Hard Questions Aren’t Hopeless

Why I favor fallibilism over cluelessness

I’ve long been struck by a structural commonality between radical skepticism and cluelessness worries. Since the EA Forum has been discussing cluelessness this week, I figured I’d take another stab at explaining why I’m not too troubled by it. (Too late to qualify for the official contest, alas.)

Skeptical Burdens

Open-minded people may be tempted by a discourse norm on which we should treat our interlocutors as epistemic equals in a sense that requires us to refrain from holding to conclusions that we cannot prove to their satisfaction. A striking thing about philosophy is that you soon learn that this discourse norm would prevent you from having almost any beliefs at all. A “radical skeptic” who doubts the existence of the external world, or the past, or the principle that the past is some guide to the future, cannot be logically compelled to abandon his skepticism. So we’d best not pin our hopes on such an impossible ambition. We must settle for merely establishing to our own satisfaction that we can reasonably maintain our beliefs in the face of the skeptic’s contrary arguments. The question is not whether we can persuade him, but whether we are persuaded by him to change (i.e., lose) our minds.

Most philosophers are, of course, not convinced by radical skepticism, for various reasons. (I’ve elsewhere summarized some of the considerations I find most stabilizing. In short, I think it can be worth epistemically wagering on our best chance of being right, even in the face of immense uncertainty. In slogan form: use your best judgment, don’t suspend it!) Cluelessness may have more defenders. But a similar methodological principle holds: In this post I’ll be explaining why I’m not convinced, rather than trying to prove that the proponent of cluelessness must agree with me. (They needn’t.)

Epistemic Difficulty vs Cluelessness

I first want to grant something in the vicinity of cluelessness concerns, by way of an important distinction. The thing I grant: it can be extremely difficult to discern what would be best. Absolutely. We face immense epistemic challenges, and it’s often extremely non-obvious how to resolve them.

If one demands that a solution to cluelessness must show how it’s easy to tell what to do, or perhaps must actually provide the correct answer to whatever difficult tradeoffs you’re struggling with, the most reasonable response will often be, “Sorry I can’t help you with that; I’m not sure either.” I’m often “clueless” in the colloquial sense that I am deeply uncertain about the answer to a difficult empirical question, and not in a position to tell anyone else what they should conclude about it. But I typically don’t doubt that others could reasonably conclude one way or the other, depending on the details of their epistemic position.

So what I typically experience is just ordinary epistemic difficulty, not philosophical cluelessness. In the former case, I haven’t reached a conclusion, and can’t even predict where further investigation would lead me — but I’m open to future clarification. Philosophical cluelessness, by contrast, commits one to the much stronger claim that nobody can (realistically) form any reasonable judgments or expectations about this question, no matter how carefully they investigate it. That’s an extremely strong skeptical claim!

I think it’s really important to bear this distinction in mind. It’s easy to come up with examples that motivate epistemic difficulty: the world is full of difficult questions. But I think it’s wildly premature to close the door on further inquiry by taking full-blown cluelessness as a conclusion settled in advance. We should (ironically) be more uncertain and epistemically humble than that.

DiGiovanni’s Argument

I’ve responded to Lenman’s original cluelessness argument over at utilitarianism.net. Anthony DiGiovanni offers an arguably tighter variant on the EA Forum:

• Let’s say that we c-prefer A over B if the reason we prefer A is an impartial altruistic comparison of the actions’ possible consequences.

• P1. Normative premise: To justify c-preferring A over B, it’s not enough to say (e.g.) that A seems heuristically good. Rather, we need to argue that A has higher “expected value” broadly speaking, meaning: In some sense we “expect” that, if we were idealized agents who could aggregate all of A’s and B’s possible consequences into literal EVs, then we’d say A has higher EV. (We ourselves don’t need literal EVs to justify c-preferences, hence the scare quotes.) Otherwise, it’s unacceptably arbitrary to c-prefer A.

• P2. Conceptual premise: If our understanding of A’s and B’s possible consequences is sufficiently coarse-grained, then we don’t have an argument for “expecting” our idealized self’s EV for A to be higher, lower, or equal to B’s. So A’s and B’s “EVs” are incomparable. In particular:

  • a. Against precise EVs: We shouldn’t represent actions’ degrees of c-preferability with literal precise expected values.

  • b. Against “best guesses”: Even if we don’t use literal precise EVs, we shouldn’t always force ourselves to compare A’s and B’s “EVs”.

• P3. Empirical premise: Due to unawareness (at least), our understanding of any pair of actions’ possible consequences is indeed very coarse-grained — enough that the conclusion of (P2) follows (i.e., these actions’ “EVs” are incomparable). In particular, the actions’ “EVs” are too severely imprecise to compare them, regardless of whether we (a) formally model these “EVs” or (b) appeal to informal/heuristic arguments.

• Conclusion: We aren’t justified in c-preferring any action over any other.

