This paper describes a cubic water tank equipped with a movable partition receiving various amounts of liquid used to represent joint probability distributions. This device is applied to the investigation of deductive inferences under uncertainty. The analogy is exploited to determine by qualitative reasoning the limits in probability of the conclusion of twenty basic deductive arguments (such as Modus Ponens, And-introduction, Contraposition, etc.) often used as benchmark problems by the various theoretical approaches to reasoning under (...) uncertainty. The probability bounds imposed by the premises on the conclusion are derived on the basis of a few trivial principles such as "a part of the tank cannot contain more liquid than its capacity allows", or "if a part is empty, the other part contains all the liquid". This stems from the equivalence between the physical constraints imposed by the capacity of the tank and its subdivisions on the volumes of liquid, and the axioms and rules of probability. The device materializes de Finetti's coherence approach to probability. It also suggests a physical counterpart of Dutch book arguments to assess individuals' rationality in probability judgments in the sense that individuals whose degrees of belief in a conclusion are out of the bounds of coherence intervals would commit themselves to executing physically impossible tasks. (shrink)

I discuss the trilemma that consists of the following three principles being inconsistent: 1. The Common Principle: if one distribution, A, necessarily brings a higher total sum of personal value that is distributed in a more egalitarian way than another distribution, B, A is more valuable than B. 2. (Weak) ex-ante Pareto: if one uncertain distribution, A, is more valuable than another uncertain distribution, B, for each patient, A is more valuable than B. 3. Pluralism about attitudes to risk (Pluralism): (...) the personal value of a prospect is a weighted sum of the values of the prospect’s outcomes, but the weight each outcome gets might be different from the probability the prospect assigns to the outcome. (shrink)

Communication facilitates coordination, but coordination might fail if there's too much uncertainty. I discuss a scenario in which vagueness-driven uncertainty undermines the possibility of publicly sharing a belief. I then show that asserting an epistemic modal sentence, 'Might p', can reveal the speaker's uncertainty, and that this may improve the chances of coordination despite the lack of a common epistemic ground. This provides a game-theoretic rationale for epistemic modality. The account draws on a standard relational semantics for (...) epistemic modality, Stalnaker's theory of assertion as informative update, and a Bayesian framework for reasoning under uncertainty. (shrink)

This is a very short textbook on probabilistic reasoning, expected utility decision-making, cognitive biases, and self-correction, especially in application to medical examples. It also includes a chapter on concepts of health.

I analyze recent discussions about making moral decisions under normative uncertainty. I discuss whether this kind of uncertainty should have practical consequences for decisions and whether there are reliable methods of reasoning that deal with the possibility that we are wrong about some moral issues. I defend a limited use of the decision theory model of reasoning in cases of normative uncertainty.

While ordinary decision theory focuses on empirical uncertainty, real decision-makers also face normative uncertainty: uncertainty about value itself. From a purely formal perspective, normative uncertainty is comparable to (Harsanyian or Rawlsian) identity uncertainty in the 'original position', where one's future values are unknown. A comprehensive decision theory must address twofold uncertainty -- normative and empirical. We present a simple model of twofold uncertainty, and show that the most popular decision principle -- maximising expected (...) value (`Expectationalism') -- has different formulations, namely Ex-Ante Expectationalism, Ex-Post Expectationalism, and hybrid theories. These alternative theories recommend different decisions, reasoning modes, and attitudes to risk. But they converge under an interesting (necessary and sufficient) condition. (shrink)

Social decisions are often made under great uncertainty – in situations where political principles, and even standard subjective expected utility, do not apply smoothly. In the first section, we argue that the core of this problem lies in decision theory itself – it is about how to act when we do not have an adequate representation of the context of the action and of its possible consequences. Thus, we distinguish two criteria to complement decision theory under ignorance (...) – Laplace’s principle of insufficient reason and Wald’s maximin criterion. After that, we apply this analysis to political philosophy, by contrasting Harsanyi’s and Rawls’s theories of justice, respectively based on Laplace’s principle of insufficient reason and Wald’s maximin rule – and we end up highlighting the virtues of Rawls’s principle on practical grounds (it is intuitively attractive because of its computational simplicity, so providing a salient point for convergence) – and connect this argument to our moral intuitions and social norms requiring prudence in the case of decisions made for the sake of others. (shrink)

In some severely uncertain situations, exemplified by climate change and novel pandemics, policymakers lack a reasoned basis for assigning probabilities to the possible outcomes of the policies they must choose between. I outline and defend an uncertainty averse, egalitarian approach to policy evaluation in these contexts. The upshot is a theory of distributive justice which offers especially strong reasons to guard against individual and collective misfortune.

