Those questions all help point to the concept at hand, but they’re actually all about decision-making under moral uncertainty, rather than moral uncertainty itself. In the same way, empirical uncertainty is uncertainty about things like whether a stock will increase in price tomorrow, which can then be blended with other things (like decision theory and your preferences) to answer questions like “What should I do, given that I don’t know whether this stock will increase in price tomorrow?”
I did start with a post on decision-making under moral uncertainty, but then got the feedback (which I’ve now realised was very much on point) that it would be worth stepping back quite a bit to discuss what moral uncertainty itself actually is.
Additionally, I’d say that none of those quoted questions at all disentangle moral from empirical uncertainty. For example, I could be 100% certain in some moral theory where infringing people’s rights is bad but everything else is fine, but still not know what I should do, because I don’t know which of a set of actions is least likely to end up infringing rights (an empirical uncertainty). So it’d be necessary to modify those questions to something like “What should I do, given that I don’t know what’s morally right, despite knowing the relevant empirical facts?” …which now involves two other terms worth defining/distinguishing, and so here we’re getting into the complexities I mentioned :) (And back into the sort of stuff that my post prior to this one unpacked.)
But all that said, I think it probably is a good idea to open this post with something to point at the concept at hand, for those readers who didn’t read the prior post and are relatively unfamiliar with the term “moral uncertainty”. So I’ve added two short sentences at the start to accomplish that objective.
(For anyone who’s for some reason interested, the original version of this post is here.)
30 seconds of googling gave me this link, which might not be anything exceptional but at least it offers a couple of relevant definitions:
and
and later a more focused question
At least they define what they are working on...
Those questions all help point to the concept at hand, but they’re actually all about decision-making under moral uncertainty, rather than moral uncertainty itself. In the same way, empirical uncertainty is uncertainty about things like whether a stock will increase in price tomorrow, which can then be blended with other things (like decision theory and your preferences) to answer questions like “What should I do, given that I don’t know whether this stock will increase in price tomorrow?”
I did start with a post on decision-making under moral uncertainty, but then got the feedback (which I’ve now realised was very much on point) that it would be worth stepping back quite a bit to discuss what moral uncertainty itself actually is.
Additionally, I’d say that none of those quoted questions at all disentangle moral from empirical uncertainty. For example, I could be 100% certain in some moral theory where infringing people’s rights is bad but everything else is fine, but still not know what I should do, because I don’t know which of a set of actions is least likely to end up infringing rights (an empirical uncertainty). So it’d be necessary to modify those questions to something like “What should I do, given that I don’t know what’s morally right, despite knowing the relevant empirical facts?” …which now involves two other terms worth defining/distinguishing, and so here we’re getting into the complexities I mentioned :) (And back into the sort of stuff that my post prior to this one unpacked.)
But all that said, I think it probably is a good idea to open this post with something to point at the concept at hand, for those readers who didn’t read the prior post and are relatively unfamiliar with the term “moral uncertainty”. So I’ve added two short sentences at the start to accomplish that objective.
(For anyone who’s for some reason interested, the original version of this post is here.)