Nice! Seems like a cool paper. One thing that confuses me, though, is why the authors think that their theory’s “moral risk aversion with respect to empirically expected utility” is undesirable. People just have weird intuitions about expected utility all the time, and don’t reason about it well in general. See, for instance, how people prefer (even when moral uncertainty isn’t involved) to donate to many charities rather than donating only to the one highest expected utility charity. It seems reasonable to call that preference misguided, so why can’t we just call the intuitive objection to “moral risk aversion with respect to empirically expected utility” misguided?
fwiw when I donate to many charities in the same cycle, a lot of the reason is for the fuzzies. Probably a similar dynamic is at play for lots of other people too.
Nice! Seems like a cool paper. One thing that confuses me, though, is why the authors think that their theory’s “moral risk aversion with respect to empirically expected utility” is undesirable. People just have weird intuitions about expected utility all the time, and don’t reason about it well in general. See, for instance, how people prefer (even when moral uncertainty isn’t involved) to donate to many charities rather than donating only to the one highest expected utility charity. It seems reasonable to call that preference misguided, so why can’t we just call the intuitive objection to “moral risk aversion with respect to empirically expected utility” misguided?
fwiw when I donate to many charities in the same cycle, a lot of the reason is for the fuzzies. Probably a similar dynamic is at play for lots of other people too.
I imagine so, but if that’s the reason it seems out of place in a paper on theoretical ethics.