First, say i) I have a ~10% credence in ex post neartermism (Vasco’s view that our impact washes out, ex post, after say 100 years) being correct, and ii) I am clueful conditional on ex post neartermism + utilitarianism. I cannot use LF to act in accordance with ex post neartermism. It’s empirical, not normative. Instead, LF tells me to do whatever increases beauty (or whatever clueful normative view comes after utilitarianism). That’s weird, because I find ex post neartermism + utilitarianism infinitely more plausible than valuing beauty, and both are action-guiding. Why is the move to a lower-ranked value like beauty more legitimate than moving to a utilitarianism conditional on ex post neartermism? I fail to see how normative views are privileged units.
Second:
At least to me, these examples highlight the intuitiveness of lexicality. I might not be willing to sacrifice any amount of positive welfare for more neutral welfare, but I still prefer worlds with more of neutral welfare ceteris paribus. Nor would I trade any welfare for beauty, but I still prefer worlds with more of it ceteris paribus.
But do you genuinely lexically prefer beauty over whatever comes next?
Why is the move to a lower-ranked value like beauty more legitimate than moving to a utilitarianism conditional on ex post neartermism?
I don’t think empirical neartermism exists separately in a way that you could move onto it from non-neartermism. Doing that requires carving up the empirical space into an ordering which I don’t know how to do (see this open question: How could the intuition “Less arbitrary parts of beliefs could be lexically more important than more arbitrary parts and that could be used for filtering” be made precise and action guiding when arbitrariness is read as being about what the beliefs are based on?). That is also what we are denying to be able to do when we work with an unordered representor.
Taking ex post neartermism as an empirical stance, it lives in the representor. I’d read having an overall (as opposed to being in one probability distribution in the representor) 10% credence in it as: For any options A and B and for any probability distribution in the representor, propositions that are over, say, 100 years away are the same with 10% chance. That is to say that if you believe 10% in ex post neartermism, that is just what utilitarianism is for you. There is no separate empirically non-neartermist utilitarianism to consider before neartermist utilitarianism.
In contrast, it seems like you are interested in considering those as separate probability distributions in order: take p_non-near and p_near. Then you could do the filtering indexed on those two and get the action guidance from being clueful in the near term. However, this would imply having lexical order between those which is not compatible with having cardinal credence between them: having 10% credence in p_near would imply collapsing those into p_mix=0.1*p_near+0.9*p_non-near and we get the thing I said in the previous paragraph.
All this is to say that these three are incompatible: (1) the difference is empirical, (2) they are separate (in the sense that you could condition on the other and be clueful) and (3) you have cardinal credence between them. Just having (1) and (2) together is possible but that requires the structure in the empirical space to separate them. Hill’s confidence ranking stuff (see footnote 14) and the open question I mentioned are related to this.
On normative views being privileged units: Do you mean as privileged over carving up the empirical space into units? If so I’d read that point as “Why use normative views as the units instead of empirical units?”. Again, if we do have a unique way to carve up the empirical space in a meaningful way, I think that is worth doing. Also, the parity between carving the normative space and carving the empirical space doesn’t bite for LF like it might for MNB: Taking the parts of the normative space that have lexicality between them isn’t really carving it into units. Lexicality already carves them and we just use that. If there is no lexicality, we don’t have the units.
Second:
I’d think of beauty as a part of a rank that orders options based on just general vibes-based aesthetic stuff. Everything with what I’d consider to be “harder” normative content is above that rank (like welfare, deontology, virtue and even some vibes-based self interest). I also don’t really have anything that would come after the rank involving beauty.
Glad to see this posted! :) Two thoughts.
First, say i) I have a ~10% credence in ex post neartermism (Vasco’s view that our impact washes out, ex post, after say 100 years) being correct, and ii) I am clueful conditional on ex post neartermism + utilitarianism. I cannot use LF to act in accordance with ex post neartermism. It’s empirical, not normative. Instead, LF tells me to do whatever increases beauty (or whatever clueful normative view comes after utilitarianism). That’s weird, because I find ex post neartermism + utilitarianism infinitely more plausible than valuing beauty, and both are action-guiding. Why is the move to a lower-ranked value like beauty more legitimate than moving to a utilitarianism conditional on ex post neartermism? I fail to see how normative views are privileged units.
Second:
But do you genuinely lexically prefer beauty over whatever comes next?
Thanks, these are good points to clarify.
First:
I don’t think empirical neartermism exists separately in a way that you could move onto it from non-neartermism. Doing that requires carving up the empirical space into an ordering which I don’t know how to do (see this open question: How could the intuition “Less arbitrary parts of beliefs could be lexically more important than more arbitrary parts and that could be used for filtering” be made precise and action guiding when arbitrariness is read as being about what the beliefs are based on?). That is also what we are denying to be able to do when we work with an unordered representor.
Taking ex post neartermism as an empirical stance, it lives in the representor. I’d read having an overall (as opposed to being in one probability distribution in the representor) 10% credence in it as: For any options A and B and for any probability distribution in the representor, propositions that are over, say, 100 years away are the same with 10% chance. That is to say that if you believe 10% in ex post neartermism, that is just what utilitarianism is for you. There is no separate empirically non-neartermist utilitarianism to consider before neartermist utilitarianism.
In contrast, it seems like you are interested in considering those as separate probability distributions in order: take p_non-near and p_near. Then you could do the filtering indexed on those two and get the action guidance from being clueful in the near term. However, this would imply having lexical order between those which is not compatible with having cardinal credence between them: having 10% credence in p_near would imply collapsing those into p_mix=0.1*p_near+0.9*p_non-near and we get the thing I said in the previous paragraph.
All this is to say that these three are incompatible: (1) the difference is empirical, (2) they are separate (in the sense that you could condition on the other and be clueful) and (3) you have cardinal credence between them. Just having (1) and (2) together is possible but that requires the structure in the empirical space to separate them. Hill’s confidence ranking stuff (see footnote 14) and the open question I mentioned are related to this.
On normative views being privileged units: Do you mean as privileged over carving up the empirical space into units? If so I’d read that point as “Why use normative views as the units instead of empirical units?”. Again, if we do have a unique way to carve up the empirical space in a meaningful way, I think that is worth doing. Also, the parity between carving the normative space and carving the empirical space doesn’t bite for LF like it might for MNB: Taking the parts of the normative space that have lexicality between them isn’t really carving it into units. Lexicality already carves them and we just use that. If there is no lexicality, we don’t have the units.
Second:
I’d think of beauty as a part of a rank that orders options based on just general vibes-based aesthetic stuff. Everything with what I’d consider to be “harder” normative content is above that rank (like welfare, deontology, virtue and even some vibes-based self interest). I also don’t really have anything that would come after the rank involving beauty.