Michael St Jules 🔸

Karma: 13,092

Philosophy, global priorities and animal welfare research. My current specific interests include: philosophy of mind, moral weights, person-affecting views, preference-based views and subjectivism, moral uncertainty, decision theory, deep uncertainty/cluelessness and backfire risks, s-risks, and indirect effects on wild animals.

I’ve also done economic modelling for some animal welfare issues.

Want to leave anonymous feedback for me, positive, constructive or negative? https://www.admonymous.co/michael-st-jules

Michael St Jules 🔸 28 Aug 2026 16:01 UTC
5 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Anthony DiGiovanni 🔸’s comment on: Cluelessness Critiques Week: Discussion Thread
Do you think you’ve ever taken an action (or sequence of actions) that, with your current understanding of cluelessness and unwarenesss, should have been ex ante c-preferred to another (or doing nothing, specifically)? Like thinking a bit more about specific backfire risks or cluelessness, or breathing?
EDIT: Also some more weirder things, like not kicking a puppy when given the chance and no one else would know. Or, say, if you’ve already stepped on a snail and it’s clearly going to die, should you put it out of its misery?

Michael St Jules 🔸 19 Aug 2026 22:06 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Impartial Partially’s comment on: Bottom-Up Bracketing: A Person-Centered Response to Cluelessness
Here’s the draft!

Michael St Jules 🔸 19 Aug 2026 20:14 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: tobycrisford 🔸’s comment on: Bottom-Up Bracketing: A Person-Centered Response to Cluelessness
I think it’s 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:
1. I get a tasty snack right away.
2. 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.
3. increase the probability of a dystopian lock in via a set of causal paths X.
4. decrease the probability of a dystopian lock in via a set of causal paths Y.
5. decrease the probability of a dystopian lock in via a set of causal paths Z.
6. other good things.
7. 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?

Michael St Jules 🔸 19 Aug 2026 19:20 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Impartial Partially’s comment on: Bottom-Up Bracketing: A Person-Centered Response to Cluelessness
I agree with the meta point, but my reaction is that if this particular theory is practically never action-guiding, I’ll just move onto other theories that could be action-guiding, say via some kind of metanormative bracketing or wager.
I think treating tiny probabilities of severe suffering (or any large difference for an individual) as lower would probably work to often give determinate comparisons, as you suggest. We could get a range of views that set the thresholds between higher and lower in different places and have moral uncertainty over them.
It could go too far or turn on empirical facts that in my view it shouldn’t really, although this is pulling in nonidentity/counterpart intuitions, so basically question begging.
Generally any moral patients who do not yet exist / are not yet conceived could be dramatically discounted because each such pre-specified individual is extremely unlikely to exist, based on the huge number of sperm cells in the race to fertilize an egg. The view could practically be a strict person-affecting view like presentism or necessitarianism.
All of our apparently cost-effective animal welfare interventions could only help animals to the lower level, because none of them help already conceived individuals, given the delay between the decision to support an intervention and its actual implementation.
Causing millions more chickens to be factory farmed per year would only reach the lower level for each resulting chicken ex ante.
Plausibly each specific far future moral patient is far far far less likely to exist than any specific chicken in the next 10 years. Each individual’s probability of existing could roughly decrease exponentially with their generation number from the present, at least for biological moral patients. So, there could be thresholds where chickens over the next few years reach higher, but far future moral patients only reach lower. But should the view turn on these particulars?

Michael St Jules 🔸 19 Aug 2026 18:32 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: tobycrisford 🔸’s comment on: Bottom-Up Bracketing: A Person-Centered Response to Cluelessness
I second Impartial Partially’s answer, but figured I’d 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.

