MichaelA🔸 comments on Making decisions under moral uncertainty

[MichaelA🔸]

Hi Arepo,

I’ll just respond quickly, but I imagine people who are actively working on moral uncertainty stuff would be able to say much more. And I’ll split my response to each point into a separate comment.

On your first point, you may find this paper from Phil Trammell interesting. (Though I haven’t read beyond the abstract myself, and am not sure I’d understand the paper easily if I did.) The abstract reads:

When we are faced with a choice among acts, but are uncertain about the true state of the world, we may be uncertain about the acts’ “choiceworthiness”. Decision theories guide our choice by making normative claims about how we should respond to this uncertainty. If we are unsure which decision theory is correct, however, we may remain unsure of what we ought to do. Given this decision-theoretic uncertainty, meta-theories attempt to resolve the conflicts between our decision theories...but we may be unsure which meta-theory is correct as well. This reasoning can launch a regress of ever-higher-order uncertainty, which may leave one forever uncertain about what one ought to do. There is, fortunately, a class of circumstances under which this regress is not a problem. If one holds a cardinal understanding of subjective choiceworthiness, and accepts certain other criteria (which are too weak to specify any particular decision theory), one’s hierarchy of metanormative uncertainty ultimately converges to precise definitions of “subjective choiceworthiness” for any finite set of acts. If one allows the metanormative regress to extend to the transfinite ordinals, the convergence criteria can be weakened further. Finally, the structure of these results applies straightforwardly not just to decision-theoretic uncertainty, but also to other varieties of normative uncertainty, such as moral uncertainty.

I believe similar issues were also discussed on some episodes of the 80,000 Hours Podcast—perhaps one with Hilary Greaves?