to Savage’s Theorem and generalizations. But maximizing expected utility with a specifically unbounded utility functions, like total welfare, also violates a more general version of the Sure-Thing Principle, because of St Petersburg prospects (infinite expected utility, but finite actual utility in each outcome), e.g. Russell and Isaacs, 2021 https://philarchive.org/rec/RUSINP-2 . It also gets worse, because Anteriority (weaker than ex ante Pareto, but generalized to individuals whose existence is uncertain) + Impartiality + Stochastic Dominance are jointly inconsistent due to St Petersburg-like prospects over population sizes, with a few additional modest assumptions (Goodsell, 2021, https://philpapers.org/rec/GOOASP-2 ).
We could idealize and decide as if we had full information, looking for agreement, or just take an ex post view. See Fleurbaey and Voorhoeve, 2013 https://philarchive.org/rec/VOODAY
Yes, that’s another problem indeed—thanks for the addition! Johann Frick (“Contractualism and Social Risk”) offers a “decomposition test” as a solution on which (roughly) every action of a procedure needs to be justifiable at the time of its performance for the procedure to be justified. But this “stage-wise ex ante contractualism” has its own additional problems.
Thanks for sharing! I think Frick’s approach looks pretty promising, although either with limited/partial aggregation or, as he does, recognizing that this isn’t the full picture, and we can have other reasons to balance, to appropriately handle cases with many statistical lives at stake but low individual risks. What additional problems did you have in mind?
Hmm I can’t recall all its problems right now, but for one I think that the view is then not compatible anymore with ex ante Pareto—which I find the most attractive feature of the ex ante view compared to other views that limit aggregation. If it’s necessary for justifiability that all the subsequent actions of a procedure are ex ante justifiable, then the initiating action could be in everyone’s ex ante interest and still not justified, right?