Moral Uncertainty

Maximizing Expected Choiceworthiness seems reasonable on its face, but I have three worries.

(1) I’m not sure that the best reasons we have to maximize expected value in cases of empirical uncertainty generalize to the case of moral uncertainty. For example, Law of Large Numbers arguments don’t apply if the event that you’re uncertain about is by its nature unrepeatable.

(2) It’s a very strict constraint on a moral theory to say it must rate all possible actions one might take with a single real number. Is the goodness of donating to charity according to Christanity greater than or less than two utils? How does it compare to the goodness of cultivating the Aristotelian virtue of continence? I worry that intertheoretic value comparisons like these just aren’t meaningful.

(3) Even if I have sharp credences on empirical propositions–which I’m not sure I do–I definitely don’t have sharp credences on moral theories, so any practicable theory of choice under moral uncertainty has to interact somehow with fuzzy Bayesianism.

Reading list

• MacAskill, Bykvist, and Ord’s Moral Uncertainty
• Moorhouse’s review of MU
• Gustafsson’s defense of My Favorite Theory

Last updated 13 August 2024