Thanks for this post, Magnus! While I’m still uncompelled by your arguments in “Why give weight to a scope-adjusted view” for the reasons discussed here and here, I’ll set that aside and respond to the “Asymmetry in practical recommendations”.
Suppose that (i) the normative perspective from which we’re clueless (e.g., impartial consequentialism plus my framework here) says both A and B are permissible, and (ii) all other normative perspectives we give weight to say only A is permissible. In that case, I’d agree we should do A, no matter how minuscule the weight we give to the perspectives in (ii).
But realistically, our situation doesn’t seem that clean. Take {A = “donate to the Humane Slaughter Association”, B = “spend that money on yourself”}. It seems that different scope-adjusted views might give the opposite verdict here. Let T be the time horizon beyond which the HSA donation might lead to, say, increased wild animal suffering via increasing the price of meat for larger farmed animals.
If we discount fast enough, the effects before T (preventing painful slaughter) dominate ⇒ A is better than B.
If we discount more slowly (but not so slowly that we’re clueless!), the backfire effect on wild animals after T might dominate ⇒ B is better than A.
(In practice things might be much more complicated than this model lets on. It’s just an illustration.)
We might try to put meta-normative weights on these different discount rates. But I expect the relative weights to be arbitrary, which would make us clueless all over again from a consequentialist perspective. (I’m not saying our normative views need to be precisely specified — they can and will be vague — but we need some perhaps-vague overall reason to think the A-favoring perspectives outweigh the B-favoring perspectives. And I’m still keen for people to think about what that kind of reason might be!)
To clarify, the general approach outlined here doesn’t rest on the use of discount rates — that’s just a simple and illustrative example of scope-restriction.
Right, but the same point applies to other scope-restricted views, no? We need some non-arbitrary answer as to why we limit the scope to some set of consequences rather than a larger or smaller set. (I do think bracketing is a relatively promising direction for such a non-arbitrary answer, to be clear.)
Thanks for this post, Magnus! While I’m still uncompelled by your arguments in “Why give weight to a scope-adjusted view” for the reasons discussed here and here, I’ll set that aside and respond to the “Asymmetry in practical recommendations”.
Suppose that (i) the normative perspective from which we’re clueless (e.g., impartial consequentialism plus my framework here) says both A and B are permissible, and (ii) all other normative perspectives we give weight to say only A is permissible. In that case, I’d agree we should do A, no matter how minuscule the weight we give to the perspectives in (ii).
But realistically, our situation doesn’t seem that clean. Take {A = “donate to the Humane Slaughter Association”, B = “spend that money on yourself”}. It seems that different scope-adjusted views might give the opposite verdict here. Let T be the time horizon beyond which the HSA donation might lead to, say, increased wild animal suffering via increasing the price of meat for larger farmed animals.
If we discount fast enough, the effects before T (preventing painful slaughter) dominate ⇒ A is better than B.
If we discount more slowly (but not so slowly that we’re clueless!), the backfire effect on wild animals after T might dominate ⇒ B is better than A.
(In practice things might be much more complicated than this model lets on. It’s just an illustration.)
We might try to put meta-normative weights on these different discount rates. But I expect the relative weights to be arbitrary, which would make us clueless all over again from a consequentialist perspective. (I’m not saying our normative views need to be precisely specified — they can and will be vague — but we need some perhaps-vague overall reason to think the A-favoring perspectives outweigh the B-favoring perspectives. And I’m still keen for people to think about what that kind of reason might be!)
To clarify, the general approach outlined here doesn’t rest on the use of discount rates — that’s just a simple and illustrative example of scope-restriction.
Right, but the same point applies to other scope-restricted views, no? We need some non-arbitrary answer as to why we limit the scope to some set of consequences rather than a larger or smaller set. (I do think bracketing is a relatively promising direction for such a non-arbitrary answer, to be clear.)