A bargaining-theoretic approach to moral uncertainty

Owen Cotton-Barratt (Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford), Hilary Greaves (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)

GPI Working Paper No. 2-2023, published in the Journal of Moral Philosophy

This paper explores a new approach to the problem of decision under relevant moral uncertainty. We treat the case of an agent making decisions in the face of moral uncertainty on the model of bargaining theory, as if the decision-making process were one of bargaining among different internal parts of the agent, with different parts committed to different moral theories. The resulting approach contrasts interestingly with the extant “maximise expected choiceworthiness” and “my favourite theory” approaches, in several key respects. In particular, it seems somewhat less prone than the MEC approach to ‘fanaticism’: allowing decisions to be dictated by a theory in which the agent has extremely low credence, if the relative stakes are high enough. Overall, however, we tentatively conclude that the MEC approach is superior to a bargaining-theoretic approach.

Other working papers

The Hinge of History Hypothesis: Reply to MacAskill – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)

Some believe that the current era is uniquely important with respect to how well the rest of human history goes. Following Parfit, call this the Hinge of History Hypothesis. Recently, MacAskill has argued that our era is actually very unlikely to be especially influential in the way asserted by the Hinge of History Hypothesis. I respond to MacAskill, pointing to important unresolved ambiguities in his proposed definition of what it means for a time to be influential and criticizing the two arguments…

Tiny probabilities and the value of the far future – Petra Kosonen (Population Wellbeing Initiative, University of Texas at Austin)

Morally speaking, what matters the most is the far future – at least according to Longtermism. The reason why the far future is of utmost importance is that our acts’ expected influence on the value of the world is mainly determined by their consequences in the far future. The case for Longtermism is straightforward: Given the enormous number of people who might exist in the far future, even a tiny probability of affecting how the far future goes outweighs the importance of our acts’ consequences…

Crying wolf: Warning about societal risks can be reputationally risky – Lucius Caviola (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford) et al.

Society relies on expert warnings about large-scale risks like pandemics and natural disasters. Across ten studies (N = 5,342), we demonstrate people’s reluctance to warn about unlikely but large-scale risks because they are concerned about being blamed for being wrong. In particular, warners anticipate that if the risk doesn’t occur, they will be perceived as overly alarmist and responsible for wasting societal resources. This phenomenon appears in the context of natural, technological, and financial risks…