While there is universal agreement that agents ought to act ethically, there is no agreement as to what constitutes ethical behaviour. To address this problem, recent philosophical approaches to `moral uncertainty' propose aggregation of multiple ethical theories to guide agent behaviour. However, one of the foundational proposals for aggregation - Maximising Expected Choiceworthiness (MEC) - has been criticised as being vulnerable to fanaticism; the problem of an ethical theory dominating agent behaviour despite low credence (confidence) in said theory. Fanaticism thus undermines the `democratic' motivation for accommodating multiple ethical perspectives. The problem of fanaticism has not yet been mathematically defined. Representing moral uncertainty as an instance of social welfare aggregation, this paper contributes to the field of moral uncertainty by 1) formalising the problem of fanaticism as a property of social welfare functionals and 2) providing non-fanatical alternatives to MEC, i.e. Highest k-trimmed Mean and Highest Median.
翻译:尽管普遍认为主体应当遵守伦理规范,但对于何为伦理行为尚未达成共识。为此,近期关于"道德不确定性"的哲学方法提出通过聚合多种伦理理论来指导主体行为。然而,作为聚合的基础性提案之一——最大期望可选值得性(MEC)——被批评易受狂热主义影响:即某种伦理理论尽管可信度(置信度)较低,却主导主体行为的问题。狂热主义由此削弱了容纳多元伦理视角的"民主"动机。目前狂热主义问题尚未被数学化定义。本文将道德不确定性表示为社会福利聚合的实例,通过1)将狂热主义问题形式化为社会福利泛函的性质,2)为MEC提供非狂热主义替代方案(即最高k-截尾均值与最高中位数),为道德不确定性领域做出贡献。