The parliamentary approach to moral uncertainty

Abstract

Moral uncertainty is a problem of decision-making when there are conflicting moral theories to consider. This paper proposes a novel approach based on an analogy to real-world legislative bodies. It suggests that individuals, in order to make morally appropriate decisions, should theoretically hold a “parliament” internal to themselves that makes decisions based on the theories or values held by the individual analogous to the delegates of a legislative body, weighted by the confidence the individual has in each theory. This approach, called Moral Parliament, avoids many objections to other approaches. However, it inherits a dilemma rooted in political theory about intransitivity across decisions, which may cause undesirable outcomes such as a sequence of dominated decisions. Future work may involve developing new analyses of current approaches to moral uncertainty based on the Moral Parliament framework, as well as exploring avenues to relax assumptions imported from decision theory. – AI-generated abstract.