I think you highlight some potentially good pros for this approach and I can’t say I’ve thoroughly analyzed this approach. However, quite a few of those pros seem non-unique to this particular model of moral uncertainty vs. other frameworks that acknowledge uncertainty and try to weigh the significance of the scenarios against each other. For example, such models already have the pros related to “It stops a moral theory from dominating...,” “it makes you less fanatical,” etc. (but there are some seemingly unique “pros,” such as “It has no need for intertheoretic comparisons of value”).
Still, I am highly skeptical of such a model even in comparison to just simply “going with whatever you are most confident in” because of things like complexity (among other things). More importantly, I think this model has a few serious problems along the lines of failing to weight the significance of the situation and thus wouldn’t perform well under basic expected value tests (which you might have been getting at with your point about choosing theories with low “stake”): suppose your credences are 50% average utilitarian, 50% total utilitarian. You are presented with a situation where choice A mildly improves average utility such as by severely restricting some population’s growth rate (imagine it’s for animals)--but this is drastically bad from a total utilitarian viewpoint in comparison to choice B (do nothing / allow the population to rise). To use simple numbers, we could be talking about choice A = +5,-100 (utility points under “average, total”), vs. choice B = 0,0. If the decisionmaker is operating on average utilitarianism, it would be drastically bad. This is why (to my understanding), when your educated intuition says you have the time, knowledge, etc. to do some beneficial analysis, you should try to weight and compare the significance of the situations under different moral frameworks.
I think you highlight some potentially good pros for this approach and I can’t say I’ve thoroughly analyzed this approach. However, quite a few of those pros seem non-unique to this particular model of moral uncertainty vs. other frameworks that acknowledge uncertainty and try to weigh the significance of the scenarios against each other. For example, such models already have the pros related to “It stops a moral theory from dominating...,” “it makes you less fanatical,” etc. (but there are some seemingly unique “pros,” such as “It has no need for intertheoretic comparisons of value”).
Still, I am highly skeptical of such a model even in comparison to just simply “going with whatever you are most confident in” because of things like complexity (among other things). More importantly, I think this model has a few serious problems along the lines of failing to weight the significance of the situation and thus wouldn’t perform well under basic expected value tests (which you might have been getting at with your point about choosing theories with low “stake”): suppose your credences are 50% average utilitarian, 50% total utilitarian. You are presented with a situation where choice A mildly improves average utility such as by severely restricting some population’s growth rate (imagine it’s for animals)--but this is drastically bad from a total utilitarian viewpoint in comparison to choice B (do nothing / allow the population to rise). To use simple numbers, we could be talking about choice A = +5,-100 (utility points under “average, total”), vs. choice B = 0,0. If the decisionmaker is operating on average utilitarianism, it would be drastically bad. This is why (to my understanding), when your educated intuition says you have the time, knowledge, etc. to do some beneficial analysis, you should try to weight and compare the significance of the situations under different moral frameworks.