Michael St Jules 🔸 19 Aug 2026 2:01 UTC
10 points
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in reply to: Impartial Partially’s comment on: Bottom-Up Bracketing: A Person-Centered Response to Cluelessness
I’d be curious about how you think about transworld identity and personal identity and to get your take on the following proposal for counterpart relations. I expect that bottom-up bracketing would rarely be action-guiding in practice without counterpart relations, because of huge numbers of contingent moral patients pointing in each direction, and counterpart relations could make some version action-guiding in practice by allowing us to bracket out far more of them.
This is a pretty rough sketch.
One way I’m thinking of grounding counterpart relations is by looking for measures that naturally generalize our concepts of transworld and personal identity. For example, Alice in A is the same person as Alice in B and her past self because of common causes of the features important to Alice’s identity, like her memories, psychological dispositions, etc.. Maybe we’d say specifically due to the preservation or inheritance of the physical structures (her brain) responsible for her psychological features from her past selves.
All of this is a matter of degree, because Alice changes over time and could diverge between worlds A and B. Almost all of the particles in her neurons and elsewhere in her body are replaced over time, and which particles make her up will diverge across worlds. In cases of amnesia, brain damage and normal human aging and experience, people can change fairly dramatically in their psychological features. We might say that transworld and personal identity matching are themselves graded. Alice is kind of both the same person and kind of a different person, and more a different person the larger the divergence and the less is inherited.
Then, Alice and Bob, if both human, share more psychological dispositions than Alice and a chicken, and this can be traced back to more recent common causes of their psychological dispositions, i.e. more recent common ancestry between any two humans than between a human and a chicken, passed through genes. This could let us preferentially match counterparts that are more closely related/trace more of their genes that account for psychological features back to the same more recent ancestors.
Transworld identity is just a special case of this kind of causal counterpart relation where the common causes of psychological features are especially potent or of a particular kind, e.g. the “same” brain, which we can trace through spacetime. The gap between distinct persons is admittedly generally much larger than between the same person across worlds or at different points in time, but if it’s more a difference in degree than kind since both are graded, then this would give us reason to accept or reject both transworld/personal identity and causal counterpart relations together, rather than accept transworld/personal identiy and reject causal counterpart relations.
One potential supporting argument for the generalization from direct inheritance of psychological features to common causes of psychological features for counterpart relations:
1. While adult Alice inherits some psychological features from her infant self and infant brain, many of her cognitive capacities as an adult — which are plausibly important to her identity — were not directly inherited from her infant self or infant brain (or fetal brain), but were caused in part by general and often region-specific DNA-driven processes to restructure her brain. Furthermore, the vast majority of the particles in her neurons and brain get replaced even if most neurons are preserved, and (I’d guess) the DNA in those neurons are necessary for ensuring their function even as the particles in them turn over. So, Alice’s psychological features and identity over time and across worlds come in large part from her DNA. The same has been typically true for conscious biological beings on Earth so far.
2. The persistent DNA particles over time cause Alice’s psychological features over time and across worlds. Copies of them from her ancestors cause many of her relative’s similar psychological features over time and across worlds. What grounds her identity across time and worlds is common causes of her psychological features, but going back up the causal chain, we find common causes of psychological features between moral patients, too, not just within, through copies of the same DNA.^[1]
3. If common causes, like someone’s DNA, of shared psychological features across worlds are what ground transworld identity, then we should be able to use common causes, like a common ancestor’s DNA from which copies were inherited, of shared psychological features to ground counterpart relations across worlds to generalize transworld identity, too.
We can use other common causes of shared psychological features to ground counterparts more generally. Or even common causes of individuals’ existences across worlds, e.g. if someone is deciding between dog breeders to breed a puppy for them (or buying a puppy from them and creating demand for further puppies), they are causally downstream of each of the possible resulting puppies, and this further common cause supports matching the possible resulting puppies across worlds as counterparts.
1. ^
  I also don’t think it would make a difference if all of Alice’s DNA got replaced by exact copies and none of her particles were preserved over time. Either causal relationships or continuity are doing the work here.
What links here?
- Results: Cluelessness Critiques Competition by Will Aldred (29 Aug 2026 17:38 UTC; 58 points)

Michael St Jules 🔸 18 Aug 2026 19:26 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Impartial Partially’s comment on: Bottom-Up Bracketing: A Person-Centered Response to Cluelessness
Is this a version of (weak) actualism as a person-affecting theory? In worlds where Alice doesn’t exist, she has no properties like welfare to provide us any reasons or welfare-based objections.
Weak actualism, as in the literature (Hare, 2007, Spencer, 2021 section 6), would say to pick among the options that maximize “self-conditional value”. An option is permissible only if it’s no worse than any other for the people who (ever) exist in the resulting outcome. In other words, assuming we choose the option A, we compare all the options pairwise on the basis of the reasons provided by the people who would exist given our choice of A,^[1] and if A is no worse overall than any other option on these comparisons, then it maximizes self-conditional value.^[2]
It sounds similar to what you wrote here, too:
Perhaps, on a person-centered approach to ethics, that is simply true (cf. Boonin 2014 and Pummer 2024): If we choose B, we will have made it the case that (i) no actual person has negative welfare, which they could object to on personal welfare grounds, and (ii) all actual persons have the maximum amount of positive welfare they could have had. (Person p2, once she exists, will have no welfare-based objection to our choosing B: We could not have made her better off. Nor will p1, who will not exist.) On a person-centered approach, we may therefore have maximized people’s welfare in the sense that matters.
1. ^
  Weighing the reasons by the probability that those reasons exist at all, say.
2. ^
  Weak actualism doesn’t need to say that all options that maximize self-conditional value are permissible. There are some cases where we can plausibly recommend choices between them.
  I also think maximizing self-conditional value as formalized in the literature is the wrong approach for an actualist when deciding between at least 3 options, because it’s myopic, and we should use backward induction on behalf of the people who would exist given an option. This can avoid the repugnant conclusion. I have an unpublished draft based on the idea of backward induction for weak actualism I’d be happy to share, and I discuss the problem a bit here.

