Moral latitude is only ever a matter of coincidence on the most popular decision procedure in the literature on moral uncertainty. In all possible choice situations other than those in which two or more options happen to be tied for maximal expected choiceworthiness, Maximize Expected Choiceworthiness implies that only one possible option is uniquely appropriate. A better theory of appropriateness would be more sensitive to the decision maker’s credence in theories that endorse agent-centred prerogatives. In this paper, we will develop (...) and defend a modified version of this view that allows for agent-centred prerogatives and supererogation as part of its verdicts about appropriateness. (shrink)

Nick Bostrom and others have suggested treating decision-making under moral uncertainty as analogous to parliamentary decision-making. The core suggestion of this “parliamentary approach” is that the competing moral theories function like delegates to the parliament, and that these delegates then make decisions by some combination of bargaining and voting. There seems some reason to hope that such an approach might avoid standard objections to existing approaches (for example, the “maximise expected choiceworthiness” (MEC) and “my favourite theory” approaches). However, the parliamentary (...) approach is so far extremely underspecified, making it largely indeterminate how such a model will in fact behave in the respects that those concerned with moral uncertainty care about. This paper explores one way of making it precise. We treat predicaments of moral uncertainty as analogous to bargaining situations alone (setting aside voting), and apply a version of the Nash solution that is standard in bargaining theory. The resulting model does indeed perform in many of the hoped-for ways. However, so also does a version of MEC that employs a structural approach to intertheoretic comparisons. It seems to us an open question which, regarding this version of MEC and the bargaining-theoretic approach, is superior to the other. We identify the key points on which the two differ. (shrink)

Multidimensional concepts are everywhere, and they are important. Examples include moral value, welfare, scientific confirmation, democracy, and biodiversity. How, if at all, can we aggregate the underlying dimensions of a multidimensional concept F to yield verdicts about which things are Fer than which overall? Social choice theory can be used to model and investigate this aggregation problem. Here, we focus on a particularly thorny problem made salient by this social choice-theoretic framework: the underlying dimensions of a given concept might be (...) measurable on different types of scales—e.g., some ordinal and some cardinal. An underappreciated impossibility theorem due to Anna Khmelnitskaya shows that seemingly plausible constraints on aggregation across scale types are inconsistent. This impossibility threatens to render the notion of overall Fness incoherent. We attempt to defuse this threat, arguing that the impossibility depends on an overly restrictive conception of measurement and of how measurement constrains aggregation. Adopting a more flexible—and, we think, more perspicuous—conception of measurement opens an array of possibilities for aggregation across disparate scale types. (shrink)

As well as disagreeing about how much one should donate to charity, moral theories also disagree about where one should donate. In light of this disagreement, how should the morally uncertain philanthropist allocate her donations? In many cases, one intuitively attractive option is for the philanthropist to split her donations across all of the charities that are recommended by moral views in which she has positive credence, with each charity’s share being proportional to her credence in the moral theories that (...) recommend that particular charity. Despite the fact that something like this approach is already being used by real-world philanthropists to distribute billions of dollars of donations, it is not supported by any of the approaches to moral uncertainty that have been proposed thus-far in the philosophical literature. In this paper, we will develop a bargaining-based approach to moral uncertainty that honors the proportionality intuition in favor of splitting one’s donations. We also show how this bargaining-based approach has several further advantages over the best alternative proposals. (shrink)