This paper presents a unifying diagnosis of a number of important problems facing existing models of rational choice under moral uncertainty and proposes a remedy. I argue that the problems of (i) severely limited scope, (ii) intertheoretic comparisons, and (iii) 'swamping’ all stem from the way in which values are assigned to options in decision rules such as Maximisation of Expected Choiceworthiness. By assigning values to options under a given moral theory by asking something like ‘how much (...) do I desire this option, supposing this theory is true?’ rather than ‘how much value does this theory assign to this option?’ these problems can be avoided, while the appealing features of these accounts can be preserved. This amendment provides a role for the preferences, desires, or goals of rational agents that is curiously absent from the existing discussion of what individuals rationally ought to do when they are uncertain about what they morally ought to do. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Epistemic states of uncertainty play important roles in ethical and political theorizing. Theories that appeal to a “veil of ignorance,” for example, analyze fairness or impartiality in terms of certain states of ignorance. It is important, then, to scrutinize proposed conceptions of ignorance and explore promising alternatives in such contexts. Here, I study Lerner’s probabilistic egalitarian theorem in the setting of imprecise probabilities. Lerner’s theorem assumes that a social planner tasked with distributing income to individuals in a population is (...) “completely ignorant” about which utility functions belong to which individuals. Lerner models this ignorance with a certain uniform probability distribution, and shows that, under certain further assumptions, income should be equally distributed. Much of the criticism of the relevance of Lerner’s result centers on the representation of ignorance involved. Imprecise probabilities provide a general framework for reasoning about various forms of uncertainty including, in particular, ignorance. To what extent can Lerner’s conclusion be maintained in this setting? (shrink)

The existing philosophical debate about the nature of reasons for belief between pragmatists and evidentialists has been substantially biased in favor of evidentialists. The literature has been focused on gathering and evaluating evidence pertaining to evidentialism and pragmatism, in the form of philosophical arguments for and against these two theses. But this way of proceeding simply presumes the truth of evidentialism, since it assumes that what we should be doing when evaluating pragmatism and evidentialism is collecting relevant evidence in order (...) to determine which of them we should believe. Evidentialism recommends this way of proceeding, but pragmatism does not. Holding the debate on terms more favorable to the pragmatist would require also identifying and assessing the practical reasons in favor of belief in pragmatism and evidentialism. Ultimately, as I will argue in this paper, conducting the debate in a fair way will shed new light on the merits of pragmatism and the flaws of evidentialism. In the first section, I outline some terminological preliminaries and identify how the discussion is biased in favor of evidentialism. In the second section, I identify the practical reasons bearing on belief in pragmatism and evidentialism. I argue that there are structural reasons why almost everyone, almost all of the time, will have more than ample practical reason to be a pragmatist rather than an evidentialist. Then, in the third section, I examine the prospect that pragmatism and evidentialism could be self-defeating theories, and show that the self-defeat of evidentialism is both more likely and worse than the self-defeat of pragmatism. In the fourth section, I discuss how to rationally change or make up one’s mind about pragmatism and evidentialism, and how to determine what to believe under uncertainty about whether pragmatism or evidentialism is correct. Then, I conclude. (shrink)

Against the background of continuing inadequacy in global efforts to address climate change and apparent social and political inertia, ever greater interest is being generated in the idea that geoengineering may offer some solution to this problem. I do not take a position, here, on whether or not geoengineering could ever be morally justifiable. My goal in this paper is more modest – but also has broader implications. I aim to show that even if some form of geoengineering might be (...) ethically acceptable in certain specific circumstances, lab-based research into such techniques could nevertheless have morally problematic consequences. I support this claim by explaining that our current state of uncertainty regarding how the impacts of geoengineering interventions could be geographically distributed may help to promote international agreement on fair rules for the governance of geoengineering. In these circumstances of scientific uncertainty, international actors also face uncertainty regarding who the winners and losers could be with respect to potential rules of geoengineering governance, thereby obstructing the pursuit of self-interest in the selection of such rules. Instead of a research first approach, then, we have reason to take a governance first approach – ensuring that fair international institutions to regulate geoengineering activities are established before further research is conducted into how the costs and benefits of such interventions could be distributed. (shrink)

