Podcast: Krister Bykvist on moral uncertainty, rationality, metaethics, AI and future populations

On today’s episode of the Utilitarian Podcast, I talk with Krister Bykvist. Krister is a Professor of philosophy at Stockholm University and Institute for Futures Studies.

We talk about the approach to moral uncertainty laid out by Krister and his co-authors in a recent book. We discuss whether we can gain evidence for moral theories, whether moral uncertainty leads to an infinite regress, the metaethical and practical implications of moral uncertainty and how to think about moral information. 

We briefly touch upon whether the philosophy and mathematics of moral uncertainty might be interesting for AI safety research. 

Then we move on to discussing future lives, impossibility theorems in population ethics and metaethics more generally. 

This is a nerdy philosophical discussion, so I do my best to introduce unfamiliar terms throughout the conversation.