Most prominently, Greaves, et al. (2022) argue that the person who is difference-making risk averse cares that she be the cause of good things, not just that good things happen; while this might add meaning to her life, her preference is ultimately about her, not the world.
Another response could be to modify difference-making to not center your own default option (inaction or your own business-as-usual): instead of picking only one default option to compare each option to, you could compare each pair of options, as if each option gets to be picked as the default to compare the rest to. Then, eliminate the options that do the worst across comparisons, according to some rule. Here are some possible rules I’ve thought about (to be used separately, not together):
eliminate option A if and only if there’s some option B it’s worse than, no matter which option among all is chosen as the default
eliminate option A if and only there’s some option B compared to which A is always worse or equivalent, and at least worse in one case, no matter which option among all is chosen as the default
eliminate A if and only if it’s worse than some B both ways, i.e. with B compared to A as the default, and with A compared to B as the default
for each option A, take the sum of the difference-making risk averse expected differences with A as the default, and then pick the option with the smallest such sum.
I haven’t thought a lot about their consequences, though, and I’m not aware of any other work on this. They might introduce other problems that picking one default didn’t have.
Another response could be to modify difference-making to not center your own default option (inaction or your own business-as-usual): instead of picking only one default option to compare each option to, you could compare each pair of options, as if each option gets to be picked as the default to compare the rest to. Then, eliminate the options that do the worst across comparisons, according to some rule. Here are some possible rules I’ve thought about (to be used separately, not together):
eliminate option A if and only if there’s some option B it’s worse than, no matter which option among all is chosen as the default
eliminate option A if and only there’s some option B compared to which A is always worse or equivalent, and at least worse in one case, no matter which option among all is chosen as the default
eliminate A if and only if it’s worse than some B both ways, i.e. with B compared to A as the default, and with A compared to B as the default
for each option A, take the sum of the difference-making risk averse expected differences with A as the default, and then pick the option with the smallest such sum.
I haven’t thought a lot about their consequences, though, and I’m not aware of any other work on this. They might introduce other problems that picking one default didn’t have.