This thesis discusses how societies should allocate clinical care resources. The first aim of the thesis is to defend the idea that clinical care resource allocation is a matter for deliberative democratic procedures. I argue that deliberative democracy is justified because of its ability to implement equal respect and autonomy. Furthermore, I address several in-principle objections to the project of applying deliberative democracy to clinical care resource allocation. Most notably, I respond to the narrow view of the scope of deliberative (...) democracy and the critiques of explicit rationing. -/- The second aim of the thesis is to determine what is required by deliberative democracy in clinical care resource allocation. I identify the general requirements that resource allocation agencies should meet, namely public reason, public involvement, transparency, accuracy and revisability. I then examine what is required by deliberative democracy with regard to two particularly salient specific topics, namely the substantive values that should govern resource allocation and the involvement of scientific experts in decision-making. -/- I demonstrate that public reason imposes severe constraints on the substantive values that should be employed. Most of these constraints are rooted in the idea that, under a regime of scarcity, public reason requires that resources be allocated so as to minimise the strongest complaint anyone may have. Out of the variety of values that are commonly proposed as relevant, only priority to the worst-off, ability to benefit, specialness of clinical care and cost are consistent with public reason. Turning to expert involvement, I argue that deliberative democracy can overcome several formidable threats, such as the opacity of expert opinions to laypersons and the tendency to hide uncertainty and disagreement from the public. I also discuss how my proposals on substantive values and expert involvement could be implemented, in order to add to the plausibility of my theory. (shrink)

Choice often proceeds in two stages: We construct a shortlist on the basis of limited and uncertain information about the options and then reduce this uncertainty by examining the shortlist in greater detail. The goal is to do well when making a final choice from the option set. I argue that we cannot realise this goal by constructing a ranking over the options at shortlisting stage which determines of each option whether it is more or less worthy of being (...) included in a shortlist. This is relevant to the 2010 UK Equality Act. The Act requires that shortlists be constructed on grounds of candidate rankings and affirmative action is only permissible for equally qualified candidates. This is misguided: Shortlisting candidates with lower expected qualifications but higher variance may raise the chance of finding an exceptionally strong candidate. If it does, then shortlisting such candidates would make eminent business sense and there is nothing unfair about it. This observation opens up room for including more underrepresented candidates with protected characteristics, as they are more likely to display greater variance in the selector’s credence functions at shortlisting stage. (shrink)

In this contribution we will present a generalization of de Finetti's betting game in which a gambler is allowed to buy and sell unknown events' betting odds from more than one bookmaker. In such a framework, the sole coherence of the books the gambler can play with is not sucient, as in the original de Finetti's frame, to bar the gambler from a sure-win opportunity. The notion of joint coherence which we will introduce in this paper characterizes those coherent books (...) on which sure- win is impossible. Our main results provide geometric characterizations of the space of all books which are jointly coherent with a xed one. As a consequence we will also show that joint coherence is decidable. (shrink)

Recent research has begun to investigate sensory processing in relation to nonclinical variation in traits associated with the autism spectrum disorders (ASD). We propose that existing accounts of autistic perception can be augmented by considering a role for individual differences in top-down expectations for the precision of sensory input, related to the processing of state-dependent levels of uncertainty. We therefore examined ASD-like traits in relation to the rubber-hand illusion: an experimental paradigm that typically elicits crossmodal integration of visual, tactile, (...) and proprioceptive information in an unusual illusory context. Individuals with higher ASD-like traits showed reduced effects of the rubber-hand illusion on perceived arm position and reach-to-grasp movements, compared to individuals with lower ASD-like traits. These differences occurred despite both groups reporting the typical subjective experience of the illusion concerning visuotactile integration and ownership for the rubber hand. Together these results suggest that the integration of proprioceptive information with cues for arm position derived from the illusory context differs between individuals partly in relation to traits associated with ASD. We suggest that the observed differences in sensory integration can be best explained in terms of differing expectations regarding the precision of sensory estimates in contexts that suggest uncertainty. (shrink)

Robert Adams argues that often our moral commitment outstrips what we are epistemically entitled to believe; in these cases, the virtuous agent doxastic states are instances of “moral faith”. I argue against Adams’ views on the need for moral faith; at least in some cases, our moral “intuitions” provide us with certain moral knowledge. The appearance that there can be no certainty here is the result of dubious views about second-order or indirect doubts. Nonetheless, discussing the phenomena that lead Adams (...) to postulate moral faith brings to light the nature of the epistemic warrant underlying various kinds of moral commitments. (shrink)

In this paper, a critical discussion is made of the role of entailments in the so-called New Paradigm of psychology of reasoning based on Bayesian models of rationality (Elqayam & Over, 2013). It is argued that assessments of probabilistic coherence cannot stand on their own, but that they need to be integrated with empirical studies of intuitive entailment judgments. This need is motivated not just by the requirements of probability theory itself, but also by a need to enhance the (...) interdisciplinary integration of the psychology of reasoning with formal semantics in linguistics. The constructive goal of the paper is to introduce a new experimental paradigm, called the Dialogical Entailment task, to supplement current trends in the psychology of reasoning towards investigating knowledge-rich, social reasoning under uncertainty (Oaksford and Chater, 2019). As a case study, this experimental paradigm is applied to reasoning with conditionals and negation operators (e.g. CEM, wide and narrow negation). As part of the investigation, participants’ entailment judgments are evaluated against their probability evaluations to assess participants’ cross-task consistency over two experimental sessions. (shrink)

