Thereâs something that bothers me with bracketing, that Iâd be interested to hear a reply to. It seems to affect bottom up bracketing as you have presented it here. I am unsure if it affects top down bracketing as well, but it sounds like it might.
Suppose I have an action available to me that will have the following 3 effects, impossible to disentangle:
I get a tasty snack right away.
Some broken glass is left somewhere. I am confident it will remain buried for 100 years, but after that I think it is highly likely to resurface and cause someone a nasty injury, due to where it is located.
Some effect on the long term future which I think will be significant in expectation, but which I am clueless about the sign of.
My understanding is that bracketing would say not only is this act permissable, but that I should do it. This is because it benefits me, and I am clueless about its effects on every other beneficiary (the person who is injured by the glass in 100 years may well be compensated by a benefit from 3).
But this feels wrong! If I just consider the effects that I am not clueless about, the bad seems to clearly outweigh the good. The same intuition that motivated bracketing in the first place would seem to say that this act is wrong.
I can buy the plausibility of a theory that says it is indeterminate whether I should take this act or not, due to the uncertainty bundled up in 3. And I can buy a theory which says the act is wrong (since that is what my intuition strongly points towards). But a theory that says it is wrong not to take this act feels like it has gone wrong somewhere.
Apologies if this is naive and has already been addressed at length somewhere. I would be interested to know how proponents of bracketing respond to this.
I second Impartial Partiallyâs answer, but figured Iâd address another issue here re presentation which stacks the deck in one direction. I think it will seem less intuitively objectionable if you name particular ways someone at risk of the broken glass could benefit from 3, and separate those into separate points, rather than (fairly arbitrarily, imo) grouping all harms and benefits together in 3 besides 1 and 2.
It feels hard to come up with simple neat examples of clueless effects, which is why I left it ambiguous in my original question. But I think we can make it more precise without shifting the intuition (or at least my intuition).
Letâs say effect 3 is that your act will shift the probability of dystopian lock in (a many thousand year dictatorship) in a direction that you are clueless about.
I think itâs helpful to separate positive impact and negative impact causal paths specifically. By still grouping them together in 3, it could stack the deck in favour of ignoring them together, rather than say grouping different items together and ignoring them together. So, instead, we could have something like:
I get a tasty snack right away.
Some broken glass is left somewhere. I am confident it will remain buried for 100 years, but after that I think it is highly likely to resurface and cause someone a nasty injury, due to where it is located.
increase the probability of a dystopian lock in via a set of causal paths X.
decrease the probability of a dystopian lock in via a set of causal paths Y.
decrease the probability of a dystopian lock in via a set of causal paths Z.
other good things.
other bad things.
And, of course, we could divide up each of 3-7 into further items. Or we could combine different subsets of them into one item.
So, my question would be, how should we divide and group these items together to decide which to ignore, and why?
I think itâs difficult to give a complete answer to your question without essentially drafting a fresh entry to the cluelessness critiques competition. I accept that it is not a solution to the general problem to simply say âjust ignore the effects/âcausal pathways youâre clueless aboutâ, because as you point out, in general, we can change the way we group these effects, and that may change what gets ignored. Iirc there is a section arguing this point clearly in digiovannis sequence.
My example was not meant to be taken as saying âlook, there is this obviously correct method for approaching these problems that bracketing disagrees withâ. It was meant to be taken only as âin this very contrived example, bracketingâs recommendations seem to clash with the intuition that motivates bracketing in the first placeâ (maybe I am going wrong by thinking it motivated by intuition)
In my contrived example, there are no other good things and other bad things. The effects are, by assumption, just (splitting positive and negative):
I get a tasty snack right away.
Broken glass left somewhere and injures someone.
Dystopian lock in triggered that otherwise would not have happened.
Dystopian lock in averted that otherwise would have happened.
Effect 1 occurs with probability 1. Effect 2 occurs with probability near 1 (if imprecise, the interval is small and near 1).