Michael St Jules 🔸 18 Aug 2026 8:11 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Michael St Jules 🔸’s comment on: Announcing: Cluelessness Critiques Competition
Hmm, I think I made some unjustified leaps in the above comment.
Some contingent moral patients in A could be determinately better off in expectation (conditional on existing) than the statistical average contingent moral patient in B, and some contingent moral patients in A could be determinately worse off in expectation (conditional on existing) than the statistical average contingent moral patient in B. So, with counterparts:
1. on bottom-up bracketing, we wouldn’t bracket the determinately better off than average contingent moral patients and determinately worse off than average contingent moral patients out. We do get to bracket out those where the comparison is indeterminate, by overlapping in range of welfare with the average. I’d guess it’s possible to specify some that are far enough away from the average, but this could be wrong.
2. on top-down bracketing, whether they get bracketed out probably depends a lot more on the specifics.
There’s also a question of whether we should handle counterparts iteratively, and then if order matters. If we bracket out Alice in A with her statistical counterparts in B, then it doesn’t seem like Alice should be left as an available counterpart to those in B (after pulling out one statistically average contingent moral patient from B), so Alice shouldn’t be part of the statistical average for counterparts of those left in B. So the statistical average of remaining moral patients in A needs to be recomputed. But if we bracket out the contingent moral patient Alex in A first instead of Alice, could this change the verdict of the comparison?

Michael St Jules 🔸 17 Aug 2026 16:48 UTC
7 points
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on: Challenging the unawareness argument with third actions and mixed actions
Very interesting!
How do you recommend choosing between somewhere-uniquely-optimal actions if there are multiple? I’m imagining the worst case where we still have several left that we’re clueless between.^[1]
And are all convex combinations of (lotteries over) somewhere-uniquely-optimal actions also somewhere-uniquely-optimal? (Let’s suppose our set of actions is closed under convex combinations, so somewhere-unique-optimality is defined with respect to that set.)
EDIT: The answer is no. 60-For-Sure, 100-If-True and 100-If-False are all somewhere-uniquely-optimal (under convex combinations), but 60-For-Sure dominates the convex combination of picking one of 100-If-True or 100-If-False at random, with 50% probability each.
1. ^
  I suppose the actual worst case is where inaction is ~always somewhere uniquely-optimal, and especially when building a portfolio to give across organizations, but that will depend on the particulars involved.

Michael St Jules 🔸 17 Aug 2026 16:41 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Challenging the unawareness argument with third actions and mixed actions
Just to clarify the example and concept: if we added the option c-For-Sure, which gives c with 100% probability, to the set of options in your example, it would be somewhere optimal iff c is at least 50, right?
Take Pr(X)=50%. Then 50-For-Sure, 100-If-True and 100-If-False all have EV 50.
And further, any lottery/gamble between any three of them (50-For-Sure, 100-If-True and 100-If-False) has EV 50, if the draw of the option is statistically independent from X’s probability distribution.

Michael St Jules 🔸 9 Aug 2026 3:25 UTC
4 points
3 ∶ 0
in reply to: huw’s comment on: You can now afford to work at AIM: our new salary policy, program stipends, and founder salary advice
Bigger seed grants!