The use of evidence to resolve uncertainties is key to many endeavours, most conspicuously science and law. Despite this, the logic of uncertainty is seldom taught explicitly, and often seems misunderstood. Traditional educational practice even fails to encourage students to identify uncertainty when they express knowledge, though mark schemes that reward the identification of reliable and uncertain responses have long been shown to encourage more insightful understanding. In our information-rich society the ability to identify uncertainty is often (...) more important than the possession of knowledge itself. In both science and law there are fundamentally different kinds of uncertainty at issue. There is uncertainty whether a particular hypothesis is correct, and there is uncertainty about observable data that may be generated if a particular hypothesis is correct. Both are expressed in terms of probabilities. Each has its own domain of application and its own logic, but the inter-relationship is complex and sometimes misunderstood. Hypothesis probabilities are always open to error through possible failure to take account of realistic alternatives, while the proper inferences that can be drawn from data probabilities (often in the context of significance testing) are quite limited and easily over-interpreted. When considering these two kinds of probability in a court of law it is possible to interpret the phrase 'reasonable doubt' in different ways. It can be seen as addressing data uncertainty: whether such incriminating evidence might with reasonable probability arise to confront an innocent person. Or (the more conventional view) it can be seen as some sort of threshold level on the probability that the defendant is guilty (a hypothesis probability). Each typically involves elements of subjective judgement, but fewer issues and uncertainties arise when considering the data probability and it is argued that this is often the more critical and proper issue for a jury to address. This has particular repercussions for cases involving identification of a suspect through trawl of a DNA or other database. (shrink)

Three challenges to a unified understanding of delusions emerge from Radden's On Delusion (2011). Here, I propose that in order to respond to these challenges, and to work towards a unifying framework for delusions, we should see delusions as arising in inference under uncertainty. This proposal is based on the observation that delusions in key respects are surprisingly like perceptual illusions, and it is developed further by focusing particularly on individual differences in uncertainty expectations.

I outline four conditions on permissible promise-making: the promise must be for a morally permissible end, must not be deceptive, must be in good faith, and must involve a realistic assessment of oneself. I then address whether promises that you are uncertain you can keep can meet these four criteria, with a focus on campaign promises as an illustrative example. I argue that uncertain promises can meet the first two criteria, but that whether they can meet the second two depends (...) on the source of the promisor's uncertainty. External uncertainty stemming from outside factors is unproblematic, but internal uncertainty stemming from the promisor's doubts about her own strength leads to promises that are in bad faith or unrealistic. I conclude that campaign promises are often subject to internal uncertainty and are therefore morally impermissible to make, all else being equal. (shrink)

This paper considers the responsibilities of the FDA with regard to disseminating information about the benefits and harms of e-cigarettes. Tobacco harm reduction advocates claim that the FDA has been overcautious and has violated ethical obligations by failing to clearly communicate to the public that e-cigarettes are far less harmful than cigarettes. We argue, by contrast, that the FDA’s obligations in this arena are more complex than they may appear at first blush. Though the FDA is accountable for informing the (...) public about the health risks and benefits of products it regulates, it also has other roles that inform when and how it should disseminate information. In addition to being a knowledge purveyor, it is also a knowledge producer, an advisor to the public, and a practical agent shaping the material conditions in which people make health-related choices. In our view, those other roles call for caution in the way the FDA interprets and communicates the available evidence. (shrink)

