Moral Uncertainty

This paper responds to continuing commentary on Velmans (2002a) “How could conscious experiences affect brains,” a target article for a special issue of JCS. I focus on the final question dealt with by the target article: how free will relates to preconscious and conscious mental processing, and I develop the case for preconscious free will.  Although “preconscious free will” might appear to be a contradiction in terms, it is consistent with the scientific evidence and provides a parsimonious way to reconcile the commonsense view that voluntary acts are freely chosen with the evidence that conscious wishes and decisions are determined by preconscious processing in the mind/brain.  I consider alternative interpretations of how “conscious free will” might operate by Libet and by Mangan and respond to doubts about the extent to which the operations of mind are revealed in consciousness, raised by Claxton and Bouratinos. In reconciling commonsense attributions of freedom and responsibility with the findings of science, preconscious free will can be shown to have practical consequences for adjudications in law.

How should deontological theories that prohibit actions of type K — such as intentionally killing an innocent person — deal with cases of uncertainty as to whether a particular action is of type K? Frank Jackson and Michael Smith, who raise this problem in their paper "Absolutist Moral Theories and Uncertainty" (2006), focus on a case where a skier is about to cause the death of ten innocent people — we don’t know for sure whether on purpose or not — by causing an avalanche; and we can only save the people by shooting the skier. One possible deontological attitude towards such uncertainty is what Jackson and Smith call the threshold view, according to which whether or not the deontological constraint applies depends on our degree of (justified) certainty meets a given threshold. Jackson and Smith argue against the threshold view that it leads to implausible paradoxical moral dilemmas in a special kind of case. In this response paper, we show that the threshold view can avoid these implausible moral dilemmas, as long as the relevant deontological constraint is grounded in individualistic patient-based considerations, such as what an individual person is entitled to object to.

How should an agent decide what to do when she is uncertain not just about morally relevant empirical matters, like the consequences of some course of action, but about the basic principles of morality itself? This question has only recently been taken up in a systematic way by philosophers. Advocates of moral hedging claim that an agent should weigh the reasons put forward by each moral theory in which she has positive credence, considering both the likelihood that that theory is true and the strength of the reasons it posits. The view that it is sometimes rational to hedge for one's moral uncertainties, however, has recently come under attack both from those who believe that an agent should always be guided by the dictates of the single moral theory she deems most probable and from those who believe that an agent's moral beliefs are simply irrelevant to what she ought to do. Among the many objections to hedging that have been pressed in the recent literature is the worry that there is no non-arbitrary way of making the intertheoretic comparisons of moral value necessary to aggregate the value assignments of rival moral theories into a single ranking of an agent's options.

This dissertation has two principal objectives: First, I argue that, contra these recent objections, an agent's moral beliefs and uncertainties are relevant to what she rationally ought to do, and more particularly, that agents are at least sometimes rationally required to hedge for their moral uncertainties. My principal argument for these claims appeals to the enkratic conception of rationality, according to which the requirements of practical rationality derive from an agent's beliefs about the objective, desire-independent value or choiceworthiness of her options. Second, I outline a new general theory of rational choice under moral uncertainty. Central to this theory is the idea of content-based aggregation, that the principles according to which an agent should compare and aggregate rival moral theories are grounded in the content of those theories themselves, including not only their value assignments but also the metaethical and other non-surface-level propositions that underlie, justify, or explain those value assignments.

When an abortion is performed, someone dies. Are we killing a human person? Widespread disagreement exists. However, it is not necessary to establish personhood in order to establish the wrongness of abortion: a substantial chance of personhood is enough. We defend The Do Not Risk Homicide Argument: abortions are wrong after 10 weeks gestation because they substantially and unjustifiably risk homicide, the unjust killing of a human person. Why 10 weeks? Because the cumulative evidence establishes a substantial chance (a more than one in five chance) that preborn human beings are persons after 10 weeks (if not before then). We submit evidence from our bad track record, widespread disagreement about personhood (after 10 weeks gestation), problems with theories of personhood, the similarity between preborn human beings and premature newborns, miscalculations of gestational age, and the common intuitive responses of women to their pregnancies and miscarriages. Our argument is cogent because it bypasses the stalemate over preborn personhood and rests on common ground rather than contentious metaphysics. It also strongly suggests that society must do more to protect preborn human beings. We briefly discuss its practical implications for fetal pain relief, social policy, and abortion law.

This issue of Criminal Law and Philosophy contains three papers on a topic of increasing importance within the field of ‘‘neurolaw’’—namely, the implications for criminal law of direct brain intervention based mind altering techniques (DBI’s). To locate these papers’ topic within a broader context, I begin with an overview of some prominent topics in the field of neurolaw, where possible providing some references to relevant literature. The specific questions asked by the three authors, as well as their answers and central claims, are then sketched out, and I end with a brief comment to explain why this particular topic can be expected to gain more prominence in coming years.

