The way I see it, your morality defines a preference ordering over situations and your decision theory maps from decisions to situations. There can be some interaction there is that different moralities may want different inputs, ie. consequentialism only cares about the consequences, while others care about the actions that you chose. But the point is that each theory should be capable of standing on its own. And I agree with probability being somewhat ambiguous for anthropic situations, but our decision theory can just output betting outcomes instead of probabilities.
but our decision theory can just output betting outcomes instead of probabilities.
Indeed. And ADT outputs betting outcomes without any problems. It’s when you interpret them as probabilities that you start having problems, because in order to go from betting odds to probabilities, you have to sort out how much you value two copies of you getting a reward, versus one copy.
I suppose that makes sense if you’re a moral non-realist.
Also, you may care about other people for reasons of morality. Or simply because you like them. Ultimately why you care doesn’t matter and only the fact that you have a preference matters. The morality aspect is inessential.
your decision theory maps from decisions to situations
Could you say a little more about what a situation is? One thing I thought is maybe that a situation is a result of a choice? But then it sounds like your decision theory decides whether you should, for example, take an offered piece of chocolate, regardless of whether you like chocolate or not. So I guess that’s not it
But the point is that each theory should be capable of standing on its own
Can you say a little more about how ADT doesn’t stand on its own? After all, ADT is just defined as:
An ADT agent is an agent that would implement a self-confirming linking with any agent that would do the same. It would then maximises its expected utility, conditional on that linking, and using the standard non-anthropic probabilities of the various worlds.
Is the problem that it mentions expected utility, but it should be agnostic over values not expressible as utilities?
The way I see it, your morality defines a preference ordering over situations and your decision theory maps from decisions to situations. There can be some interaction there is that different moralities may want different inputs, ie. consequentialism only cares about the consequences, while others care about the actions that you chose. But the point is that each theory should be capable of standing on its own. And I agree with probability being somewhat ambiguous for anthropic situations, but our decision theory can just output betting outcomes instead of probabilities.
Indeed. And ADT outputs betting outcomes without any problems. It’s when you interpret them as probabilities that you start having problems, because in order to go from betting odds to probabilities, you have to sort out how much you value two copies of you getting a reward, versus one copy.
Well, if anything that’s about your preferences, not morality.
Moral preferences are a specific subtype of preferences.
I suppose that makes sense if you’re a moral non-realist.
Also, you may care about other people for reasons of morality. Or simply because you like them. Ultimately why you care doesn’t matter and only the fact that you have a preference matters. The morality aspect is inessential.
Could you say a little more about what a situation is? One thing I thought is maybe that a situation is a result of a choice? But then it sounds like your decision theory decides whether you should, for example, take an offered piece of chocolate, regardless of whether you like chocolate or not. So I guess that’s not it
Can you say a little more about how ADT doesn’t stand on its own? After all, ADT is just defined as:
Is the problem that it mentions expected utility, but it should be agnostic over values not expressible as utilities?