Got it. The tricky thing seems to be that sensitivity to stakes is an obvious virtue in some circumstances; and (intuitively) a mistake in others. Not clear to me what marks that difference, though. Note also that maximising expected utility allows for decisions to be dictated by low-credence/likelihood states/events. That’s normally intuitively fine, but sometimes leads to ‘unfairness’ — e.g. St. Petersburg Paradox and Pascal’s wager / mugging.
I’m not entirely sure what you’re getting at re the envelopes, but that’s probably me missing something obvious. To make the analogy clearer: swap out monetary payouts with morally relevant outcomes, such that holding A at the end of the game causes outcome O1 and holding B causes O2. Suppose you’re uncertain between T1 and T2. T1 says O1 is morally bad but O2 is permissible, and vice-versa. Instead of paying to switch, you can choose to do something which is slightly wrong on both T1 and T2, but wrong enough that doing it >10 times is worse than O1 and O2 on both theories. Again, it looks like the sortition model is virtually guaranteed to recommend taking a course of action which is far worse than sticking to either envelope on either T1 or T2 — by constantly switching and causing a large number of minor wrongs.
But agreed that we should be uncertain about the best approach to moral uncertainty!
Got it. The tricky thing seems to be that sensitivity to stakes is an obvious virtue in some circumstances; and (intuitively) a mistake in others. Not clear to me what marks that difference, though. Note also that maximising expected utility allows for decisions to be dictated by low-credence/likelihood states/events. That’s normally intuitively fine, but sometimes leads to ‘unfairness’ — e.g. St. Petersburg Paradox and Pascal’s wager / mugging.
I’m not entirely sure what you’re getting at re the envelopes, but that’s probably me missing something obvious. To make the analogy clearer: swap out monetary payouts with morally relevant outcomes, such that holding A at the end of the game causes outcome O1 and holding B causes O2. Suppose you’re uncertain between T1 and T2. T1 says O1 is morally bad but O2 is permissible, and vice-versa. Instead of paying to switch, you can choose to do something which is slightly wrong on both T1 and T2, but wrong enough that doing it >10 times is worse than O1 and O2 on both theories. Again, it looks like the sortition model is virtually guaranteed to recommend taking a course of action which is far worse than sticking to either envelope on either T1 or T2 — by constantly switching and causing a large number of minor wrongs.
But agreed that we should be uncertain about the best approach to moral uncertainty!