This paper develops a philosophical account of moral disruption. According to Robert Baker (2013), moral disruption is a process in which technological innovations undermine established moral norms without clearly leading to a new set of norms. Here I analyze this process in terms of moral uncertainty, formulating a philosophical account with two variants. On the Harm Account, such uncertainty is always harmful because it blocks our knowledge of our own and others' moral obligations. On the Qualified Harm Account, there is no harm in cases where moral uncertainty is related to innovation that is "for the best" in historical perspective, or where uncertainty is the expression of a deliberative virtue. The two accounts are compared by applying them to Baker's historical case of the introduction of mechanical ventilation and organ transplantation technologies, as well as the present-day case of mass data practices in the health domain.

Direct brain intervention based mental capacity restoration techniques — for instance, psycho-active drugs — are sometimes used in criminal cases to promote the aims of justice. For instance, they might be used to restore a person’s competence to stand trial in order to assess the degree of their responsibility for what they did, or to restore their competence for punishment so that we can hold them responsible for it. Some also suggest that such interventions might be used for therapy or reform in criminal legal contexts — i.e. to make non-responsible and irresponsible people more responsible. However, I argue that such interventions may at least sometimes fail to promote these responsibility-related legal aims. This is because responsibility hinges on other factors than just what mental capacities a person has — in particular, it also hinges on such things as authenticity, personal identity, and mental capacity ownership — and some ways of restoring mental capacity may adversely affect these other factors. Put one way, my claim is that what might suffice for the restoration of competence need not necessarily suffice for the restoration of responsibility, or, put another way, that although responsibility indeed tracks mental capacity it may not always track restored mental capacities.

This paper argues in favor of a particular account of decision‐making under normative uncertainty: that, when it is possible to do so, one should maximize expected choice‐worthiness . Though this position has been often suggested in the literature and is often taken to be the ‘default’ view, it has so far received little in the way of positive argument in its favor. After dealing with some preliminaries and giving the basic motivation for taking normative uncertainty into account in our decision‐making, we consider and provide new arguments against two rival accounts that have been offered—the accounts that we call ‘My Favorite Theory’ and ‘My Favorite Option’. We then give a novel argument for comparativism —the view that, under normative uncertainty, one should take into account both probabilities of different theories and magnitudes of choice‐worthiness. Finally, we further argue in favor of maximizing expected choice‐worthiness and consider and respond to five objections.

Given the deep disagreement surrounding population axiology, one should remain uncertain about which theory is best. However, this uncertainty need not leave one neutral about which acts are better or worse. We show that as the number of lives at stake grows, the Expected Moral Value approach to axiological uncertainty systematically pushes one towards choosing the option preferred by the Total and Critical Level views, even if one's credence in those theories is low.

Modern health data practices come with many practical uncertainties. In this paper I argue that data subjects' trust in the institutions and organizations that control their data, and their ability to know their own moral obligations in relation to their data, are undermined by significant uncertainties regarding the what, how, and who of mass data collection and analysis. I conclude by considering how proposals for managing situations of high uncertainty might be applied to this problem. These emphasize increasing organizational flexibility, knowledge, and capacity, and reducing hazard.

A number of philosophers have claimed that we should take not just empirical uncertainty but also fundamental moral uncertainty into account in our decision-making, and that, despite widespread moral disagreement, doing so would allow us to draw robust lessons for some issues in practical ethics. In this article, I argue that, so far, the implications for practical ethics have been drawn too simplistically. First, the implications of moral uncertainty for normative ethics are far more wide-ranging than has been noted so far. Second, one can't straightforwardly argue from moral uncertainty to particular conclusions in practical ethics, both because of ‘interaction’ effects between moral issues, and because of the variety of different possible intertheoretic comparisons that one can reasonably endorse.

Decisions, whether moral or prudential, should be guided at least in part by considerations of the consequences that would result from the various available actions. For any given action, however, the majority of its consequences are unpredictable at the time of decision. Many have worried that this leaves us, in some important sense, clueless. In this paper, I distinguish between 'simple' and 'complex' possible sources of cluelessness. In terms of this taxonomy, the majority of the existing literature on cluelessness focusses on the simple sources. I argue, contra James Lenman in particular, that these would-be sources of cluelessness are unproblematic, on the grounds that indifference-based reasoning is far less problematic than Lenman (along with many others) supposes. However, there does seem to be a genuine phenomenon of cluelessness associated with the 'complex' sources; here, indifference-based reasoning is inapplicable by anyone's lights. This 'complex problem of cluelessness' is vivid and pressing, in particular, in the context of Effective Altruism. This motivates a more thorough examination of the precise nature of cluelessness, and the precise source of the associated phenomenology of discomfort in forced-choice situations. The latter parts of the paper make some initial explorations in those directions.

