Ah, I wasn’t aware of the slides. I actually had a section discussing the distinction between IB and moral parliaments which I cut at the last minute because I wasn’t sure what to say. In the Greaves and Cotton-Barrett paper, they make no reference to moral parliaments. Newberry and Ord (2021) cite Greaves and Cotton-Barrett but don’t explain what they take the distinction between the moral parliament and bargaining theoretic approach to be.
Thinking about it now, both approaches capture the intuition we should imagine what would happen if we distributed resources to representatives of moral views and then some bargaining occurs. The differences appear to be in the specifics: do we allow agents to bargain over time vs only at an instance? Do we allow grand bargains vs restrict the discussion to a limited set of issues? What are the decision-making procedure and the disagreement point? What resources are awarded to the agents (i.e. votes vs money/time)?
One problem with the parliamentary approach, where we have to specify a voting procedure is, is how we could possibly justify one procedure over another. After all, to say it was right on the basis of some first-order moral theory would be question-begging.
Relatedly, as I note in a comment above, is that agents may well prefer to be able to engage in grand, life-long bargains than to be restricted (as Ord and Newberry suggest) to convening parliaments now and then to deal with particular issues. So we can see why agents, starting from something like a ‘veil of ignorance’, would not agree to it.
It’s for these reasons I suspect the internal bargaining version is superior. I suspect there would be more to say about this after further reflection.
Ah, I wasn’t aware of the slides. I actually had a section discussing the distinction between IB and moral parliaments which I cut at the last minute because I wasn’t sure what to say. In the Greaves and Cotton-Barrett paper, they make no reference to moral parliaments. Newberry and Ord (2021) cite Greaves and Cotton-Barrett but don’t explain what they take the distinction between the moral parliament and bargaining theoretic approach to be.
Thinking about it now, both approaches capture the intuition we should imagine what would happen if we distributed resources to representatives of moral views and then some bargaining occurs. The differences appear to be in the specifics: do we allow agents to bargain over time vs only at an instance? Do we allow grand bargains vs restrict the discussion to a limited set of issues? What are the decision-making procedure and the disagreement point? What resources are awarded to the agents (i.e. votes vs money/time)?
One problem with the parliamentary approach, where we have to specify a voting procedure is, is how we could possibly justify one procedure over another. After all, to say it was right on the basis of some first-order moral theory would be question-begging.
Relatedly, as I note in a comment above, is that agents may well prefer to be able to engage in grand, life-long bargains than to be restricted (as Ord and Newberry suggest) to convening parliaments now and then to deal with particular issues. So we can see why agents, starting from something like a ‘veil of ignorance’, would not agree to it.
It’s for these reasons I suspect the internal bargaining version is superior. I suspect there would be more to say about this after further reflection.