Effects 3 and 4 both occur with only very small probability (and are clearly mutually exclusive as well). And the probabilities are imprecise. But the upper limit of each imprecise interval is large enough to produce value in expectation that outweighs 1 and 2. And the intervals overlap, which makes the sign of the total expected value indeterminate.
This is I think a complete specification of the problem (we donât need to worry about the causal pathways?). And my intuition still strongly points to one of these conclusions being acceptable:
It is indeterminate whether we should want this act to happen.
We should prefer that this act does not happen.
But bracketing advocates neither of these, so feels wrong.
If you push me on what it is that lets me group 3 and 4 together so that I can ignore them, rather than grouping 2, 3, and 4 together (as bracketing does) I guess I would point to the degree of imprecision in the probability estimates, which feels like the more relevant factor than which person is feeling the effect.
Hi Tobyââthanks, itâs a good question. If you expected your broken glass to badly hurt a person tomorrow, I suppose you wouldnât feel clueless about the net effect on the personâs lifetime wellbeing. If so, why feel clueless if the nasty injury occurs later? If injuries from broken glass in the ground are still happening in that future society, it canât have changed that much. (Otherwise, why assume that the broken glass would cause harm, rather than nothing or a benefit, in the first place?)
But suppose we are clueless about the net effect on the injured personâs lifetime wellbeing. In that case, if we âaskâ the person (from our ex ante perspective, given our imprecise credences) whether she prefers that we remove the glass rather than leaving it in the ground, her welfare-based answer is âno.â Consequently, it would seem adequate to bracket her out and bracket you in (from a âconsequentialistâ point of view). The person supplies no contrastive reason favoring either option; you do.
I should also say, though, that not leaving the glass in the ground seems quite overdetermined by the reasons we have. E.g., deontological reasons not to actively cause serious foreseeable harm to a person (or violate their right to bodily integrity), and reasons not to risk doing so, provide a pretty clear verdict here. (Such reasons are relevant when it comes to actively causing the existence of future people, too.) You canât cut a person without their consent and then (over)compensate them for it.
But suppose we are clueless about the net effect on the injured personâs lifetime wellbeing. In that case, if we âaskâ the person (from our ex ante perspective, given our imprecise credences) whether she prefers that we remove the glass rather than leaving it in the ground, her welfare-based answer is âno.â Consequently, it would seem adequate to bracket her out and bracket you in (from a âconsequentialistâ point of view). The person supplies no contrastive reason favoring either option; you do.
Just to check: then we should also bracket me out in the snack case, right? I presumably donât know that eating the tasty snack determinately improves my lifetime welfare overall. So your version of bracketing wouldnât actually recommend #1, as Toby assumed. It would remain silent in the decision situation he depicted.
To be action-guiding, person-based bracketing requires âknowingâ the net effect on the lifetime well-being of at least one (lifetime) person, right?
I think we can just add that I am confident effect 3 will not become relevant until after I am dead. I didnât explicitly state that assumption, but that was what I had in mind. Then we get the problematic conclusion I was worried about I think?
This also raises another interesting question though, which is how bracketing interacts with personal identity being fuzzy. If bracketing cares about aggregating the effects on one âpersonâ then how do we deal with situations involving branching personal identity? I would have thought you would have to frame it in terms of âperson momentsâ, rather than âpersonsâ, in order to be coherent?
I donât think I agree that her welfare based answer is obviously ânoâ. If I put myself in her shoes, I think I would choose not to be cut by the glass.
I am considering whether something should happen that will:
Cause me a nasty injury with broken glass.
Have some other larger impact on my welfare that I am clueless about the sign of.
Why is it incoherent for me to say:
âThe part of the effect that I am not clueless about is very bad, so I prefer that it does not happen.â
..?
It is not clear to me why this is wrong. I admit it is also not clear that this reasoning is coherent.This is a confusing thing to reason about. But I think claiming I can have no welfare based reason for preferring one outcome here needs more justification, it should not just be asserted (is this not ultimately the kind of question that this whole essay competition is about?)
