Sorry to hear you’re struggling! As others have said, getting to a less tormented state of mind should likely be your top priority right now.
(I think this would be true even if you only cared about understanding these issues and acting accordingly, because they’re difficult enough that it’s hard to make progress without being able to think clearly about them. I think that focusing on getting better would be your best bet even if there’s some probability that you’ll care less about these issues in the future, as you mentioned worrying about in a different comment, because decent mental health seems really important for grappling with these issues productively.)
But here’s a concrete answer, for whenever you want to engage with it:
- Are there moral systems that avoid negligible probabilities and are consistent
Stochastic dominance as a general decision theory is a decision theory that agrees with expected-utility-maximization in most cases, but says that it’s permissible to ignore sufficiently small probabilities. It’s explained in a paper here and in a podcast here (on the 52:11 mark).
Sorry to hear you’re struggling! As others have said, getting to a less tormented state of mind should likely be your top priority right now.
(I think this would be true even if you only cared about understanding these issues and acting accordingly, because they’re difficult enough that it’s hard to make progress without being able to think clearly about them. I think that focusing on getting better would be your best bet even if there’s some probability that you’ll care less about these issues in the future, as you mentioned worrying about in a different comment, because decent mental health seems really important for grappling with these issues productively.)
But here’s a concrete answer, for whenever you want to engage with it:
Stochastic dominance as a general decision theory is a decision theory that agrees with expected-utility-maximization in most cases, but says that it’s permissible to ignore sufficiently small probabilities. It’s explained in a paper here and in a podcast here (on the 52:11 mark).