Thanks for your helpful reply! I’m very sympathetic to your view on moral theory and applied ethics: most (if not all) moral theories face severe problems and that is not generally sufficient reason to not consider them when doing applied ethics. However, I think the ex ante view is one of those views that don’t deserve more than negligible weight—which is where we seem to have different judgments. Even when taking into consideration that alternative views have their own problems, the statistical lives problem seems to be as close to a “knock-down argument” as it gets. You are right that there are possible circumstances in which the ex ante view would not prioritize identified people over any number of “statistical” people, and these circumstances might be even common. But the fact remains that there are also possible circumstances in which the ex ante view does prioritize one identified person over any number of “statistical” people—and at least to me this is just “clearly wrong”. I would be less confident if I knew of advocates of the ex ante view who remain steadfast in light of this problem; but no one seems to be willing to bite this bullet.
After pushing so much that we should reject the ex ante view, I feel like I should stress that I really appreciate this type of research. I think we should consider the implications of a wide range of possible moral theories, and excluding certain moral theories from this is a risky move. In fact, I think that an ideal analysis under moral uncertainty should include ex ante contractualism, only I’m afraid that people tend to give too much weight to its implications and that this is worse than (for now) not considering it at all.
Thanks for your helpful reply! I’m very sympathetic to your view on moral theory and applied ethics: most (if not all) moral theories face severe problems and that is not generally sufficient reason to not consider them when doing applied ethics. However, I think the ex ante view is one of those views that don’t deserve more than negligible weight—which is where we seem to have different judgments. Even when taking into consideration that alternative views have their own problems, the statistical lives problem seems to be as close to a “knock-down argument” as it gets. You are right that there are possible circumstances in which the ex ante view would not prioritize identified people over any number of “statistical” people, and these circumstances might be even common. But the fact remains that there are also possible circumstances in which the ex ante view does prioritize one identified person over any number of “statistical” people—and at least to me this is just “clearly wrong”. I would be less confident if I knew of advocates of the ex ante view who remain steadfast in light of this problem; but no one seems to be willing to bite this bullet.
After pushing so much that we should reject the ex ante view, I feel like I should stress that I really appreciate this type of research. I think we should consider the implications of a wide range of possible moral theories, and excluding certain moral theories from this is a risky move. In fact, I think that an ideal analysis under moral uncertainty should include ex ante contractualism, only I’m afraid that people tend to give too much weight to its implications and that this is worse than (for now) not considering it at all.