If I was in this situation, I think I would choose not to be cut by the glass, for welfare based reasons. If this choice meant that someone else missed out on a tasty snack, I would not mind a theory that told me it was indeterminate whether my choice was still the best one. But if a theory tells me that giving the other person the snack is the strictly better choice, then this feels wrong.
I donât think I agree that her welfare based answer is obviously ânoâ. If I put myself in her shoes, I think I would choose not to be cut by the glass.
I think Impartial was assuming that she should be clueless about the effect on her long-term well-being for similar reasons why we should be clueless about the impact of our actions on the long-term future (premise which we assume if weâre considering bracketing in the first place)[1]. You can always find many reasons why the nasty cut would actually have good overall consequences (e.g., teaches her not to walk barefoot and she avoids potential future far nastier cuts), and our best guess on what reasons for and against sum up to does not seem truth-tracking. I struggle to see how one could defend that we know the nasty cut will overall harm her while holding that we should suspend judgment on the sign of any action A vs B on the overall future.
I think the real potential problem, though, is what you raise in this other comment: why should the units be âlifelong personsâ rather than, say, person-moments? (See also this related thread started by Jesse.) Arguably, the reason why you would choose not to be cut by the glass if you were her, is because you are bracketing in near-term you (who is clearly harmed) and bracketing out longer-term you (where youâre clueless). And, indeed, I curently fail to see how this move is any less warranted than what Impartial proposes, and the two moves are incompatible/âcontradictory.
Hi both, thanksââyes, I agree this might justify Tobyâs intuition: Person-moments, or âpoints of viewâ that a person occupies (cf. Pettigrewâs lecture 6 here), might be the appropriate basic objects of moral concern. I am sympathetic to some of the arguments for this view (e.g., drawing on the apparent existence of intrapersonal moral demands). It might also help us avoid the cluelessness problem potentially posed by prudential longtermism: Take the snack now, bracket your far future âselves.â
So my response is this: I think we should first try and see how far we can get with persons as the basic objects of altruistic concern, for a variety of reasons. But feel free to insert âperson-momentâ or âpoint of view occupied by a personâ where my post says âpersonâ; youâll get person-moment-centered bottom-up bracketing, or personal-point-of-view-centered bottom-up bracketing, based on exactly parallel arguments. Importantly, the shift to person-moments or points of view does not render the theory âimpersonalâ or âaggregate-first.â It just makes the individual, separate persons we are concerned with smaller.
feel free to insert âperson-momentâ or âpoint of view occupied by a personâ where my post says âpersonâ; youâll get person-moment-centered bottom-up bracketing, or personal-point-of-view-centered bottom-up bracketing, based on exactly parallel arguments.
Iâve actually been confused about why Kollin et al. (2025) and Clifton (2025) never even mentioned something like âperson-momentsâ as potential âlocations of valueâ. After a quick look, it seems theyâve been considered in infinite ethics, and I didnât find any argument for why theyâre clearly not suited as serious candidates.
Maybe any way of individuating person-moments was considered too arbitrary, or thereâs some reason, that does not come to mind rn, why bracketing over those would fail to provide action guidance?
thereâs some reason, that does not come to mind rn, why bracketing over those would fail to provide action guidance?
The worry is very similar to the worry about bracketing on persons: identity of person-moments is super fragile.
Letâs say I donate to AMF. There are some far-future person-moments for which I am clueful that donating to AMF seriously harms them, because these person-moments only exist in the possible worlds corresponding to [insert far-future backfire risk here]. And we can say the same substituting in âbenefitsâ for âharmsâ. We then end up a maximal bracket-set on which the donation is good, and one on which the donation is bad.
(If this needs more unpacking, Iâm happy to do that!)
When you suppose here that consequentialist bracketing implies neartermism, are you conditioning on space-time region bracketing? (Which is arguably more action-guiding than any form of person-based bracketing?)
Hi Anthony, thanksââunpacking the worry and making it precise would be helpful, yes (especially as it applies to bottom-up bracketing). Perhaps my discussion with Michael can help locate potential disagreements. I just added a few thoughts.
