The question often comes up how we should make decisions under epistemic uncertainty and normative diversity of opinion. Since I need to make such decisions every day, I had to develop a personal system, however inchoative, to assist me.
A concrete (or granite) pyramid
My personal system can be thought of like a pyramid.
At the top sits some sort of measurement of success. It’s highly abstract and impractical. Let’s call it the axiology. This is really a collection of all axiologies I relate to, including the amount of frustrated preferences and suffering across our world history. This also deals with hairy questions such as how to weigh Everett branches morally and infinite ethics.
Below that sits a kind of mission statement. Let’s call it the ethical theory. It’s just as abstract, but it is opinionated about the direction in which to push our world history. For example, it may desire a reduction in suffering, but for others this floor needn’t be consequentialist in flavor.
Both of these abstract floors of the pyramid are held up by a mess of principles and heuristics at the ground floor level to guide the actual implementation.
The ground floor
The ground floor of principles and heuristics is really the most interesting part for anyone who has to act in the world, so I won’t further explain the top two floors.
The principles and heuristics should be expected to be messy. That is, I think, because they are by necessity the result of an intersubjective process of negotiation and moral trade (positive-sum compromise) with all the other agents and their preferences. (This should probably include acausal moral trades like Evidential Cooperation in Large Worlds.)
It should also be expected to be messy because these principles and heuristics have to satisfy all sorts of awkward criteria:
They have to inspire cooperation or at least not generate overwhelming opposition.
They have to be easily communicable so people at least don’t misunderstand what you’re trying to achieve and call the police on you. Ideally so people will understand your goal well enough that they want to join you.
They have to be rapidly actionable, sometimes for split second decisions.
They have to be viable under imperfect information.
They have to be psychologically sustainable for a lifetime.
They have to avoid violating laws.
And many more.
Three types of freedom
But really that leaves us still a lot of freedom (for better or worse):
There are countless things that we can do that are highly impactful and hardly violate anyone’s preferences or expectations.
There are also plenty of things that don’t violate any preferences or expectations once we get to explain them.
Finally, there are many opportunities for positive-sum moral trade.
These suggest a particular stance toward other activists:
If someone is trying to achieve the same thing you’re trying to achieve, maybe you can collaborate.
If someone is trying to achieve something other than what you’re trying to achieve, but you think their goals are valuable, don’t stand in their way. In particular, it may sometimes feel like doing nothing (to further or hinder their cause) is a form of “not standing in their way.” But if your peers are actually collaborating with them to some extent, doing nothing (or collaborating less) can cause others to also reduce their collaboration and can prevent key threshold effects from taking hold. So the true neutral position is to try to understand how much you need to collaborate toward the valuable goal so it would not have been achieved sooner without you. This is usually very cheap to do and has a chance to get runaway threshold effects rolling.
If someone is trying to achieve something that you consider neutral, the above may still apply to some extent because perhaps you can still be friends. And for reasons of Evidential Cooperation in Large Worlds. (Maybe you’ll find that their (to you) neutral thing is easy to achieve here and that other agents like them will collaborate back elsewhere where your goal is easy to achieve.)
Finally, if someone is trying achieve something that you disapprove of… Well, that’s not my metier, temperamentally, but this is where compromise can generate gains from moral trade.
Very few examples
In my experience, principles and heuristics are best identified by chatting with friends and generalizing from their various intuitions.
Charitable donations are total anarchy. Mostly, you can just donate wherever the fluff you want, and (unless you’re Open Phil) no one will throw stones through your windows in retaliation. You can just optimize directly for your goals – except, Evidential Cooperation in Large Worlds will still make strong recommendations here, but what they are is still a bit underexplored.
Even if you’re not an animal welfare activist yourself, you’re still well-advised to cooperate with behavior change to avert animal suffering to the extent expected by your peers. (And certainly to avoiding inventing phony reasons to excuse your violation of these expectations. These might be even more detrimental to moral progress and rationality waterline.)
If you want to spend time with someone but they behave outrageously unempathetically toward you or someone else (e.g., say something like “Your suffering is nothing compared to the suffering of X” to their face), you should rather cut all ties with them even though, strictly speaking, this does not imply that no positive-sum trade is possible with them.
Trying to systematically put people in powerful positions can arouse suspicion and actually make it harder to put people in powerful positions. Trying to systematically put people into the sorts of positions they find fulfilling might put as many people in powerful positions and make their lives easier too. (Or training highly conscientious people in how to dare to accept responsibility so it’s not just those who don’t care who self-select into powerful positions.)
And hundreds more…
Various non-consequentialist ethical theories can come in handy here to generate further useful principles and heuristics. That is probably because they are attempts at generalizing from the intuitions of certain authors, which puts them almost on par (to the extent to which these authors are relateable to you) with generalizations from the intuitions of your friends.
(If you find my writing style hard to read, you can ask Claude to rephrase the message into a style that works for you.)
