Another motivation I think worth mentioning is just objecting to fanaticism. As Tarsney showed, respecting stochastic dominance with statistically independent background value can force a total utilitarian to be pretty fanatical, although exactly how fanatical will depend on how wide the distribution of the background value is. Someone could still find that objectionably fanatical, even to the extent of rejecting stochastic dominance as a guide. They could still respect statewise dominance.
That being said, DMRA could also be “fanatical” about the risk of causing net harm, leading to paralysis and never doing anything or always sticking with the “default”, so maybe the thing to do is to give less than proportional weight to both net positive impacts and net negative impacts, e.g. a sigmoid function of the difference.
I agree that the plausibility of some DMRA decision theory will depend on how we actually formalize it (something I don’t do here but which Laura Duffy did some of here). Thanks for the suggestion.
Another motivation I think worth mentioning is just objecting to fanaticism. As Tarsney showed, respecting stochastic dominance with statistically independent background value can force a total utilitarian to be pretty fanatical, although exactly how fanatical will depend on how wide the distribution of the background value is. Someone could still find that objectionably fanatical, even to the extent of rejecting stochastic dominance as a guide. They could still respect statewise dominance.
That being said, DMRA could also be “fanatical” about the risk of causing net harm, leading to paralysis and never doing anything or always sticking with the “default”, so maybe the thing to do is to give less than proportional weight to both net positive impacts and net negative impacts, e.g. a sigmoid function of the difference.
I agree that the plausibility of some DMRA decision theory will depend on how we actually formalize it (something I don’t do here but which Laura Duffy did some of here). Thanks for the suggestion.