Thanks Anthony. Would it be fair to interpret your unawareness series as your steelman of OP’s post title, or as being relevant?
I couldn’t find on a quick look what decision-making approach you would (at least provisionally) endorse instead, bracketing maybe? For my own reference later:
Bracketing says to base our decisions on those consequences we are – in a precise sense – not clueless about, “bracketing out” the others. The idea is that the effects we’re clueless about should not override the obligations given to us by the benefits we aren’t clueless about, like the immediate benefits of malaria nets to the global poor. Thus bracketing could provide action-guidance in the face of cluelessness and in particular support neartermism.
… Take Mogensen’s (2020) example of deciding whether to donate to the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) or the Make-a-Wish Foundation (MAWF). As Mogensen argues, you’re clueless about the overall effects of donating to AMF vs. MAWF, due to their highly ambiguous effects on population dynamics, economic growth, resource usage, etc. You can come up with lots of asymmetrical effects each intervention has on total value, and you don’t have any principled way of weighing them up, but they still may swamp the immediate effects. Thus it seems that each of the available actions – Donate to AMF, Donate to MAWF, or Do Nothing – is permissible.
And yet, if you’re like me, you suspect that even an impartial consequentialist ought to choose AMF. For we aren’t clueless about the effects of our actions on the immediate beneficiaries! Restricting attention to those who would be prevented from contracting malaria by an AMF donation and the child who would be granted a wish by an MAWF donation, we can rank our actions by their expected total value: AMF MAWF Do Nothing. So my thought is, “Those immediately affected, who I’m not clueless about, give me a reason to Donate to AMF. It is true that, once I start accounting for more moral patients, I’ll become clueless about total value. But my cluelessness about this enlarged set of patients does not overridethe reasons given to me by the immediate beneficiaries. So, still, I’m required to Donate to AMF.” And that’s the essence of bracketing.
I would be particularly interested in how you think meta- and/or longtermist-oriented grantmaking could be improved by your work. I have not been very impressed by the reasoning behind some of these (sometimes quite large) grants, at least on the rare occasions they’ve been shared publicly.
Thanks Anthony. Would it be fair to interpret your unawareness series as your steelman of OP’s post title, or as being relevant?
I couldn’t find on a quick look what decision-making approach you would (at least provisionally) endorse instead, bracketing maybe? For my own reference later:
I would be particularly interested in how you think meta- and/or longtermist-oriented grantmaking could be improved by your work. I have not been very impressed by the reasoning behind some of these (sometimes quite large) grants, at least on the rare occasions they’ve been shared publicly.