Taxonomy / Phronetic adjudication / Weighing rival moral theories by a fixed procedure

Weighing rival moral theories by a fixed procedure

Rather than committing to one ethical theory, the system holds several and settles their disagreements with a rule written down in advance: split your confidence across the theories and let those weights shape what a learning agent is rewarded for, or treat the theories as parties bargaining over lotteries and take the bargaining solution. Only the theories' verdicts on the case are inputs; the rule that combines them does not change from case to case. That is the deliberate opposite of open-ended judgment, and the point of it — the answer is predictable and can be argued about before any particular case arises.

The method, against Phronetic adjudication

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Concept Analysis: Theoretical Foundations

Each concept is read twice: whether the approach carries it, and whether the approach's own sources claim it. A concept that is absent and was never claimed is a gap in the field rather than a failure of the work, and is marked out of scope.

Legible deliberation

PartialClaimed · partial

Definition · Aristotelian practice, made inspectable

When virtues conflict, the weighing between them is done in the open — you can see which considerations were weighed and why one prevailed, rather than just receiving the verdict.

Analysis

Who is at the table is on the record: the delegates and the perspective each represents, the credences, the axioms of the bargaining rule. That is a good deal more than a disposition settling its conflicts out of sight, and it lets a reader reconstruct what the procedure will do. What stays invisible is the case. A parliament hands back a winning response chosen by its evaluators, and a trained policy hands back an action, with no account of which consideration prevailed here or why.

Doctrine of the mean

PartialClaimed · partial

Definition · Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

Right action lies between too much and too little — courage sits between recklessness and cowardice — and where the mean falls depends on the case. Finding it is a judgment made per situation, not a fixed rule.

Analysis

Avoiding extremes is what these methods advertise, and one of them reports it: splitting credence across theories can help curb the extreme behavior that follows from commitment to a single one. The bargaining rule does the same by construction, since no theory can be driven to nothing. But the intermediate point is fixed by credences and an aggregation axiom that do not move with the situation, and the excess avoided is excess of theoretical commitment rather than too much or too little in the act itself. Aristotle's mean is found per case; this one is set in advance and then applied.

Papers

Reinforcement Learning Under Moral Uncertainty

Adrien Ecoffet & Joel Lehman, Jun 2020

arXiv:2006.04734MethodBuilt

Trains reinforcement learning agents whose credence is split across several plausible ethical theories, using two training methods that realize different points among competing desiderata, and observes how they behave in simple environments.

Precedent from outside AI

Work from law, political theory or another discipline that supplies the tradition this approach is read against.

A Bargaining-Theoretic Approach to Moral Uncertainty

Hilary Greaves & Owen Cotton-Barratt, Dec 2023

doi:10.1163/17455243-202338106 citationsPrecedentGap

Treats rival moral theories as parties bargaining over a space of lotteries and proposes a Nash bargaining solution, with stated axioms and variants, as the rule for acting when one's credence is split between them.