Political conspiracy theories—e.g., unsupported beliefs about the nefarious machinations of one’s cunning, powerful, and evil opponents—are adopted enthusiastically by a great many people of widely varying political orientations. In many cases, these theories posit that there exists a small group of individuals who have intentionally but secretly acted to cause economic problems, political strife, and even natural disasters. This group is often held to exist “in the shadows,” either because its membership is unknown, or because “the real nature” of its (...) members’ allegiances, motives, and methods has been concealed from the public at large. Paradigmatic examples of these political conspiracy theories include anti-Semitic beliefs of the sort associated with The Protocols of the Elder of Zion, the “Red Scare” of the 1950s, claims about the “New World Order,” and many others. -/- Why do these theories attract so many adherents? In this essay, I’ll attempt to spread some light on this issue by applying Kahneman and Tversky’s highly influential work on reasoning under uncertainty. I’ll proceed by first providing a brief introduction to Kahneman and Tversky’s work on reasoning under uncertainty, and the way in which this relates to standard economic and philosophic accounts of rational behavior, as well as philosophical ideas about the role of intuition. Next, I’ll move onto some specific interconnected aspects of this work that are relevant to understanding conspiracy theories, including errors involving probabilistic reasoning (“Prospect Theory”), those involving the inappropriate use of heuristics, and those related to the “framing” of certain outcomes as losses from a baseline. This essay will conclude by making two related points. First, some of the most important reasoning errors committed by adherents of conspiracy theories are errors that many of us regularly commit. Given that self-awareness of these errors provides only minimal protection from committing them, this suggests that many of use may be more vulnerable to conspiratorial reasoning than we may like to believe. Second, in the light of this danger, I will outline a few steps that might be taken to help inoculate ourselves against the appeal of these theories, and to help respond to the conspiratorial arguments of others. (shrink)

The principle that rational agents should maximize expected utility or choiceworthiness is intuitively plausible in many ordinary cases of decision-making under uncertainty. But it is less plausible in cases of extreme, low-probability risk (like Pascal's Mugging), and intolerably paradoxical in cases like the St. Petersburg and Pasadena games. In this paper I show that, under certain conditions, stochastic dominance reasoning can capture most of the plausible implications of expectational reasoning while avoiding most of its pitfalls. (...) Specifically, given sufficient background uncertainty about the choiceworthiness of one's options, many expectation-maximizing gambles that do not stochastically dominate their alternatives "in a vacuum" become stochastically dominant in virtue of that background uncertainty. But, even under these conditions, stochastic dominance will not require agents to accept options whose expectational superiority depends on sufficiently small probabilities of extreme payoffs. The sort of background uncertainty on which these results depend looks unavoidable for any agent who measures the choiceworthiness of her options in part by the total amount of value in the resulting world. At least for such agents, then, stochastic dominance offers a plausible general principle of choice under uncertainty that can explain more of the apparent rational constraints on such choices than has previously been recognized. (shrink)

Over the last decade, multi-agent systems have come to form one of the key tech- nologies for software development. The Formal Approaches to Multi-Agent Systems (FAMAS) workshop series brings together researchers from the fields of logic, theoreti- cal computer science and multi-agent systems in order to discuss formal techniques for specifying and verifying multi-agent systems. FAMAS addresses the issues of logics for multi-agent systems, formal methods for verification, for example model check- ing, and formal approaches to cooperation, multi-agent planning, communication, (...) coordination, negotiation, games, and reasoning under uncertainty in a distributed environment. In 2007, the third FAMAS workshop, FAMAS'007, was one of the agent workshops gathered together under the umbrella of Multi-Agent Logics, Languages, and Organ- isations - Federated Workshops, MALLOW'007, taking place from 3 to 7 September 2007 in Durham. This current special issue of the Logic Journal of the IGPL gathers together the revised and updated versions of the five best FAMAS'007 contributions. (shrink)

I present a new argument for the repugnant conclusion. The core of the argument is a risky, intrapersonal analogue of the mere addition paradox. The argument is important for three reasons. First, some solutions to Parfit’s original puzzle do not obviously generalize to the intrapersonal puzzle in a plausible way. Second, it raises independently important questions about how to make decisions under uncertainty for the sake of people whose existence might depend on what we do. And, third, it (...) suggests various difficulties for leading views about the value of a person’s life compared to her nonexistence. (shrink)

This is the latest draft of chapter 1 of _A New Theory of Reasons for Belief: Pragmatic Foundations and Pluralistic Reasons_ (Under Contract with OUP). It outlines the view that is the focus of the book: Welfarist Pluralism. Welfarist pluralism is the view that all normative reasons for belief are grounded in wellbeing and that being in a positive epistemic state is one of the components of wellbeing. This chapter explains how one can develop a principled version of non-derivative (...) pluralism about normative reasons for belief while still accepting that theoretical reason has a single, unified pragmatic foundation. Updated 25 January 2023. (shrink)

We investigate the conflict between the ex ante and ex post criteria of social welfare in a new framework of individual and social decisions, which distinguishes between two sources of uncertainty, here interpreted as an objective and a subjective source respectively. This framework makes it possible to endow the individuals and society not only with ex ante and ex post preferences, as is usually done, but also with interim preferences of two kinds, and correspondingly, to introduce interim forms of (...) the Pareto principle. After characterizing the ex ante and ex post criteria, we present a first solution to their conflict that extends the former as much possible in the direction of the latter. Then, we present a second solution, which goes in the opposite direction, and is also maximally assertive. Both solutions translate the assumed Pareto conditions into weighted additive utility representations, and both attribute to the individuals common probability values on the objective source of uncertainty, and different probability values on the subjective source. We discuss these solutions in terms of two conceptual arguments, i.e., the by now classic spurious unanimity argument and a novel informational argument labelled complementary ignorance. The paper complies with the standard economic methodology of basing probability and utility representations on preference axioms, but for the sake of completeness, also considers a construal of objective uncertainty based on the assumption of an exogeneously given probability measure. JEL classification: D70; D81. (shrink)

