Having to do what one thinks is very likely wrong

Suppose Alice borrowed some money from Bob and promised to give it back in ten years, and this month it is time to give it back. Alice’s friend Carl is in dire financial need, however, and Alice promised Carl that at the end of the month, she will give him any of her income this month that she hasn’t spent on necessities. Paying a debt is, of course, a necessity.

Now, suppose neither Alice nor Bob remember how much Alice borrowed. They just remember that it was some amount of money between $300 and $500. Now, obviously in light of her promise to Bob:

1. It is wrong for Alice to give less to Bob than she borrowed.

But because of her promise to Carl, and because any amount above the owed debt is not a necessity:

2. It is wrong for Alice to give more to Bob than she borrowed.

And now we have a puzzle. Whatever amount between Alice gives to Bob, she can be extremely confident is either less or more than she borrowed, and in either case she does wrong. Thus whatever Alice does, she is confident she is doing wrong.

What should Alice do? I think it’s intuitive that she should do something like minimize the expected amount of wrong.

Another dilemma?

Following up on my posts (this and this) regarding puzzles generated by moral uncertainty, here is another curious case.

Dr. Alice Kowalska believes that a steroid injection will be good for her patient, Bob. However, due to a failure of introspection, she also believes that she does not believe that a steroid injection will be beneficial to Bob. Should she administer the steroid injection?

In other words: Should Dr. Kowalska do what she thinks is good for her patient, or should she do what she thinks she thinks is good for her patient?

The earlier posts pushed me in the direction of thinking that subjective obligation takes precedence over objective obligation. That would suggest that she should do what she thinks she thinks is good for her patient.

But doesn’t this seem mistaken? After all, we don’t want Dr. Kowalska to be gazing at her own navel, trying to figure out what she thinks is good for the patient. We want her to be looking at the patient, trying to figure out what is good for the patient. So, likewise, it seems that her action should be guided by what she thinks is good for the patient, not what she thinks she thinks is good for the patient.

How, though, to reconcile this with the action-guiding precedence that the subjective seems to have in my previous posts? Maybe it’s this. What should be relevant to Dr. Kowalska is not so much what she believes, but what her evidence is. And here the case is underdescribed. Here is one story compatible with what I said above:

1. Dr. Kowalska has lots of evidence that steroid injections are good for patients of this sort. But her psychologist has informed her that because of a traumatic experience involving a steroid injection, she has been unable to form the belief that naturally goes with this evidence. However, Dr. Kowalska’s psychologist is incompetent, and Dr. Kowalska indeed has the belief in question, but trusts her psychologist and hence thinks she does not have it.

In this case, it doesn’t matter whether Dr. Kowalska believes the injection would be good for patient. What matters is that she has lots of evidence, and she should inject.

Here is another story compatible with the setup, however:

2. Dr. Kowalska knows there is no evidence that steroid injections are good for patients of this sort. However, her retirement savings are invested in a pharmaceutical company that specializes in these kinds of steroids, and wishful thinking has led to her subconsciously and epistemically akratically forming the belief that these injections are beneficial. Dr. Kowalska does not, however, realize that she has formed this subconscious belief.

In this case, intuitively, again it doesn’t matter that Dr. Kowalska has this subconscious belief. What matters is that she knows there is no evidence that the injections are good for patients of this sort, and given this, she should not inject.

If I am right in my judgments about 1 and 2, the original story left out crucial details.

Maybe we can tell the original story simply in terms of evidence. Maybe Dr. Kowalska on balance has evidence that the injection is good, while at the same time on balance having evidence that she does not on balance have evidence that the injection is good. I am not sure this is possible, though. The higher order evidence seems to undercut the lower order evidence, and hence I suspect that as soon as she gained evidence that she does not on balance have evidence, it would be the case that on balance she does not have evidence.

Here is another line of thought suggesting that what matters is evidence, not belief. Imagine that Dr. Kowalska and Dr. Schmidt both have the same evidence that it is 92% likely that the injections would be beneficial. Dr. Schmidt thereupon forms the belief that the injections would be beneficial, but Dr. Kowalska is more doxastically cautious and does not form this belief. But there is no disagreement between them as to the probabilities on the evidence. Then I think there should be no disagreement between them as to what course of action should be taken. What matters is whether 92% likelihood of benefit is enough to outweigh the cost, discomfort and side-effects, and whether the doctor additionally believes in the benefit is quite irrelevant.

More on moral risk

You are the captain of a small damaged spaceship two light years from Earth, with a crew of ten. Your hyperdrive is failing. You can activate it right now, in a last burst of energy, and then get home. If you delay activating the hyperdrive, it will become irreparable, and you will have to travel to earth at sublight speed, which will take 10 years, causing severe disruption to the personal lives of the crew.

