Yeah, I think those are both very thorny and important questions. I’d guess that no one would have amazing answers to them, but that various other EAs would have somewhat better answers than me. So I’ll just make a couple quick comments.
(1) how should one select which moral theories to use in ones evaluation of the expected choice worthiness of a given action?
I think we could ask an analogous question about how to select which hypotheses about the world/future to use in one’s evaluation of the expected value of a given action, or just in evaluating what will happen in future in general. (I.e., in the empirical context, rather than the moral/normative context.)
For example, if I want to predict the expected number of readers of an article, I could think about how many readers it’ll get if X happens and how many it’ll get if Y happens, and then think about how likely X and Y seem. X and Y could be things like “Some unrelated major news event happens to happen on the day of publication, drawing readers away”, or “Some major news event that’s somewhat related to the topic of the article happens soon-ish after publication, boosting attention”, or “The article is featured in some newsletter/roundup.”
But how many hypotheses should I consider? What about pretty unlikely stuff, like Obama mentioning the article on TV? What about really outlandish stuff that we still can’t really assign a probability of precisely 0, like a new religion forming with that article as one of its sacred texts?
Now, that response doesn’t actually answer the question at all! I don’t know how this problem is addressed in the empirical context. But I imagine people have written and thought a bunch about it in that context, and that what they’ve said could probably be ported over into the moral context.
(It’s also possible that the analogy breaks down for some reason I haven’t considered.)
Glad you found the post useful :)
Yeah, I think those are both very thorny and important questions. I’d guess that no one would have amazing answers to them, but that various other EAs would have somewhat better answers than me. So I’ll just make a couple quick comments.
I think we could ask an analogous question about how to select which hypotheses about the world/future to use in one’s evaluation of the expected value of a given action, or just in evaluating what will happen in future in general. (I.e., in the empirical context, rather than the moral/normative context.)
For example, if I want to predict the expected number of readers of an article, I could think about how many readers it’ll get if X happens and how many it’ll get if Y happens, and then think about how likely X and Y seem. X and Y could be things like “Some unrelated major news event happens to happen on the day of publication, drawing readers away”, or “Some major news event that’s somewhat related to the topic of the article happens soon-ish after publication, boosting attention”, or “The article is featured in some newsletter/roundup.”
But how many hypotheses should I consider? What about pretty unlikely stuff, like Obama mentioning the article on TV? What about really outlandish stuff that we still can’t really assign a probability of precisely 0, like a new religion forming with that article as one of its sacred texts?
Now, that response doesn’t actually answer the question at all! I don’t know how this problem is addressed in the empirical context. But I imagine people have written and thought a bunch about it in that context, and that what they’ve said could probably be ported over into the moral context.
(It’s also possible that the analogy breaks down for some reason I haven’t considered.)