I will argue that physicians have an ethical obligation to justify their conscientious objection and the most reliable interpretation of the Polish legal framework claims that conscientious objection is permissible only when the justification shows the genuineness of the judgment of conscience that is not based on false beliefs and arises from a moral norm that has a high rank. I will demonstrate that the dogma accepted in the Polish doctrine that the reasons that lie behind conscientious objection in medicine (...) cannot be evaluated or controlled by anyone is based either on a mistaken interpretation of the Constitution or on the unreliable concept of conscience. I will refer to the legal regulations concerning military refusals that require from objectors to reveal and justify their views. Finally, I will demonstrate why conscientious objection under uncertainty does not deserve acceptance, because it is based on a specific version of the precautionary principle. (shrink)

The main aim of this book is to introduce the topic of limited awareness, and changes in awareness, to those interested in the philosophy of decision-making and uncertain reasoning.

In his new book "The Importance of Being Rational", Errol Lord aims to give a real definition of the property of rationality in terms of normative reasons. If he can do so, his work is an important step towards a defense of ‘reasons fundamentalism’ – the thesis that all complex normative properties can be analyzed in terms of normative reasons. I focus on his analysis of epistemic rationality, which says that your doxastic attitudes are rational just in case they are (...) correct responses to the objective normative reasons you possess. For some fact to be an objective normative reason to do something that you possess, you have to be in a position to know this fact and be able to competently use it as a reason to do that thing. Lord’s view is thus a knowledge-first view about possessing normative reasons. Throughout the book, Lord conceptualizes belief in the traditional tripartite way – if you take any attitude at all towards a proposition, then you either believe it, or disbelieve it, or you suspend judgment about it. Lord doesn’t discuss cases in which we’re uncertain. Yet, those cases are ubiquitous. I explore how his view can be extended to them. I first discuss whether his strategy for vindicating coherence requirements in terms of normative reasons can be applied to credences. I then ask how Lord can conceive of the doxastic attitudes that encode uncertainty . (shrink)

Experimental results on the Ellsberg paradox typically reveal behavior that is commonly interpreted as ambiguity aversion. The experiments reported in the current paper find the objective probabilities for drawing a red ball that make subjects indifferent between various risky and uncertain Ellsberg bets. They allow us to examine the predictive power of alternative principles of choice under uncertainty, including the objective maximin and Hurwicz criteria, the sure-thing principle, and the principle of insufficient reason. Contrary to our expectations, the (...) principle of insufficient reason performed substantially better than rival theories in our experiment, with ambiguity aversion appearing only as a secondary phenomenon. (shrink)

Decision theory requires agents to assign probabilities to states of the world and utilities to the possible outcomes of different actions. When agents commit to having the probabilities and/or utilities in a decision problem defined by objective features of the world, they may find themselves unable to decide which actions maximize expected utility. Decision theory has long recognized that work-around strategies are available in special cases; this is where dominance reasoning, minimax, and maximin play a role. Here we describe (...) a different work around, wherein a rational decision about one decision problem can be reached by ‘interpolating’ information from another problem that the agent believes has already been rationally solved. (shrink)

How does doubt come about? What are the mechanisms responsible for our inclinations to reassess propositions and collect further evidence to support or reject them? In this paper, I approach this question by focusing on what might be considered a distorting mirror of unreasonable doubt, namely the pathological doubt of patients with obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD). Individuals with OCD exhibit a form of persistent doubting, indecisiveness, and over-cautiousness at pathological levels (Rasmussen and Eisen in Psychiatr Clin 15(4):743–758, 1992; Reed in Obsessional (...) experience and compulsive behaviour: a cognitive-structural approach, Academic Press, Cambridge, 1985; Tolin et al. in Cogn Ther Res 27(6):657–669, 2003). I argue that the failure in OCD is of an affective nature, involving both excessive epistemic anxiety and hyperactive feelings of uncertainty. I further argue that our adaptive disposition to inquire about the right matters—that is, about propositions which are both epistemically risky and imply harmful possibilities—might depend on these affective mechanisms. (shrink)