Commonsense morality includes various agent-centered constraints, including ones against killing unnecessarily, breaking a promise, and punishing the innocent. However, it's not always clear whether, had an agent φ-ed, she would have violated a constraint. And sometimes the reason for this is not that we lack knowledge of the relevant facts, but that there is no fact about whether her φ-ing would have constituted a constraint-violation. What, then, is a constraint-accepting theory (i.e., a theory that accepts that there are such constraints) to say about whether it would have been permissible for her to have φ-ed? In this paper, I canvass various possible approaches to answering this question and argue that teleology seems to offer the most plausible approach—teleology being the view that the permissibility of an agent's options depends on how their outcomes (or prospects) rank relative to each other. It seems, then, that if a constraint-accepting theory wants to be plausible, it will need to endorse teleology. So although, until very recently, it had been thought that only deontological theories could accommodate constraints, it turns out that teleological theories are not only able to accommodate constraints, but are perhaps the only theories that can do so plausibly.

In this article, I present a new interpretation of the pro-life view on the status of early human embryos. In my understanding, this position is based not on presumptions about the ontological status of embryos and their developmental capabilities but on the specific criteria of rational decisions under uncertainty and on a cautious response to the ambiguous status of embryos. This view, which uses the decision theory model of moral reasoning, promises to reconcile the uncertainty
about the ontological status of embryos with the certainty about normative obligations. I will demonstrate that my interpretation of the pro-life view, although seeming to be stronger than the standard one, has limited scope and cannot be used to limit destructive research on human embryos.

Jennifer Rose Carr’s (2020) article “Normative Uncertainty without Theories” proposes a method to maximize expected value under normative uncertainty without Intertheoretic Value Comparison (hereafter IVC). Carr argues that this method avoids IVC because it avoids theories: the agent’s credence is distributed among normative hypotheses of a particular type, which don’t constitute theories. However, I argue that Carr’s method doesn’t avoid or help to solve what I consider as the justificatory problem of IVC, which isn’t specific to comparing theories as such. This threatens the implementability of Carr’s method. Fortunately, I also show how Carr’s method can nevertheless be implemented. I identify a type of epistemic state where the justificatory problem of IVC is not a necessary obstacle to maximizing expected value. In such states, the uncertainty stems from indecisive normative intuitions, and the agent justifiably constructs all the normative hypotheses (each on the basis of a different, internally-consistent subset of her normative intuitions) by reference to the same unit of value. This part of my argument complements not only Carr’s (2020) argument, but also some moderate defenses of explicit IVC. The combination of Carr’s paper and mine helps to illuminate the conditions for maximizing expected value under normative uncertainty without unjustified value comparison.

I want to draw attention to a type of moral uncertainty which has been less examined. This form of moral uncertainty has significant implications for how to conduct cost-benefit analyses both for private and public decision-making.  Importantly, it persists even once we have adopted a particular moral theory. It is uncertainty about how to measure that which is agreed to matter morally. Consider preference utilitarianism. In order to put this theory into practice in CBAs, we require preference data which allow us to convert consumption into utility. However, different ways of measuring preferences yield different conversion rates (technically, ‘elasticities of marginal utility of consumption’). We can measure these conversion rates via risk aversion (preferences over gambles), intratemporal inequality aversion (preferences over leaky bucket experiments) and intertemporal inequality aversion (using preferences for ideal savings rates). However, the estimated values stemming from these different sources of preferences vary (Frederick et al. 2002). This is a problem because preference utilitarianism does not specify a privileged source of preferences; an ideal utilitarian agent would have convergent preferences over all of these sources. This yields a form of moral uncertainty—what value to assign to these parameters. In economic theory, it should be addressable by appealing to revealed preference, but the preferences are heterogeneous and moral theory provides no privileged source of preference.

Defenders of deontological constraints in normative ethics face a challenge: how should an agent decide what to do when she is uncertain whether some course of action would violate a constraint? The most common response to this challenge has been to defend a threshold principle on which it is subjectively permissible to act iff the agent's credence that her action would be constraint-violating is below some threshold t. But the threshold approach seems arbitrary and unmotivated: what would possibly determine where the threshold should be set, and why should there be any precise threshold at all? Threshold views also seem to violate "ought " agglomeration, since a pair of actions each of which is below the threshold for acceptable moral risk can, in combination, exceed that threshold. In this paper, I argue that stochastic dominance reasoning can vindicate and lend rigor to the threshold approach: given characteristically deontological assumptions about the moral value of acts, it turns out that morally safe options will stochastically dominate morally risky alternatives when and only when the likelihood that the risky option violates a moral constraint is greater than some precisely definable threshold (in the simplest case, .5). I also show how, in combination with the observation that deontological moral evaluation is relativized to particular choice situations, this approach can overcome the agglomeration problem. This allows the deontologist to give a precise and well-motivated response to the problem of uncertainty.

