Wheeling and dealing: An internal bargaining approach to moral uncertainty
Summary
In this post, I explore and evaluate an internal bargaining (IB) approach to moral uncertainty. On this account, the appropriate decision under moral uncertainty is the one that would be reached as the result of negotiations between agents representing the interests of each moral theory, who are awarded your resources in proportion to your credence in that theory. This has only been discussed so far by Greaves and Cotton-Barratt (2019), who give a technical account of the approach and tentatively conclude that the view is inferior to the leading alternative approach to moral uncertainty, maximise expected choiceworthiness (MEC). I provide a more intuitive sketch of how internal bargaining works, and do so in a wide range of cases. On the basis of the cases, as well as considering some challenges for the view and its theoretical features, I tentatively conclude it is superior to MEC. I close by noting one implication relevant to effective altruists: while MEC seems to push us towards a (fanatical) adherence to longtermism, internal bargaining would provide a justification for something like worldview diversification.3
Note to reader: I’m deliberately writing this in a fairly rough-and-ready way rather than as a piece of polished philosophy. If I had to write it as the latter, I don’t think it would get written for perhaps another year or two. I’ll shortly begin working on this topic with Harry Lloyd, an HLI Summer Research Fellow, and I wanted to organise and share my thoughts before doing that. In the spirit of Blaise Pascal, I should say that if I had had more time, I would have written something shorter.