TITLE:
Dealing with Moral Uncertainty: Do Logical Properties Help?
AUTHORS:
Wulf Gaertner
KEYWORDS:
Moral Uncertainty, “My Favourite Theory”, “Expected Choice-Worthiness”, Scoring Functions, Structural Properties, Common Scale of Qualitative Verdicts
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Philosophy,
Vol.11 No.1,
December
25,
2020
ABSTRACT: If an agent is unsure about which moral theory or
principle should guide her action in a decision situation, she faces moral
uncertainty. In recent years, various strategies have been explored to deal
with this type of uncertainty. In this paper, we briefly mention two strategies
from the literature that make use of credence distributions over moral
theories, namely “my favourite theory”
and “maximizing expected choice-worthiness”. As an alternative, we propose a
two-step procedure which uses the concept of aggregation over structural
properties. It is standard in the theory of collective choice and has recently
been applied to the Kuhnian problem of theory choice as well. The idea is to
explore how a morally-motivated rational agent may assess different moral
theories on the basis of fundamental
properties. These properties are ranked on a common scale of qualitative
verdicts. This method enables an outside observer to make comparisons across competing moral theories and then conclude to
what degree these theories fulfil a set
of postulated properties. By doing so, we try to render the reasons more
transparent that lie behind different types of credence ascriptions.