Award explanation: Iâm awarding this comment from Jim although I could have awarded many of his othersâheâs bringing loads of value in his comments this week, de-confusing conversations and responding to posts with helpful clarifying questions. Thanks Jim!
Thereâs something that bothers me with bracketing, that Iâd be interested to hear a reply to. It seems to affect bottom up bracketing as you have presented it here. I am unsure if it affects top down bracketing as well, but it sounds like it might.
Suppose I have an action available to me that will have the following 3 effects, impossible to disentangle:
I get a tasty snack right away.
Some broken glass is left somewhere. I am confident it will remain buried for 100 years, but after that I think it is highly likely to resurface and cause someone a nasty injury, due to where it is located.
Some effect on the long term future which I think will be significant in expectation, but which I am clueless about the sign of.
My understanding is that bracketing would say not only is this act permissable, but that I should do it. This is because it benefits me, and I am clueless about its effects on every other beneficiary (the person who is injured by the glass in 100 years may well be compensated by a benefit from 3).
But this feels wrong! If I just consider the effects that I am not clueless about, the bad seems to clearly outweigh the good. The same intuition that motivated bracketing in the first place would seem to say that this act is wrong.
I can buy the plausibility of a theory that says it is indeterminate whether I should take this act or not, due to the uncertainty bundled up in 3. And I can buy a theory which says the act is wrong (since that is what my intuition strongly points towards). But a theory that says it is wrong not to take this act feels like it has gone wrong somewhere.
Apologies if this is naive and has already been addressed at length somewhere. I would be interested to know how proponents of bracketing respond to this.
I second Impartial Partiallyâs answer, but figured Iâd address another issue here re presentation which stacks the deck in one direction. I think it will seem less intuitively objectionable if you name particular ways someone at risk of the broken glass could benefit from 3, and separate those into separate points, rather than (fairly arbitrarily, imo) grouping all harms and benefits together in 3 besides 1 and 2.
Thatâs a fair challenge.
It feels hard to come up with simple neat examples of clueless effects, which is why I left it ambiguous in my original question. But I think we can make it more precise without shifting the intuition (or at least my intuition).
Letâs say effect 3 is that your act will shift the probability of dystopian lock in (a many thousand year dictatorship) in a direction that you are clueless about.
My intuition still feels exactly the same.
I think itâs helpful to separate positive impact and negative impact causal paths specifically. By still grouping them together in 3, it could stack the deck in favour of ignoring them together, rather than say grouping different items together and ignoring them together. So, instead, we could have something like:
I get a tasty snack right away.
Some broken glass is left somewhere. I am confident it will remain buried for 100 years, but after that I think it is highly likely to resurface and cause someone a nasty injury, due to where it is located.
increase the probability of a dystopian lock in via a set of causal paths X.
decrease the probability of a dystopian lock in via a set of causal paths Y.
decrease the probability of a dystopian lock in via a set of causal paths Z.
other good things.
other bad things.
And, of course, we could divide up each of 3-7 into further items. Or we could combine different subsets of them into one item.
So, my question would be, how should we divide and group these items together to decide which to ignore, and why?
I think itâs difficult to give a complete answer to your question without essentially drafting a fresh entry to the cluelessness critiques competition. I accept that it is not a solution to the general problem to simply say âjust ignore the effects/âcausal pathways youâre clueless aboutâ, because as you point out, in general, we can change the way we group these effects, and that may change what gets ignored. Iirc there is a section arguing this point clearly in digiovannis sequence.
My example was not meant to be taken as saying âlook, there is this obviously correct method for approaching these problems that bracketing disagrees withâ. It was meant to be taken only as âin this very contrived example, bracketingâs recommendations seem to clash with the intuition that motivates bracketing in the first placeâ (maybe I am going wrong by thinking it motivated by intuition)
In my contrived example, there are no other good things and other bad things. The effects are, by assumption, just (splitting positive and negative):
I get a tasty snack right away.