My current practical ethics
The question often comes up how we should make decisions under epistemic uncertainty and normative diversity of opinion. Since I need to make such decisions every day, I had to develop a personal system, however inchoative, to assist me.
A concrete (or granite) pyramid
My personal system can be thought of like a pyramid.
At the top sits some sort of measurement of success. It’s highly abstract and impractical. Let’s call it the axiology. This is really a collection of all axiologies I relate to, including the amount of frustrated preferences and suffering across our world history. This also deals with hairy questions such as how to weigh Everett branches morally and infinite ethics.
Below that sits a kind of mission statement. Let’s call it the ethical theory. It’s just as abstract, but it is opinionated about the direction in which to push our world history. For example, it may desire a reduction in suffering, but for others this floor needn’t be consequentialist in flavor.
Both of these abstract floors of the pyramid are held up by a mess of principles and heuristics at the ground floor level to guide the actual implementation.
The ground floor
The ground floor of principles and heuristics is really the most interesting part for anyone who has to act in the world, so I won’t further explain the top two floors.
The principles and heuristics should be expected to be messy. That is, I think, because they are by necessity the result of an intersubjective process of negotiation and moral trade (positive-sum compromise) with all the other agents and their preferences. (This should probably include acausal moral trades like Evidential Cooperation in Large Worlds.)
It should also be expected to be messy because these principles and heuristics have to satisfy all sorts of awkward criteria:
They have to inspire cooperation or at least not generate overwhelming opposition.
They have to be easily communicable so people at least don’t misunderstand what you’re trying to achieve and call the police on you. Ideally so people will understand your goal well enough that they want to join you.
They have to be rapidly actionable, sometimes for split second decisions.
They have to be viable under imperfect information.
They have to be psychologically sustainable for a lifetime.
They have to avoid violating laws.
And many more.
Three types of freedom
But really that leaves us still a lot of freedom (for better or worse):
There are countless things that we can do that are highly impactful and hardly violate anyone’s preferences or expectations.
There are also plenty of things that don’t violate any preferences or expectations once we get to explain them.
Finally, there are many opportunities for positive-sum moral trade.
These suggest a particular stance toward other activists:
If someone is trying to achieve the same thing you’re trying to achieve, maybe you can collaborate.
If someone is trying to achieve something other than what you’re trying to achieve, but you think their goals are valuable, don’t stand in their way. In particular, it may sometimes feel like doing nothing (to further or hinder their cause) is a form of “not standing in their way.” But if your peers are actually collaborating with them to some extent, doing nothing (or collaborating less) can cause others to also reduce their collaboration and can prevent key threshold effects from taking hold. So the true neutral position is to try to understand how much you need to collaborate toward the valuable goal so it would not have been achieved sooner without you. This is usually very cheap to do and has a chance to get runaway threshold effects rolling.
If someone is trying to achieve something that you consider neutral, the above may still apply to some extent because perhaps you can still be friends. And for reasons of Evidential Cooperation in Large Worlds. (Maybe you’ll find that their (to you) neutral thing is easy to achieve here and that other agents like them will collaborate back elsewhere where your goal is easy to achieve.)
Finally, if someone is trying achieve something that you disapprove of… Well, that’s not my metier, temperamentally, but this is where compromise can generate gains from moral trade.
Very few examples
In my experience, principles and heuristics are best identified by chatting with friends and generalizing from their various intuitions.
Charitable donations are total anarchy. Mostly, you can just donate wherever the fluff you want, and (unless you’re Open Phil) no one will throw stones through your windows in retaliation. You can just optimize directly for your goals – except, Evidential Cooperation in Large Worlds will still make strong recommendations here, but what they are is still a bit underexplored.
Even if you’re not an animal welfare activist yourself, you’re still well-advised to cooperate with behavior change to avert animal suffering to the extent expected by your peers. (And certainly to avoiding inventing phony reasons to excuse your violation of these expectations. These might be even more detrimental to moral progress and rationality waterline.)
If you want to spend time with someone but they behave outrageously unempathetically toward you or someone else (e.g., say something like “Your suffering is nothing compared to the suffering of X” to their face), you should rather cut all ties with them even though, strictly speaking, this does not imply that no positive-sum trade is possible with them.
Trying to systematically put people in powerful positions can arouse suspicion and actually make it harder to put people in powerful positions. Trying to systematically put people into the sorts of positions they find fulfilling might put as many people in powerful positions and make their lives easier too. (Or training highly conscientious people in how to dare to accept responsibility so it’s not just those who don’t care who self-select into powerful positions.)
And hundreds more…
Various non-consequentialist ethical theories can come in handy here to generate further useful principles and heuristics. That is probably because they are attempts at generalizing from the intuitions of certain authors, which puts them almost on par (to the extent to which these authors are relateable to you) with generalizations from the intuitions of your friends.
(If you find my writing style hard to read, you can ask Claude to rephrase the message into a style that works for you.)