Moral Uncertainty, Expected Choiceworthiness, and Variance Normalization

Abstract

Abstract Many philosophers have recently defended the Maximize Expected Choiceworthiness (MEC) approach to moral uncertainty. Perhaps the most important problem for MEC is the problem of intertheoretic choiceworthiness unit comparisons; and one extant response to this problem is a technique called “variance normalization.” Although there has been some short, scattered commentary on variance normalization in the philosophical literature, nobody has yet offered a detailed critical discussion of this proposal. This article fills that lacuna, arguing that there are serious problems that would need to be addressed before variance normalization could be invoked to rescue MEC from skepticism about intertheoretic comparisons.