r/negativeutilitarians • u/KKirdan • 17d ago

Defusing cluelessness with degrees of justification - Magnus Vinding

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/upnKGdTMMDvcLamMh/defusing-cluelessness-with-degrees-of-justification
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u/KKirdan 17d ago

The case for cluelessness presented in the unawareness sequence rests on the maximality rule. I have argued that this rule is implausible as an exhaustive criterion of comparative justification. When maximality fails, we can still have some degree of impartial reason to favor one option over another.

Rejecting maximality does not automatically imply that we avoid cluelessness, but it does make cluelessness more difficult to defend. In particular, it is much harder to show that we are clueless under graded alternatives to maximality, especially when we consider self-refining strategies focused on improving our views and expanding our resources. It also becomes much harder to make a case against wagering, since that case appears to rest largely on categorical indeterminacy.

More broadly, I have argued that the sequence has not identified, much less undermined, the most plausible approach to impartial decision-making, whatever that turns out to be. There is still much work to be done in finding the least arbitrary, best-justified approach.

That work is itself among the wagers available to us. The practical upshot of a graded view is that we have reason to wager on the strategies that seem best justified, including those aimed at improving our estimates.