Michael St Jules 🔸 28 Jul 2026 16:00 UTC
6 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Subjective Probabilities should be Sharp
One could argue there is a probability above exactly 0 of any given quantity being a probabilistic mixture involving a distribution with infinite or undefined expected value. In this case, all distributions would have an infinite or undefined expected value? For me this is a bitter bullet to bite than fully rejecting distributions with infinite or undefined expected value.
I think you should just expect this, and the answer is not to deny the possibility of St Petersberg lotteries in objective quantities, but to figure out a good way to deal with them (e.g. ignore small enough probabilities, use a bounded utility function, use commitments, use bracketing of some form), or accept that they raise difficult normative problems.
Do you see any undesirable implications of believing in ghosts which have exactly 0 measurable effects on the world? I think this is effectively the same as not believing in such ghosts.
Are you saying you believe in the existence with 100% credence in anything (such as ghosts) that is not ruled out by current evidence, as long as its effects couid be arbitrarily small and are so far indistinguishable from its nonexistence? Or must it also have no important normative implications (under classical utilitarianism?)?
Ghosts could be conscious, experience pleasure and suffering and care about what you do. Some could be vengeful and want harm to fall upon those that have caused them harm in their lives (whether or not they enact it themselves). Others could want to see the happiness of loved ones. Others could want their descendants to live up to their expectations (e.g. in education, work, family, religious adherence), and not care much about their happiness. A large share could be horrified by modern secularism. It could be that every human that dies becomes a ghost indefinitely.

Michael St Jules 🔸 27 Jul 2026 17:50 UTC
6 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Subjective Probabilities should be Sharp
What do you think about the St Petersburg problem now?
I think your arguments re infinities conflict with Occam’s razor, and the principle of indifference should be applied across models within the same complexity (or submodels), otherwise you will assign 0 or too little credence to simpler models that are special cases, e.g. parameter value=0 or effectively eliminating some type of feature. There are infinitely many ways the universe could be more complex, and arbitrarily more complex, than you’d guess.
A flat universe effectively has one fewer parameter and is simpler. So it shouldn’t get 0 credence. Among flat universes, the bounded/finite ones also have extra parameters for the boundaries or shape of the universe (compared to something that looks like R^3), so the infinite one shouldn’t get 0 credence.
(There probably are many ways for the universe to be infinite spatially in its shape, too, but those are more complex than R^3.)
EDIT:
As an aside, there have been many cases where quantities in physics were assumed to be 0, but then turned out to be just small values, like the mass of neutrinos. It often makes sense to round a quantity to 0 for simplicity, but a sufficiently small value would explain exactly the same empirical evidence.
Note that I never suggested to assign 0 probability to anything. I think this leads to further examples to illustrate my point:
Would you assign exactly 0 probability to photons having exactly 0 mass?
Exactly 0 probability to there being no additional fundamental force, because it could just be vanishingly weak? And shouldn’t this get you to infinitely many fundamental forces? For any finite set of fundamental forces, you could posit another one and just say it’s very weak.
Exactly 0 probability to there not being ghosts, because their effects could just be very small or rare?
I think consistently applying your arguments suggest you should assign 0 probability in these cases, and so your models blow up in complexity and you become too credulous, contrary to Occam’s razor.

Michael St Jules 🔸 27 Jul 2026 4:05 UTC
6 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Subjective Probabilities should be Sharp
I like the principle of indifference. However, I think infinities are unfalsifiable in principle. In this case, does it make sense for me to attribute probabilities to them? If I did, they would be just metaphysical priors that can never be updated by any evidence.
St Petersburg-like lotteries, defined in terms of your Bayesian credences, don’t require assigning positive probability to any possible infinities out there in the world.
I’ll leave the rest in a footnote, because it’s not that relevant to the point I’ve been making so don’t plan to go further with it, but I already wrote it and it may be of interest to you.^[1]
1. ^
  I think falsifiability for a Bayesian could just mean we can imagine evidence that would warrant assigning very very low credences to the hypothesis. Actual infinities are often falsifiable in principle in this way, in specific cases. I think the probability you should assign to you being infinite in spatial size is extremely small. Similarly for the Earth being infinite in size.
  In the case of the spatial extent of the universe being infinite, it seems hard to falsify now only because all the evidence we’ve gathered so far is in fact consistent with it (or no less consistent than with a bounded/finite universe), and it remains one of the standard models used by experts. My own view is that it’s more likely than not infinite in spatial extent, because it’s the simplest model consistent with the evidence.
  I think our credences that the universe is infinite in spatial extent should increase with our credences that the universe is globally flat (0 global curvature), which has been measurable. If we had good evidence of nonzero global curvature, that would be decent (but not overwhelming) evidence that the universe is finite/bounded, because it would rule out the most plausible infinite models of the universe.
  I agree that we can sometimes compare actions with infinite expected cost-effectiveness. I’m most partial to expansionist views of some kind, as the most complete (given precise probabilities).

