In the last post, I shared my attempt at systemizing responsibility. In the system, everything depends on this idea of a "moral decision set" or MDS. An MDS is a list of all possible courses of action paired with their "moral intensity" values. Moral intensity comes from the expected utility change (relative to the other courses of action) multiplied by the probability of that change occuring as expected (probability is 0.0 to 1.0, or 0% to 100%, so multiplication usually mitigates).
Each course of action could have multiple possible consequences with different probabilities each. One course might involve pressing The Red Button, which has a 50% chance of giving you a dollar and 50% chance of destroying the world, while another course might involve doing nothing, which has a very high chance of doing neither as far as you know.
In a truly inclusive MDS, every course of action would be paired with every perceived-potential result. The list would be indefinitely long. And each entry on the list would receive a probability value. Given this list, you could figure out the best course of action, and credit or blame the decider according to how much he followed or deviated from that course. (Since we're incorporating both utility gain and loss, our final scale would go from -1.0 to 1.0, or -100% to 100%, where -100% is full blame and 100% is full credit.)
The problem is that we are not given this list! We have to come up with probability values for each entry. An omniscience would simply put a bunch of 100%s and 0%s wherever they needed to be. As less omniscient folks, we have to assign probability values according to the knowledge that we have.
This brings us to the problem of ignorance. Let's say Dave makes a gain-expectant decision according to his MDS. His personal MDS is relative to his knowledge, so it's qualified -- it's "MDS[Dave]." Dave, however, is ignorant. According to MDS[Omniscience], his decision was really loss-expectant. If Dave was never given the opportunity to cure his ignorance, he is blameless. If he was given the opportunity, however, then we appeal to those decisions Dave made that kept him ignorant.
This creates a chain of appeals until one of two things happen: Either we find that, at some point, Dave made a blameworthy decision that kept him ignorant, or we find that Dave made a creditworthy decision (according to Dave) every time he kept himself ignorant. If the former, he is responsible for this latest decision to a degree exactly equal to the degree that he is responsible for that ignorance-maintaining decision. If the latter, he is blameless.
Now we have a practical problem. We probably have no way to trace through the Dave's indescribably complex history to execute this ideal method. That's where the "common social expectation," or CSE, comes into play. The CSE is a list of everything anyone could possibly know, and an associated percentage indicating how common that knowledge is. Using the CSE, Dave is blamed according to the percentage associated with what he didn't know. As the "S" should indicate, the CSE is determined by society, either implicitly or explicitly.
2 comments:
"Social expectations" need to be clearly defined. I am worried that the jump between the ideal and "social expectation" is too large and arbitrary. Why would I agree with it? I would much prefer some kind of common sense method of "doing what you can." If we rely too much on ideals, then we run into the problem that ethics is too complex and possibly impossible. We need to know, "What is possible about ethics?"
What is possible is challenging ourselves and seeking learning opportunities. Morally blaming other people might be too difficult, but we can certainly find out who is legally responsible. Perhaps you could use "social norms" if you want to know who is "legally responsible."
You've arrived at exactly what I was going for with my reference to social expectations or social norms: they're for recognizing legal responsibility.
If outside of the legal context, we should continually temper our perpetual judgments, never being content with the knowledge we have. I don't think the CSE is something to be invoked unless it's a serious indictment -- in other cases, I think we should be prepared to give folks the benefit of the doubt for the most part.
Post a Comment