The topic of this thesis is axiological uncertainty – the question of how you should evaluate your options if you are uncertain about which axiology is true. As an answer, I defend Expected Value Maximisation (EVM), the view that one option is better than another if and only if it has the greater expected value across axiologies. More precisely, I explore the axiomatic foundations of this view. I employ results from state-dependent utility theory, extend them in various ways and (...) interpret them accordingly, and thus provide axiomatisations of EVM as a theory of axiological uncertainty. (shrink)

At the centenary of Frank H. Knight’s Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit (1921), we explore the continuing relevance of Knightian uncertainty to the theory and practice of entrepreneurship. There are three challenges facing such assessment. First, RUP is complex and difficult to interpret. The key but neglected element of RUP is that Knight’s account is not solely about risk and uncertainty as states of nature, but about how an agent’s beliefs about uncertain outcomes and confidence in those beliefs (...) guide their choices. Second, RUP is Knight’s only effort in this area. His subsequent career led elsewhere, so he did not engage with subsequent interpretations of this work. Third, much of the current literature emphasizes that decisions must be different under the two states of nature with a consequent misunderstanding of entrepreneurial agency. This paper addresses each challenge in sequence. First, we explicate Knight’s (1921) approach and explain why that approach is murky. Second, as a complement to Knight’s interpretation, we examine Frank P. Ramsey’s approach to subjective probabilities to help clarify Knight’s murky approach. What links Knight and Ramsey is a shared pragmatism about entrepreneurial agency under uncertainty that depends upon the beliefs about, and confidence in, their judgments of possible outcomes. This Knight-Ramsey approach does not require actor’s behaviors to be determined by the class of uncertain environment (whether risk, uncertainty, or ambiguity) they face. We focus on the response by the entrepreneur to the existence of uncertainty in all its forms. We argue that this reductive account provides a foundation to examine common problems in management, including managerial hubris, the interaction between entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, and the need for experimentation (such as prototyping and market research) in advance of new product and venture launches. Third, we critique current literature that favors epistemic purism about the ontology of risk and uncertainty and ignores Knight-Ramsey pragmatism in meeting uncertainty, such as using formal and informal institutions for uncertainty mitigation. Our account locates Frank Knight’s subtleties in entrepreneurial behavior firmly in the literature on entrepreneurial agency a century later. (shrink)

A dynamic semantics for iffy oughts offers an attractive alternative to the folklore that Chisholm's paradox enforces an unhappy choice between the intuitive inference rules of factual and deontic detachment. The first part of the story told here shows how a dynamic theory about ifs and oughts gives rise to a nonmonotonic perspective on deontic discourse and reasoning that elegantly removes the air of paradox from Chisholm's puzzle without sacrificing any of the two detachment principles. The second part of (...) the story showcases two bonus applications of the framework suggested here: it offers a response to Forrester's gentle murder paradox and avoids Kolodny and MacFarlane's miners paradox about deontic reasoning under epistemic uncertainty. A comparison between the dynamic semantic proposal made in this paper and a more conservative approach combining a static semantics with a dynamic pragmatics is provided. (shrink)

Innovative research on decision making under ‘deep uncertainty’ is underway in applied fields such as engineering and operational research, largely outside the view of normative theorists grounded in decision theory. Applied methods and tools for decision support under deep uncertainty go beyond standard decision theory in the attention that they give to the structuring of decisions. Decision structuring is an important part of a broader philosophy of managing uncertainty in decision making, and normative decision theorists (...) can both learn from, and contribute to, the growing deep uncertainty decision support literature. (shrink)

We typically have to act under uncertainty. We can be uncertain about the relevant descriptive facts, but also about the relevant normative facts. However, the search for a theory of decision-making under normative uncertainty is doomed to failure. First, the most natural proposal for what to do given normative uncertainty faces two devastating problems. Second, the motivations for wanting a theory of what to do given descriptive uncertainty do not carry over to normative (...) class='Hi'>uncertainty. Descriptive facts may be inaccessible even in principle, and ignorance of them excuses one from blame, but normative facts are in principle accessible, and ignorance of them arguably is no excuse. Normative facts differ from descriptive facts: normative facts affect what we ought to do no matter what, while descriptive facts affect what we ought to do only insofar as we are aware of them. (shrink)

