MichaelA🔸 comments on Against Irreducible Normativity

Good question!

By “open-ended moral uncertainty” I mean being uncertain about one’s values without having in mind well-defined criteria (either implicit or explicit) for what constitutes a correct solution.

Footnote 26 leaves me with the impression that perhaps you mean something like “uncertainty about what our fundamental goals should be, rather than uncertainty that’s just about what should follow from our fundamental goals”. But I’m not sure I’d call the latter type of uncertainty normative/​moral uncertainty at all—it seems more like logical or empirical uncertainty.

Yes, this captures it well. I’d say most of the usage of “moral uncertainty” in EA circles is at least in part open-ended, so this is in agreement with your intuition that maybe what I’m describing isn’t “normative uncertainty” at all. I think many effective altruists use “moral uncertainty” in a way that either fails to refer to anything meaningful, or it implies under-determined moral values. (I think this can often be okay. Our views on lots of things are under-determined and there isn’t necessarily anything wrong with that. But sometimes it can be bad to think that something is well-determined when it’s not.)

Now, I didn’t necessarily mean to suggest that the only defensible way to think that morality has enough “structure” to deserve the label “moral realism” is to advance an object-level normative theory that specifies every single possible detail. If someone subscribes to hedonistic total utilitarianism but leaves it under-defined to what degree bees can feel pleasure, maybe that still qualifies as moral realism. But if someone is so morally uncertain that they don’t know whether they favor preference utilitarianism or hedonistic utilitarianism, or whether they might favor some kind prioritarianism after all, or even something entirely different such as Kantianism, moral particularism, etc., then I would ask them: “Why do you think the question you’re asking yourself is well-defined? What are you uncertain about? Why do you expect there to be a speaker-independent solution to this question?”

To be clear, I’m not making an argument that one cannot be in a state of uncertainty between, for instance, preference utilitarianism versus hedonistic utilitarianism. I’m just saying that, as far as I can tell, the way to make this work satisfactorily would be based on anti-realist assumptions. The question we’re asking, in this case, isn’t “What’s the true moral theory?” but “Which moral theory would I come to endorse if I thought about this question more?”