Moral uncertainty and public justification
Jacob Barrett (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford) and Andreas T Schmidt (University of Groningen)
GPI Working Paper No. 15-2021, forthcoming at Philosophers' Imprint
Moral uncertainty and disagreement pervade our lives. Yet we still need to make decisions and act, both in individual and political contexts. So, what should we do? The moral uncertainty approach provides a theory of what individuals morally ought to do when they are uncertain about morality. Public reason liberals, in contrast, provide a theory of how societies should deal with reasonable disagreements about morality. They defend the public justification principle: state action is permissible only if it can be justified to all reasonable people. In this article, we bring these two approaches together. Specifically, we investigate whether the moral uncertainty approach supports public reason liberalism: given our own moral uncertainty, should we favor public justification? We argue that while the moral uncertainty approach cannot vindicate an exceptionless public justification principle, it gives us reason to adopt public justification as a pro tanto institutional commitment. Furthermore, it provides new answers to some intramural debates among public reason liberals and new responses to some common objections.
Other working papers
Cassandra’s Curse: A second tragedy of the commons – Philippe Colo (ETH Zurich)
This paper studies why scientific forecasts regarding exceptional or rare events generally fail to trigger adequate public response. I consider a game of contribution to a public bad. Prior to the game, I assume contributors receive non-verifiable expert advice regarding uncertain damages. In addition, I assume that the expert cares only about social welfare. Under mild assumptions, I show that no information transmission can happen at equilibrium when the number of contributors…
Intergenerational equity under catastrophic climate change – Aurélie Méjean (CNRS, Paris), Antonin Pottier (EHESS, CIRED, Paris), Stéphane Zuber (CNRS, Paris) and Marc Fleurbaey (CNRS, Paris School of Economics)
Climate change raises the issue of intergenerational equity. As climate change threatens irreversible and dangerous impacts, possibly leading to extinction, the most relevant trade-off may not be between present and future consumption, but between present consumption and the mere existence of future generations. To investigate this trade-off, we build an integrated assessment model that explicitly accounts for the risk of extinction of future generations…
Consciousness makes things matter – Andrew Y. Lee (University of Toronto)
This paper argues that phenomenal consciousness is what makes an entity a welfare subject, or the kind of thing that can be better or worse off. I develop and motivate this view, and then defend it from objections concerning death, non-conscious entities that have interests (such as plants), and conscious subjects that necessarily have welfare level zero. I also explain how my theory of welfare subjects relates to experientialist and anti-experientialist theories of welfare goods.