A well-ordered society faces a crisis whenever a sufficient number of noncompliers enter into the political system. This has the potential to destabilize liberal democratic political order. This article provides a formal analysis of two competing solutions to the problem of political stability offered in the public reason liberalism literature—namely, using public reason or using convergence discourse to restore liberal democratic political order in the well-ordered society. The formal analyses offered in this article show that using public reason fails completely, (...) and using convergent discourse, although doing better, has its own critical limitations that have not been previously recognized properly. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend an account of the reasons for which we act, believe, and so on for any Ф such that there can be reasons for which we Ф. Such reasons are standardly called motivating reasons. I argue that three dominant views of motivating reasons (psychologism, factualism and disjunctivism) all fail to capture the ordinary concept of a motivating reason. I show this by drawing out three constraints on what motivating reasons must be, and demonstrating how each view (...) fails to satisfy at least one of these constraints. I then propose and defend my own account of motivating reasons, which I call the Guise of Normative Reasons Account. On the account I defend, motivating reasons are propositions. A proposition is the reason for which someone Ф‐s when (a) she represents that proposition as a normative reason to Ф, and (b) her representation explains, in the right way, her Ф‐ing. As I argue, the Guise of Normative Reasons Account satisfies all three constraints on what motivating reasons must be, and weathers several objections that might be leveled against propositionalist views. (shrink)

In the growing literature on decision-making under moral uncertainty, a number of skeptics have argued that there is an insuperable barrier to rational "hedging" for the risk of moral error, namely the apparent incomparability of moral reasons given by rival theories like Kantianism and utilitarianism. Various general theories of intertheoretic value comparison have been proposed to meet this objection, but each suffers from apparently fatal flaws. In this paper, I propose a more modest approach that aims to identify (...) classes of moral theories that share common principles strong enough to establish bases for intertheoretic comparison. I show that, contra the claims of skeptics, there are often rationally perspicuous grounds for precise, quantitative value comparisons within such classes. In light of this fact, I argue, the existence of some apparent incomparabilities between widely divergent moral theories cannot serve as a general argument against hedging for one's moral uncertainties. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

In this essay, we explore an issue of moral uncertainty: what we are permitted to do when we are unsure about which moral principles are correct. We develop a novel approach to this issue that incorporates important insights from previous work on moral uncertainty, while avoiding some of the difficulties that beset existing alternative approaches. Our approach is based on evaluating and choosing between option sets rather than particular conduct options. We show how our approach is particularly well-suited (...) to address this issue of moral uncertainty with respect to agents that have credence in moral theories that are not fully consequentialist. (shrink)

Recent work in judgment and decisionmaking has stressed that institutions, like individuals, often rely on decisionmaking heuristics. But most of the institutional decisionmaking heuristics studied to date are highly firm- and industry-specific. This contrasts to the individual case, in which many heuristics are general-purpose rules suitable for a wide range of decision problems. Are there also general-purpose heuristics for institutional decisionmaking? In this paper, I argue that a number of methods recently developed for decisionmaking under deep uncertainty have (...) a good claim to be understood as general-purpose decisionmaking heuristics suitable for a broad range of institutional decision problems. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

We are sometimes unsure of the moral status of our relationships with other entities. Recent case studies in this uncertainty include our relationships with artificial agents (robots, assistant AI, etc.), animals, and patients with “locked-in” syndrome. Do these entities have basic moral standing? Could they count as true friends or lovers? What should we do when we do not know the answer to these questions? An influential line of reasoning suggests that, in such cases of moral uncertainty, (...) we need meta-moral decision rules that allow us to either minimize the risks of moral wrongdoing or improve the choice-worthiness of our actions. One particular argument adopted in this literature is the “risk asymmetry argument,” which claims that the risks associated with accepting or rejecting some moral facts may be sufficiently asymmetrical as to warrant favoring a particular practical resolution of this uncertainty. Focusing on the case study of artificial beings, this article argues that this is best understood as an ethical-epistemic challenge. The article argues that taking potential risk asymmetries seriously can help resolve disputes about the status of human–AI relationships, at least in practical terms (philosophical debates will, no doubt, continue); however, the resolution depends on a proper, empirically grounded assessment of the risks involved. Being skeptical about basic moral status, but more open to the possibility of meaningful relationships with such entities, may be the most sensible approach to take. (shrink)

In this paper we introduce the nascent literature on Moral Uncertainty Theory and explore its application to the criminal law. Moral Uncertainty Theory seeks to address the question of what we ought to do when we are uncertain about what to do because we are torn between rival moral theories. For instance, we may have some credence in one theory that tells us to do A but also in another that tells us to do B. We examine how (...) we might decide whether or not to criminalize some conduct when we are unsure as to whether or not the conduct is morally permitted, and whether or not it is permissible to criminalize the conduct. We also look at how we might make sentencing decisions under moral uncertainty. We argue that Moral Uncertainty Theory can be an illuminating way to address these questions, but find that doing so is a lot more complicated than applying Moral Uncertainty Theory to individual conduct. (shrink)