I think there plausibly are principles that achieve (1) and (2), but they’ll give up either transitivity or the independence of irrelevant alternatives, and if used to guide actions locally without anticipating your own future decisions and without the ability to make precommitments, lead to plausibly irrational behaviour (and more than usual than just with known hard problems like Newcomb’s and Parfit’s hitchhiker). I don’t think those count as “crazy towns”, but they’re things people find undesirable or see as “inconsistent”. Also, they might require more arbitrariness than usual, e.g. picking thresholds, or nonlinear monotonically increasing functions.
Principles I have in mind (although they need to be extended or combined with others to achieve 1):
A non-fanatical approach to normative uncertainty or similar, but (possibly) instead of weighing different theories by subjective credences, you think of it as weighing principles or reasons by all-things-considered intuitive weights within a single theory. This interpretation makes most sense if you’re either a moral realist who treats ethics as fundamentally pluralistic or vague, or you’re a moral antirealist. However, again, this will probably lead to violations of transitivity or the independence of irrelevant alternatives to avoid fanaticism, unless you assume reasons are always bounded in strength, which rules out risk-neutral EV-maximizing total utilitarianism.
Also, I normally think of crazy town as requiring an act, rather than an omission, so distinguishing the two could help, although that might be unfair, and I suppose you can imagine forced choices.
I think there plausibly are principles that achieve (1) and (2), but they’ll give up either transitivity or the independence of irrelevant alternatives, and if used to guide actions locally without anticipating your own future decisions and without the ability to make precommitments, lead to plausibly irrational behaviour (and more than usual than just with known hard problems like Newcomb’s and Parfit’s hitchhiker). I don’t think those count as “crazy towns”, but they’re things people find undesirable or see as “inconsistent”. Also, they might require more arbitrariness than usual, e.g. picking thresholds, or nonlinear monotonically increasing functions.
Principles I have in mind (although they need to be extended or combined with others to achieve 1):
Partial/limited aggregation, although I don’t know if they’re very well-developed, especially to handle uncertainty (and some extensions may have horrific crazy town counterexamples, like https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/smgFKszHPLfoBEqmf/partial-aggregation-s-utility-monster). The Repugnant Conclusion and extensions (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00355-021-01321-2 ) can be avoided this way, and I think limiting and totally forbidding aggregation are basically the only ways to do so, but totally forbidding aggregation probably leads to crazy towns.
Difference-making risk aversion, to prevent fanaticism for an otherwise unbounded theory (objections of stochastic dominance and, if universalized, collective defeat here https://globalprioritiesinstitute.org/on-the-desire-to-make-a-difference-hilary-greaves-william-macaskill-andreas-mogensen-and-teruji-thomas-global-priorities-institute-university-of-oxford/ , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HT2w5jGCWG4 and https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/QZujaLgPateuiHXDT/concerns-with-difference-making-risk-aversion , and some other objections and responses here https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/sEnkD8sHP6pZztFc2/fanatical-eas-should-support-very-weird-projects?commentId=YqNWwzdpvmFbbXyoe#YqNWwzdpvmFbbXyoe ). There’s also a modification that never locally violates stochastic dominance, by replacing the outcome distributions with their quantile functions (i.e. sorting each outcome distribution statewise), but it’s also not implausible to me that we should just give up stochastic dominance and focus on statewise dominance, because stochastic dominance doesn’t guarantee conditional worseness, difference-making may be fundamentally a statewise concern, and stochastic dominance is fanatical with the right background noise when (deterministic) value is additive (https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/705555).
A non-fanatical approach to normative uncertainty or similar, but (possibly) instead of weighing different theories by subjective credences, you think of it as weighing principles or reasons by all-things-considered intuitive weights within a single theory. This interpretation makes most sense if you’re either a moral realist who treats ethics as fundamentally pluralistic or vague, or you’re a moral antirealist. However, again, this will probably lead to violations of transitivity or the independence of irrelevant alternatives to avoid fanaticism, unless you assume reasons are always bounded in strength, which rules out risk-neutral EV-maximizing total utilitarianism.
Also, I normally think of crazy town as requiring an act, rather than an omission, so distinguishing the two could help, although that might be unfair, and I suppose you can imagine forced choices.