It’s a neat argument! But as with Lenman’s, it’s far from clear to me that we should have much confidence in any of the premises, let alone all of them. In the remainder of this post, I want to focus on two pressure points: numerical precision and prospective reasons. But my highest-level claim is that (as with arguments for radical skepticism) we should have less confidence in the conjunction of the premises than in the falsity of the conclusion. (We can, for example, reasonably expect that starting a nuclear war would be impartially dispreferable in prospect. You’ve gone badly awry if you lose sight of this.)

Numerical Precision

DiGiovanni’s case for imprecise credences rests heavily on the intuition that it would be objectionably arbitrary to settle on any precise number given the breadth of our uncertainty in the face of conflicting considerations. I get the intuition: from the inside, I’m not sure how I would go about determining a precise credence in non-arbitrary fashion. But I think this confuses a procedural question (by what process should we settle on a credence?) with the substantive epistemic question of what credence is in fact most warranted. The latter question might have a precise answer even if we can’t easily articulate a general high-level process that will reliably yield this correct answer. (This general phenomenon is familiar from philosophy more generally. There is no general philosophical method that reliably yields true answers. If that suffices for you to rule out belief, then you’re back in radical skeptical territory.)

So I’m inclined to think P2 is false (and certainly reasonably rejectable): in many cases we can reasonably—albeit tentatively—expect “our idealized self’s EV for A to be higher, lower, or equal to B’s,” rather than committing ourselves to incomparability, even when our current grasp of their consequences is quite coarse-grained and incomplete.

Prospective Reasons

Alternatively, if you posit incommensurable values then you should probably reject P1. As Caspar Hare argues in ‘Take the Sugar’ (and his recent book Living in a Strange World), (i) one option can be better in prospect than another, even when you know that, given more information, you would (correctly) regard the two outcomes as incommensurable or on a par; and (ii) in such cases, it’s rational to pick the better prospect rather than deferring to the idealized perspective.

One way Hare argues for this conclusion in LiSW is by appeal to the idea that reasons are contrastive: “A consideration is a reason to do X rather than Y, only if it is something that can be said for doing X, but not for doing Y.” (p. 69)

Cluelessness is not a reason to do one thing rather than another. Nor does it cancel or undermine the force of the knowable reasons we have, e.g., to save a particular person’s life. (It may be reason to believe that if we knew more, our reasons to save this one life would be swamped by other reasons. But outweighing is not undermining: the original reason still retains its original force. And again, since we’ve no grounds for expecting the balance of unknown reasons to count against rather than for our currently-preferred action, the fact of cluelessness is normatively inert: it makes no difference to our reasons for action.)

In the absence of competing reasons, impartial concern (regarding the consequences for individuals) should lead us to prefer to save someone’s life rather than have them die prematurely. This remains true even if we have no expectation that a more-informed agent would necessarily concur. (We’d better not expect them to have the reverse preference, of course, but we may expect them to be overwhelmed by incommensurability without being so overwhelmed ourselves.)

Or, as I previously wrote in response to Lenman:

Lenman distinguishes the “visible” (epistemically accessible) and “invisible” (entirely unknowable) consequences of an action. Using this distinction, there is a very quick argument that saving lives has positive expected value. After all, if we’ve no idea what the long-term consequences of an action will be, then these “invisible” considerations are (given our evidence) simply silent—that is, speaking neither for nor against any particular option. So the visible reasons win out, unopposed. For example, saving a child’s life has an expected value of “+1 life saved”, which doesn’t change when our long-term ignorance is pointed out.

It’s less straightforward when we see a range of considerations and just aren’t sure how to weigh them. (Perhaps you’ve heard that clearing forests to create factory farms might sufficiently reduce insect numbers in the area as to result in a net reduction in suffering, but you aren’t sure how credible the claim is, or even how likely it is that insects have net-negative lives on average.) I can then no longer say, in schematic terms, what the “correct” EV is in such a case: it’s rather a judgment call. That brings us back to the earlier point about “epistemic difficulty”—still not the same thing as strict cluelessness.

The Value Correlation Thesis

Finally, I want to wrap up by proposing a principle that helps a lot with general cluelessness concerns, and I think warrants tentative endorsement.

Value Correlation: An action’s short-run/visible value is a positive predictor of its long-run/invisible value. Actions that look good on the visible margin are more likely to be good than bad in the long run.

For example, we should expect that saving someone’s life, or increasing people’s capabilities to pursue their own goals and live autonomous lives, is more likely to have positive than negative instrumental effects in the long run. There could be many specific exceptions, of course. (It’s a defeasible default, not a universal generalization.) But we shouldn’t expect that most short-term goods are long-term bad, or vice versa.

This strikes me as a datum of common sense, somewhat akin to expecting the future to be like the past (though obviously change happens, so there are plenty of exceptions there too). Consider, again, whether we should really regard nuclear war as equally likely to prove good in the long run as bad. Other cases are less drastic, but trigger the same principle in miniature. So I think this principle is a reasonable starting point, and indeed more reasonable than the sorts of alternative starting points that lead to radical cluelessness.