The problem is this. When such a failing hyperdrive is activated, everything within a million kilometers of the spaceship’s position will be briefly bathed in lethal radiation, though the spaceship itself will be protected and the radiation will quickly dissipate. Your scanners, fortunately, show no planets or spaceships within a million kilometers, but they do show one large asteroid. You know there are two asteroids that pass through that area of space: one of them is inhabited, with a population of 10 million, while the other is barren. You turn your telescope to the asteroid. It looks like the uninhabited asteroid.

So, you come to believe there is no life within a million kilometers. Moreover, you believe that as the captain of the ship who has a resposibility to get the crew home in a reasonable amount of time, unless of course this causes undue harm. Thus, you believe:

1. You are obligated to activate the hyperdrive.

You reflect, however, on the fact that ship’s captains have made mistakes in asteroid identification before. You pull up the training database, and find that at this distance, captains with your level of training make the relevant mistake only once in a million times. So you still believe that this is the lifeless asteroid. but now you get worried. You imagine a million starship captains making the same kind of decision as you. As a result, 10 million crew members get home on time to their friends and families, but in one case, 10 million people are wiped out in an asteroid. You conclude, reasonably, that this is an unacceptable level of risk. One in a million isn’t good enough. So, you conclude:

2. You are obligated not to activate the hyperdrive.

This reflection on the possibility of perceptual error does not remove your belief in (1), indeed your knowledge of (1). After all, a one in a million chance of error is less than the chance of error in many cases of ordinary everyday perceptual knowledge—and, indeed, asteroid identification just is a case of everyday perceptual knowledge for a captain like yourself.

Maybe this is just a case of your knowing you are in a real moral dilemma: you have two conflicting duties, one to activate the hyperdrive and the other not to. But this fails to account for the asymmetry in the case, namely that caution should prevail, and there has to be an important sense of “right” in which the right decision is not to activate the hyperdrive.

I don’t know what to say about cases like this. Here is my best start. First, make a distinction between subjective and objective obligations. This disambiguates (1) and (2) as:

3. You are objectively obligated to activate the hyperdrive.

4. You are subjectively obligated not to activate the hyperdrive.

Second, deny the plausible bridge principle:

4. If you believe you are objectively obligated to ϕ, then you are subjectively obligated to ϕ.

You need to deny (4), since you believe (3), and if (4) were true, then it would follow you are subjectively obligated to activate the hyperdrive, and we would once again have lost sight of the asymmetric “right” on which the right thing is not to activate.

This works as far as it goes, though we need some sort of a replacement for (4), some other principle bridging from the objective to the subjective. What that principle is is not clear to me. A first try is some sort of an analogue to expected utility calculations, where instead of utilities we have the moral weights of non-violated duties. But I doubt that these weights can be handled numerically.

And I still don’t know how to handle is the problem of ignorance of the bridge principles between the objective and the subjective.

It seems there is some complex function from one’s total mental state to one’s full-stop subjective obligation. This complex function is one which is not known to us at present. (Which is a bit weird, in that it is the function that governs subjective obligation.)

A way out of this mess would be to have some sort of infallibilism about subjective obligation. Perhaps there is some specially epistemically illuminated state that we are in when we are subjectively obligated, a state that is a deliverance of a conscience that is at least infallible with respect to subjective obligation. I see difficulties for this approach, but maybe there is some hope, too.

Objection: Because of pragmatic encroachment, the standards for knowledge go up heavily when ten million lives are at stake, and you don’t know that the asteroid is uninhabited when lives depend on this. Thus, you don’t know (1), whereas you do know (2), which restores the crucial action-guiding asymmetry.

Response: I don’t buy pragmatic encroachment. I think the only rational process by which you lose knowledge is getting counterevidence; the stakes going up does not make for counterevidence.

But this is a big discussion in epistemology. I think I can avoid it by supposing (as I expect is true) that you are no more than 99.9999% sure of the risk principles underlying the cautionary judgment in (2). Moreover, the stakes go up for that judgment just as much as they do for (1). Hence, I can suppose that you know neither (1) nor (2), but are merely very confident, and rationally so, of both. This restores the symmetry between (1) and (2).

Between subjective and objective obligation

I fear that a correct account of the moral life will require both objective and subjective obligations. That’s not too bad. But I’m also afraid that there may be a whole range of hybrid things that we will need to take into account.

