“Bracketing Cluelessness” is a philosophy paper by Sylvester Kollin, Anthony DiGiovanni, Nicolas Macé, and myself, which presents a new approach to decision-making in the face of consequentialist cluelessness.

Abstract:

Consequentialists must take into account all possible consequences of their actions, including those in the far future. But due to the difficulty of getting a grasp on these consequences and producing non-arbitrary probabilities for them, it seems that consequentialists should often consider themselves clueless about which option is best. Contrary to orthodox consequentialism, however, there is a common-sense intuition that one should bracket those consequences which one is clueless about. Building on a model involving imprecise probability, we develop two novel alternatives to orthodoxy which capture this intuition. On bottom-up bracketing, we set aside those beneficiaries for whom we are clueless what would be best, and then base the overall verdict on the remainder. On top-down bracketing, we instead base the overall verdict on what would be best for the largest subsets of beneficiaries relative to which we are not clueless. The two are not equivalent: the former violates statewise dominance, whereas the latter does not. The main objection which applies to both kinds of bracketing is that they do not rank prospects acyclically. Our response includes showing how a natural way of generalising bracketing to the dynamic setting avoids value-pumps. Finally, we argue that bracketing has important implications for real-world altruistic decision-makers, favouring neartermism over longtermism.