Bracketing cluelessness: A new theory of altruistic decision-making

Abstract

Consequentialist decision-making encounters a fundamental challenge when agents are “clueless” about the aggregate welfare effects of their actions, particularly regarding long-term consequences, which limits the capacity of impartial, risk-neutral consequentialism to provide principled action-guidance. This leads to common intuitions, such as favoring near-term interventions, lacking a rigorous foundation. A novel normative theory, “bracketing,” addresses this by instructing agents to base decisions on consequences about which they are not clueless, effectively “bracketing out” others. Defined using imprecise probabilities and “locations of value,” bracketing offers a distinct alternative to expected total utility maximization and can support focused, near-term altruistic action. However, the theory faces challenges, including the potential for conflicting “maximal bracket-sets,” difficulties in defining morally relevant “locations of value” (e.g., persons vs. spacetime regions), possible cyclicity in its ranking relation, and an incomplete account of sequential decision-making. Bracketing also has broader implications, potentially justifying the disregard of highly speculative impacts and offering a framework for addressing normative uncertainty. – AI-generated abstract.