Clarifying some misunderstandings of the unawareness argument

Thanks again to everyone who participated in the Cluelessness Critiques Competition! 

Across several entries to the competition, I noticed a few important misunderstandings of my argument for cluelessness from unawareness (the “unawareness argument”). This post aims to clear up some of those. To recap the summary of the argument:

• Let’s say that we c-prefer A over B if the reason we prefer A is an impartial altruistic comparison of the actions’ possible consequences.
• P1. Normative premise: To justify c-preferring A over B, it’s not enough to say (e.g.) that A seems heuristically good. Rather, we need to argue that A has higher “expected value” broadly speaking, meaning: In some sense we “expect” that, if we were idealized agents who could aggregate all of A’s and B’s possible consequences into literal EVs, then we’d say A has higher EV. (We ourselves don’t need literal EVs to justify c-preferences, hence the scare quotes.) Otherwise, it’s unacceptably arbitrary to c-prefer A.
• P2. Conceptual premise: If our understanding of A’s and B’s possible consequences is sufficiently coarse-grained, then we don’t have an argument for “expecting” our idealized self’s EV for A to be higher, lower, or equal to B’s. So A’s and B’s “EVs” are incomparable. In particular:
  • a. Against precise EVs: We shouldn’t represent actions’ degrees of c-preferability with literal precise expected values.
  • b. Against “best guesses”: Even if we don’t use literal precise EVs, we shouldn’t always force ourselves to compare A’s and B’s “EVs”.
• P3. Empirical^[4] premise: Due to unawareness (at least), our understanding of any pair of actions’ possible consequences is indeed very coarse-grained — enough that the conclusion of (P2) follows (i.e., these actions’ “EVs” are incomparable). In particular, the actions’ “EVs” are too severely imprecise to compare them, regardless of whether we (a) formally model these “EVs” or (b) appeal to informal/heuristic arguments.
• Conclusion: We aren’t justified in c-preferring any action over any other.

Please see the footnotes for quotes of examples, which provide more context on each misunderstanding in the table.

1. ^{^}

   Quote: “For an initial example of why we might want to diverge from the idealized self [...] consider [that] an idealized self might be able to simulate a coin flip really granularly and so [assign] ~100% to heads (or to tails), but we can't tell which of those would be and so we keep our 50%. If some decision hinges on choosing heads or tails correctly, our best move might be to abstain, even though we might not think that an epistemically idealized self would do that.”

2. ^{^}

    Quote (emphasis mine): “[Stated as a counter to P1:] We can have good reasons to prefer one action over another, reasons based on the evidence we actually have, the values we actually hold, and the comparisons we can actually make, without having any clue what an idealized version of ourselves would think.”

3. ^{^}

   I have made claims like “we don’t have a reason to choose one strategy over another based purely on the impartial good”. But in context, the argument was that it’s ambiguous how to weigh up pro tanto reasons in favor of both options. So these claims were meant to be read as “balance of reasons” claims.

^{^}

Quote: ““I haven’t found any formal or rigorous justification for my decisions” doesn’t mean “my decisions are arbitrary”.” Quote: “We have no “non-arbitrary” justification for making any decisions under any circumstances, due to various epistemological problems [...]”

^{^}

Quote (emphasis mine): “[Stated as a rebuttal to my argument:] We can act as if we have good reasons even when we can’t identify those reasons. […] Two pieces of supporting evidence: 1. Common-sense decision theory can solve problems that we have no rigorous account of. […] 2. Mathematicians can intuit the truth of a conjecture before they know how to prove it.”

^{^}

Quote (emphasis mine): “DiGiovanni objects that consequences can be divided into subsets in arbitrary ways and that the unknown remainder may contain reasons on both sides. My response is that, on a reasons-based approach, the identification of significant consequences is not arbitrary. […] Well-supported indirect effects must also be considered, but mere possibility is not enough.” Quote (emphasis mine): “Reasons-based weighing requires only that the specific reasons actually on the table be compared to each other, and it is a further, substantive question — not settled by P3 — whether the mere existence of unconceived considerations defeats an identified reason's weight […]”

^{^}

Quote: “[Stated as a rebuttal to my argument:] The following two claims are in the same class: 1. My sandwich-related unawareness is sufficiently bounded that it doesn’t influence my decisions. 2. I can reasonably go with my best guess when making decisions from an impartial-altruistic point of view. In both cases, I make a leap without having a visible justification for doing so, or even a theory of how to produce such a justification.” Quote: “If we accept that superforecasters’ past success in geopolitics is evidence of future success—even though next year’s geopolitical situation will be unprecedented in many ways—then we have admitted that we’re willing to use inductive evidence for situations that aren’t perfectly analogous, or that involve some unawareness. At that point, there is no barrier to having credences about the impartial-altruistic effects of decisions, even though our ability to induct is much weaker. […] Is there a qualitative difference between predicting actions’ effects on the far future versus predicting effects on complicated geopolitical outcomes?”

^{^}

Dickens’ post includes this quote by me, which indicates that my argument is about the degree of imprecision: “Premise P2 claims that actions are incomparable when our understanding of a decision problem is coarse-grained enough.” But the view he responds to is the view that there’s a qualitative difference between the impartial altruistic case and the local case. I think this disconnect is downstream of the fact that, as he says, his post “[does] not address imprecise probabilities”.

^{^}

Indeed, Dickens (author of the quotes I’m responding to in this row) himself says: ““I haven’t found any formal or rigorous justification for my decisions” doesn’t mean “my decisions are arbitrary”.”

^{^}

Quote: “The point needed to be made here is to introduce the idea of the cluelessness horizon: the line beyond which we are clearly clueless. Inside this horizon are consequences we can have some idea about, so we could make decisions if we only focused on those. Taking into account also what is beyond the horizon is what becomes impossible. … [The author goes on to argue that if we only make decisions based on consequences before the cluelessness horizon, the sequence’s conclusion doesn’t follow.]”

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