Let’s start with clear examples of objective and subjective obligations. If Bob promised Alice to give her $10 but I misremember the promise and instead thinks he promised never to give her any more, then:

1. Bob is objectively required to give Alice $10.

2. Bob is subjectively required not to give Alice any money.

These cases come from a mistake about particular fact. There are also cases arising from mistakes about general facts. Helmut is a soldier in the Germany army in 1944 who knows the war is unjust but mistakenly believes that because he is a soldier, he is morally required to kill enemy combatants. Then:

3. Helmut is objectively required to refrain from shooting Allied combatants.

4. Helmut is subjectively required to kill Allied combatants.

But there are interesting cases of mistakes elsewhere in the reasoning that generate curious cases that aren’t neatly classified in the objective/subjective schema.

Consider moral principles about what one should subjectively do in cases of moral risk. For instance, suppose that Carl and his young daughter are stuck on a desert island for the next three months. The island is full of chickens. Carl believes it is 25% likely that chickens have the same rights as humans, and he needs to feed his daughter. His daughter has a mild allergy to the only other protein source on the island: her eyes will sting and her nose run for the next three months if she doesn’t live on chicken. Carl thus thinks that if chickens have the same rights as humans, he is forbidden from feeding chicken to his daughter; but if they don’t, then he is obligated to feed chicken to her.

Carl could now accept one of these two moral risk principles (obviously, these will be derivative from more general principles):

5. An action that has a 75% probability of being required, and a 25% chance of being forbidden, should always be done.

6. An action that has a 25% probability of being forbidden with a moral weight on par with the prohibition on multiple homicides and a 75% probability of being required with a moral weight on par with that of preventing one’s child’s mild allergic symptoms for three months should never be done.

Suppose that in fact chickens have very little in the way of rights. Then, probably:

7. Carl is objectively required to feed chicken to his daughter.

Suppose further that Carl’s evidence leads him to be sure that (5) is true, and hence he concludes that he is required to feed chicken to his daughter. Then:

8. Carl is subjectively required to feed chicken to his daughter.

This is a subjective requirement: it comes from what Carl thinks about the probabilities of rights, moral principles about what what to do in cases of risk, etc. It is independent of the objective obligation in (7), though in this example it agrees with it.

But suppose, as is very plausible, that (5) is false, and that (6) is the right moral principle here. (To see the point, suppose that he sees a large mammal in the woods that would suffice to feed his daughter for three months. If the chance that that mammal is a human being is 25%, that’s too high a risk to take.) Then Carl’s reasoning is mistaken. Instead, given his uncertainty:

9. Carl is required to to refrain from killing chickens.

But what kind of an obligation is (9)? Both (8) and (9) are independent of the objective facts about the rights of chickens and depend on Carl’s beliefs, so it sounds like it’s subjective like (8). But (8) has some additional subjectivity in it: (8) is based on Carl’s mistaken belief about what his obligations are in cases of mortal risk, while (9) is based on what Carl’s obligations (but of what sort?) “really are” in those cases.

It seems that (9) is some sort of a hybrid objective-subjective obligation.

And the kinds of hybrid obligations can be multiplied. For we could ask about what we should do when we are not sure which principle of deciding in circumstances of moral risk we should adopt. And we could be right or we could be wrong about that.

We could try to deny (9), and say that all we have are (7) and (8). But consider this familiar line of reasoning: Both Bob and Helmut are mistaken about their obligations; they are not mistaken about their subjective obligations; so, there must be some other kinds of obligations they are mistaken about, namely objective ones. Similarly, Carl is mistaken about something. He isn’t mistaken about his subjective obligation to feed chicken. Moreover, his mistake does not rest in a deviation between subjective and objective obligation, as in Bob’s and Helmut’s case, because in fact objectively Carl should feed chicken to his daughter, as in fact (I assume for the sake of the argument) chickens have no rights. So just as we needed to suppose an objective obligation that Bob and Helmut got wrong, we need a hybrid objective-subjective one that Carl got wrong.

Here’s another way to see the problem. Bob thinks he is objectively obligated to give no money to Alice and Helmut thinks he is objectively obligated to kill enemy soldiers. But when Carl applies (5), what does he come to think? He doesn’t come to think that he is objectively required to feed chicken to his daughter. He already thought that this was 75% likely, and (5) does not affect that judgment at all. It seems that just as Bob and Helmut have a belief about something other than mere subjective obligation, Carl does as well, but in his case that’s not objective obligation. So it seems Carl has to be judging, and doing so incorrectly, about some sort of a hybrid obligation.

This makes me really, really want an account of obligation that doesn’t involve two different kinds. But I don’t know a really good one.