Broken glass left somewhere and injures someone.
Dystopian lock in triggered that otherwise would not have happened.
Dystopian lock in averted that otherwise would have happened.
Effect 1 occurs with probability 1. Effect 2 occurs with probability near 1 (if imprecise, the interval is small and near 1).
Effects 3 and 4 both occur with only very small probability (and are clearly mutually exclusive as well). And the probabilities are imprecise. But the upper limit of each imprecise interval is large enough to produce value in expectation that outweighs 1 and 2. And the intervals overlap, which makes the sign of the total expected value indeterminate.
This is I think a complete specification of the problem (we donât need to worry about the causal pathways?). And my intuition still strongly points to one of these conclusions being acceptable:
It is indeterminate whether we should want this act to happen.
We should prefer that this act does not happen.
But bracketing advocates neither of these, so feels wrong.
If you push me on what it is that lets me group 3 and 4 together so that I can ignore them, rather than grouping 2, 3, and 4 together (as bracketing does) I guess I would point to the degree of imprecision in the probability estimates, which feels like the more relevant factor than which person is feeling the effect.
Hi Tobyââthanks, itâs a good question. If you expected your broken glass to badly hurt a person tomorrow, I suppose you wouldnât feel clueless about the net effect on the personâs lifetime wellbeing. If so, why feel clueless if the nasty injury occurs later? If injuries from broken glass in the ground are still happening in that future society, it canât have changed that much. (Otherwise, why assume that the broken glass would cause harm, rather than nothing or a benefit, in the first place?)
But suppose we are clueless about the net effect on the injured personâs lifetime wellbeing. In that case, if we âaskâ the person (from our ex ante perspective, given our imprecise credences) whether she prefers that we remove the glass rather than leaving it in the ground, her welfare-based answer is âno.â Consequently, it would seem adequate to bracket her out and bracket you in (from a âconsequentialistâ point of view). The person supplies no contrastive reason favoring either option; you do.
I should also say, though, that not leaving the glass in the ground seems quite overdetermined by the reasons we have. E.g., deontological reasons not to actively cause serious foreseeable harm to a person (or violate their right to bodily integrity), and reasons not to risk doing so, provide a pretty clear verdict here. (Such reasons are relevant when it comes to actively causing the existence of future people, too.) You canât cut a person without their consent and then (over)compensate them for it.
Just to check: then we should also bracket me out in the snack case, right? I presumably donât know that eating the tasty snack determinately improves my lifetime welfare overall. So your version of bracketing wouldnât actually recommend #1, as Toby assumed. It would remain silent in the decision situation he depicted.
To be action-guiding, person-based bracketing requires âknowingâ the net effect on the lifetime well-being of at least one (lifetime) person, right?
Interesting!
I think we can just add that I am confident effect 3 will not become relevant until after I am dead. I didnât explicitly state that assumption, but that was what I had in mind. Then we get the problematic conclusion I was worried about I think?
This also raises another interesting question though, which is how bracketing interacts with personal identity being fuzzy. If bracketing cares about aggregating the effects on one âpersonâ then how do we deal with situations involving branching personal identity? I would have thought you would have to frame it in terms of âperson momentsâ, rather than âpersonsâ, in order to be coherent?
Thanks for the reply!
I donât think I agree that her welfare based answer is obviously ânoâ. If I put myself in her shoes, I think I would choose not to be cut by the glass.
I am considering whether something should happen that will:
Cause me a nasty injury with broken glass.
Have some other larger impact on my welfare that I am clueless about the sign of.
Why is it incoherent for me to say:
âThe part of the effect that I am not clueless about is very bad, so I prefer that it does not happen.â
..?
It is not clear to me why this is wrong. I admit it is also not clear that this reasoning is coherent. This is a confusing thing to reason about. But I think claiming I can have no welfare based reason for preferring one outcome here needs more justification, it should not just be asserted (is this not ultimately the kind of question that this whole essay competition is about?)
