Abstract
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? One common response to this challenge proposes 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: where does the threshold come from, and why should it take any one value rather than another? 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). The stochastic dominance approach also allows a principled, albeit intuitively imperfect, response to the agglomeration problem. Thus, I argue, deontologists are better equipped than many critics have supposed to address the problems of decision-making under uncertainty.
Highlights
We are often uncertain about what we morally ought to do. Such uncertainty can arise from uncertainty about the empirical facts: for instance, is this substance that I am about to put in my friend’s coffee sweetener, or is it arsenic (Weatherson 2014)? It can arise from uncertainty about basic moral principles—what we might call “purely moral” uncertainty: for instance, given
In the cases we have examined, stochastic dominance makes no distinction between “weaker” constraints and “stronger” constraints
I have argued that stochastic dominance provides a principled foundation for a threshold view, which can rebut the accusation that such views are unmotivated and arbitrary
Summary
We are often uncertain about what we morally ought to do. Such uncertainty can arise from uncertainty about the empirical facts: for instance, is this substance that I am about to put in my friend’s coffee sweetener, or is it arsenic (Weatherson 2014)? It can arise from uncertainty about basic moral principles—what we might call “purely moral” uncertainty: for instance, given. Expectational reasoning, seems ill-suited to—if not actively incompatible with— non-consequentialist moral theories like Kantian deontology, most obviously because (unlike, say, classical utilitarianism) these theories are not naturally interpreted as assigning finite cardinal degrees of rightness and wrongness to options that can be multiplied by probabilities and summed to yield expectations. For this reason among others, several philosophers have doubted whether Kantians et al can provide any plausible decision rule for epistemically imperfect agents. I suggest a solution to this problem that follows naturally from the approach developed in preceding sections and which, though intuitively imperfect, strikes me as an improvement over other extant solutions
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