AAP2010 Abstracts


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Title Mr
First Name Brian
Surname Hedden
Institution Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Title of Paper Decision-Making Under Normative Uncertainty
Select a Stream Normative Ethics
Abstract We have to make decisions even when we're uncertain about relevant facts. To deal with this uncertainty, it is common in ethics to distinguish between the objective ought and the subjective ought. What one objectively ought to do is whatever would in fact be morally best, while what one subjectively ought to do is whatever would be expectedly morally best, or would maximize expected moral value, given the agent's descriptive beliefs. However, we typically suffer from not only descriptive uncertainty, but also uncertainty about which moral view is correct. Recently the problem of decision-making under normative uncertainty (what one super-subjectively ought to do, let us say) has received considerable attention. The most prominent proposal is to represent each moral theory using a value function and then to sum up the expected moral values of an act given each moral theory, weighted by the agent's confidence in that moral theory. One then super-subjectively ought to do whichever act comes out best on this calculation. This proposal is intuitive, but three serious problems show that its ambitions must be considerably scaled back. First, this proposal requires us to make precise comparisons of 'degrees of wrongness' across distinct moral theories, which cannot be done in a plausible way unless we already have some facts about what agents in certain circumstances super-subjectively ought to do. Second, this proposal cannot deal with moral views which distinguish between the supererogatory and the merely permissible. Third, this proposal yields implausible results when agents give some credence to absolutist moral theories. We go further and argue that it's not even clear that there is a super-subjective sense of 'ought.' We look at the motivations for distinguishing between the objective and the subjective oughts and argue that these considerations do not support also introducing the super-subjective ought.