If I was in this situation, I think I would choose not to be cut by the glass, for welfare based reasons. If this choice meant that someone else missed out on a tasty snack, I would not mind a theory that told me it was indeterminate whether my choice was still the best one. But if a theory tells me that giving the other person the snack is the strictly better choice, then this feels wrong.
I think Impartial was assuming that she should be clueless about the effect on her long-term well-being for similar reasons why we should be clueless about the impact of our actions on the long-term future (premise which we assume if weâre considering bracketing in the first place)[1]. You can always find many reasons why the nasty cut would actually have good overall consequences (e.g., teaches her not to walk barefoot and she avoids potential future far nastier cuts), and our best guess on what reasons for and against sum up to does not seem truth-tracking. I struggle to see how one could defend that we know the nasty cut will overall harm her while holding that we should suspend judgment on the sign of any action A vs B on the overall future.
I think the real potential problem, though, is what you raise in this other comment: why should the units be âlifelong personsâ rather than, say, person-moments? (See also this related thread started by Jesse.) Arguably, the reason why you would choose not to be cut by the glass if you were her, is because you are bracketing in near-term you (who is clearly harmed) and bracketing out longer-term you (where youâre clueless). And, indeed, I curently fail to see how this move is any less warranted than what Impartial proposes, and the two moves are incompatible/âcontradictory.
If I refuse to work with this premise, then I should just do what I think is overall good and donât need bracketing. Problem solved.
Hi both, thanksââyes, I agree this might justify Tobyâs intuition: Person-moments, or âpoints of viewâ that a person occupies (cf. Pettigrewâs lecture 6 here), might be the appropriate basic objects of moral concern. I am sympathetic to some of the arguments for this view (e.g., drawing on the apparent existence of intrapersonal moral demands). It might also help us avoid the cluelessness problem potentially posed by prudential longtermism: Take the snack now, bracket your far future âselves.â
So my response is this: I think we should first try and see how far we can get with persons as the basic objects of altruistic concern, for a variety of reasons. But feel free to insert âperson-momentâ or âpoint of view occupied by a personâ where my post says âpersonâ; youâll get person-moment-centered bottom-up bracketing, or personal-point-of-view-centered bottom-up bracketing, based on exactly parallel arguments. Importantly, the shift to person-moments or points of view does not render the theory âimpersonalâ or âaggregate-first.â It just makes the individual, separate persons we are concerned with smaller.
Iâve actually been confused about why Kollin et al. (2025) and Clifton (2025) never even mentioned something like âperson-momentsâ as potential âlocations of valueâ. After a quick look, it seems theyâve been considered in infinite ethics, and I didnât find any argument for why theyâre clearly not suited as serious candidates.
Maybe any way of individuating person-moments was considered too arbitrary, or thereâs some reason, that does not come to mind rn, why bracketing over those would fail to provide action guidance?
The worry is very similar to the worry about bracketing on persons: identity of person-moments is super fragile.
Letâs say I donate to AMF. There are some far-future person-moments for which I am clueful that donating to AMF seriously harms them, because these person-moments only exist in the possible worlds corresponding to [insert far-future backfire risk here]. And we can say the same substituting in âbenefitsâ for âharmsâ. We then end up a maximal bracket-set on which the donation is good, and one on which the donation is bad.
(If this needs more unpacking, Iâm happy to do that!)
When you suppose here that consequentialist bracketing implies neartermism, are you conditioning on space-time region bracketing? (Which is arguably more action-guiding than any form of person-based bracketing?)
Yeah, spacetime bracketing or some more formally nebulous form of bracketing along the lines here.
Hi Anthony, thanksââunpacking the worry and making it precise would be helpful, yes (especially as it applies to bottom-up bracketing). Perhaps my discussion with Michael can help locate potential disagreements. I just added a few thoughts.
Award explanation: Iâm awarding this comment from Jim although I could have awarded many of his othersâheâs bringing loads of value in his comments this week, de-confusing conversations and responding to posts with helpful clarifying questions. Thanks Jim!