How can someone reconcile the desire to eat meat, and a tendency toward vegetarian ideals? How should we reconcile contradictory moral values? How can we aggregate different moral theories? How individual preferences can be fairly aggregated to represent a will, norm, or social decision? Conflict resolution and preference aggregation are tasks that intrigue philosophers, economists, sociologists, decision theorists, and many other scholars, being a rich interdisciplinary area for research. When trying to solve questions about moral uncertainty a meta understanding of the concept of normativity can help us to develop strategies to deal with norms themselves. 2 nd-order normativity, or norms about norms, is a hierarchical way to think about how to combine many different normative structures and preferences into a single coherent decision. That is what metanormativity is all about, a way to answer: what should we do when we don't know what to do? In this study, we will review a decision-making strategy dealing with moral uncertainty, Maximization of Expected Choice-Worthiness. This strategy, proposed by William MacAskill, allows for the aggregation and inter-theoretical comparison of different normative structures, cardinal theories, and ordinal theories. In this study, we will exemplify the metanormative methods proposed by MacAskill, using has an example, a series of vegetarian dilemmas. Given the similarity to this metanormative strategy to expected utility theory, we will also show that it is possible to integrate both models to address decision-making problems in situations of empirical and moral uncertainty. We believe that this kind of ethical-mathematical formalism can be useful to help develop strategies to better aggregate moral preferences and solve conflicts.

This is a handout for my presentation at the 2017 Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress (RoME) on Friday August 11th, 10:10 at Humanities 186. 
I welcome any comments, thoughts, etc. Feel free to drop me an email about it.

Abstract: Suppose an agent’s credence is divided between two purely normative theories: T1, according to which hurting animals is just as bad as hurting people; and T2, according to which hurting animals is not as bad as hurting people. In such a case, could the badness of hurting animals according to T1 be comparable to (for instance: equal to, worse than, or twice as bad as) the badness of doing so according to T2? Such comparison exemplifies what’s called “intertheoretic choice-worthiness comparisons.” Pace the critics, I argue that such comparisons can sometimes be practically meaningful; and their acceptance — justifiable. I identify one type of epistemic states of normative uncertainty where one should choose the stochastically dominant option on the basis of merely-ordinal intertheoretic choice-worthiness comparison. I identify another type of epistemic states where there’s room for maximizing expected intertheoretic choice-worthiness, within a certain reflective-equilibrium-like deliberative procedure.

Artificial superintelligence is expected by many experts to arrive before or around the turn of the century. Solving the AI-safety problem – making sure artificial superintelligences don’t act in ways that create morally disastrous outcomes - is of immense importance. One relevant sub-problem that has been raised is that of simulations run by such a superintelligence – what do we do given the possibility that these simulations have moral status? I approach this question by first situating it within the broader context of the AI-safety problem, and using its resources to formulate the question as a decision problem under uncertainty. By considering debates regarding the grounds of moral status as well as the computational realizability of mental properties, I further formalize the decision problem. To make progress on solving this decision problem, I’ll identify questions that we need to make progress on in decision theory, ethics and mind.

Published version (at ETMP) is available for free viewing at - http://rdcu.be/mOUK
Attached is a penultimate version.
Abstract:
De dicto moral motivation is typically characterized by the agent's conceiving of her goal in thin normative terms such as to do what is right. I argue that lacking an effective de dicto moral motivation (at least in a certain broad sense of this term) would put the agent in a bad position for responding in the manner that is morally best (relative to her epistemic state) in a certain type of situations. Two central features of the relevant type of situations are (1) the appropriateness of the agent's uncertainty concerning her underived moral values, and (2) the practical, moral importance of resolving this uncertainty. I argue that in some situations that are marked by these two features the most virtuous response is deciding to conduct a deep moral inquiry for a de dicto moral purpose. In such situations lacking an effective de dicto moral motivation would amount to a moral shortcoming. I show the implications for Michael Smith's (1994) argument against Motivational Judgment Externalism and for Brian Weatherson's (2014) argument against avoiding moral recklessness: both arguments rely on a depreciating view of de dicto moral motivation, and both fail; or so I argue.

This essay aims to understand how both economic and social entrepreneurs deal with moral dilemmas, emphasizing the uncertainty’s moral dimension based on Frank Knight’s work (1972). It was possible to develop a conceptual framework of moral uncertainty by integrating theories of uncertainty and entrepreneurship, the moral development theory from Kohlberg and moral dilemmas. From the sociology, it is worth considering the substantive and instrumental rationality, tension between ethics of conviction and responsibility, both from Weber (1999) and Guerreiro Ramos (1989). There is a presentation of some analytical categories to address moral uncertainty and make some propositions related to moral development. It is worth suggesting four sources of moral uncertainty involving the moral reasoning.