Michael St Jules 🔸 23 Jul 2026 16:57 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Subjective Probabilities should be Sharp
I object to relying on infinities (not arbitrarily large finities) to guide decisions because they do not explain more empirical evidence than arbitrarily large finities.
But do they deserve to be privileged at the exclusion of the infinite EV distributions if and when the latter are at least as consistent with the evidence? Why? Shouldn’t you use some principle of indifference or symmetry here?
If there’s no finite upper bound on what the value the specific probability distribution can take, how can you be 100% confident it is not a probabilistic mixture with a distribution with infinite or undefined EV (but finite for every actual value), like 0.0001% probability to it being drawn from something like a St. Petersburg lottery?

Michael St Jules 🔸 22 Jul 2026 18:25 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Subjective Probabilities should be Sharp
The expected value of the St. Petersburg lottery is 1 + 1 + … = +inf. It involves finite terms, but infinitely many terms. I meant to relate f(x) = x in my comment to the expected value of the St. Petersburg lottery. If this involved an arbitrarily large number of terms, its expected value would be arbitrarily large, but not infinite.
I don’t understand what you’re objecting to. Are you saying all probability distributions should only take finitely many possible values? If so, do you have an upper bound on what the total value should be over all of the future and possible existence, that you’re 100% confident in, under your course of action if where you do nothing? (It doesn’t have to be the least upper bound / tight.)

Michael St Jules 🔸 12 Jul 2026 17:29 UTC
2 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Subjective Probabilities should be Sharp
Below is how Claude thinks Adam (the author of the article) would object to your comments. The objections make sense to me. Any reactions?
Claude is dumb (at least without further critique and verification, and usually with), and your prompt basically put it on the task of defending the position, not actually assessing the arguments fairly. So it turned up bad arguments.
I doubt the author would respond this badly.

Michael St Jules 🔸 12 Jul 2026 16:06 UTC
6 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Subjective Probabilities should be Sharp
Taking bet A doesn’t require any commitment. My argument just uses backward induction (+ignoring statewise incomparability), which you should generally use in sequential choice situations, or else you’ll be worse off in many situations, even with sharp probabilities.
It allows unsharpness. Having unsharp probabilities does not require sequential decisions to be made independently.
that very concession is what Elga reads as victory: the imprecision has stopped doing the one thing it was introduced to do.
The argument against unsharp probabilities is defeated. We just have to treat them in certain ways. The summary of the paper here missed one way we could treat them, and claimed too much against another (if we accept commitments or resolute choice in other cases).

Michael St Jules 🔸 12 Jul 2026 16:03 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Subjective Probabilities should be Sharp
Solution to which problem? I am not sure what is supposed to be problematic.
That if you use backward induction on acting rationally at each step, you will be worse off. You will predict later that you’ll change your mind, unless you can force your future self to honor a commitment (or plan) you’d no longer want to keep when it actually comes time to honor it.
EDIT: my bad, the problem is that if you don’t use commitments, you could be worse off. Using backward induction in the Sally argument actually works fine, doesn’t leave you (or Sally) worse off and doesn’t require any commitment.
However, I do not think it can be infinite. The function f(x) = x can take an arbitrarily large value, but not an infinite value (its range is the set of real numbers).
St Petersburg doesn’t require any state to have infinite value. Its value is (canonically) 2^n with probability 1/2^n for each n at least 1. Always finite actual value, but infinite expected value.

Michael St Jules 🔸 11 Jul 2026 19:27 UTC
6 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Subjective Probabilities should be Sharp
Why does Parfit’s hitchhiker pose a problem?
Because the same kind of solution is available to someone with unsharp probabilities in Elga’s scenario, if you’re treating them fairly.
The St. Petersburg paradox involves an infinite expected payoff, and I reject infinite worlds.
It doesn’t require an infinite world, only that you can’t be 100% confident in any finite upper bound on your impact that you specify, and that there are infinitely many ways that the world could be (due largely to not full certainty about physics).
(But also 0% to infinite worlds seems epistemically immodest, doesn’t treat the evidence on each side fairly, and is poorly argued, imo. But I don’t want to rehash this.)
In Sally’s case, her money is the only thing that matters.
Why can’t the fact that she’d pick a dominated sequence or regret it if she rejects both bets matter to her after rejecting bet A?
I understand one should accept bet A based on that strategy. However, unsharp probabilities are supposed to allow for accepting or rejecting A?
They don’t have to in every case. If it was A in isolation, and no other decisions, then yes, both rejecting and accepting should be permissible. But that’s not the case presented to us.