Moral Choice Without Moralism

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 13 (2010). Pp. 561-584.

Moral Desirability and Rational Decision Being a formal and general as well as the most widely accepted approach to practical rationality, rational decision theory should be crucial for justifying rational morals. In particular, acting morally should also (nearly always) be rational in decision theoretic terms. After defending this thesis, in the critical part of the paper two strategies to develop morals following this insight are criticized: game theoretical ethics of cooperation and ethical intuitionism. The central structural objections to ethics of cooperation are that they too directly aim at the rationality of moral action and that they to do not encompass moral values or a moral desirability function. The constructive half of the paper takes up these criticisms by developing a two-part strategy to bring rationality and morals in line. The first part is to define 'moral desirability'. This is done, using multi-attribute utility theory, by equating several adequate components of an individual's comprehensive (rational) utility function with the moral desirability function. The second part is to introduce mechanisms, institutions, in particular socially valid moral norms, that provide further motivation for acting in accordance with morals.

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 2010

Morality for the purposes of this paper consists of sets of rules or principles intended for the general regulation of conduct for all. Intuitionist accounts of morality are rejected as making reasoned analysis of morals impossible. In many interactions, there is partial conflict and partial cooperation. From the general social point of view, the rational thing to propose is that we steer clear of conflict and promote cooperation. This is what it is rational to propose to reinforce, and to assist in reinforcing in society; it is not necessarily what it is individually rational to do. Even so, given the general situation, the rationality of its reinforcement will typically support the rationality of individual action as well. Game theory makes it possible to clarify these interactions, and these proposals for social solutions.

Cognitive Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience, 2008

What decisions should we make? Moral values, rules, and virtues provide standards for morally acceptable decisions, without prescribing how we should reach them. However, moral theories do assume that we are, at least in principle, capable of making the right decisions. Consequently, an empirical investigation of the methods and resources we use for making moral decisions becomes relevant. We consider theoretical parallels of economic decision theory and moral utilitarianism and suggest that moral decision making may tap into mechanisms and processes that have originally evolved for nonmoral decision making. For example, the computation of reward value occurs through the combination of probability and magnitude; similar computation might also be used for determining utilitarian moral value. Both nonmoral and moral decisions may resort to intuitions and heuristics. Learning mechanisms implicated in the assignment of reward value to stimuli, actions, and outcomes may also enable us to determine moral value and assign it to stimuli, actions, and outcomes. In conclusion, we suggest that moral capabilities can employ and benefit from a variety of nonmoral decision-making and learning mechanisms.

2000

The wide range of mathematical methods used in decision making or in decision aid, together with the complexity of our days' decision making problems generate questions referring to the public expectations from mathematics. There are mathematical methods accompanied by uniqueness theorems of the solution, which seem to be, form the point of view of various types of decision makers, dictatorial

2010 Second Brazilian Workshop on Social Simulation, 2010

Looking to the operation of an agent architecture, ie. its goal generation and maintenance processing, is relevant to understand fully how a moral based agent takes appropriate and diverse decisions within social situations of serious games for organizations. How decision does happen is a complex issue and the major motivation of this paper, and our answer, the proposal of a new architecture, is supported on the clarification of the organization and structure of an agent, ie. the interpretation of agent actions (moral-driven behaviour) under the pressure of severe constraints.

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 2010

Open Journal of Philosophy, 2021

If an agent is unsure about which moral theory or principle should guide her action in a decision situation, she faces moral uncertainty. In recent years, various strategies have been explored to deal with this type of uncertainty. In this paper, we briefly mention two strategies from the literature that make use of credence distributions over moral theories, namely "my favourite theory" and "maximizing expected choice-worthiness". As an alternative, we propose a two-step procedure which uses the concept of aggregation over structural properties. It is standard in the theory of collective choice and has recently been applied to the Kuhnian problem of theory choice as well. The idea is to explore how a morally-motivated rational agent may assess different moral theories on the basis of fundamental properties. These properties are ranked on a common scale of qualitative verdicts. This method enables an outside observer to make comparisons across competing moral theories and then conclude to what degree these theories fulfil a set of postulated properties. By doing so, we try to render the reasons more transparent that lie behind different types of credence ascriptions.

Die vorliegende Dissertation untersucht, wie Menschen Urteile und Entscheidungen in moralischen Situationen unter Unsicherheit treffen. In theoretischer Hinsicht wird Verhalten in moralischen Situationen aus der Perspektive begrenzter und ökologischer Rationalität analysiert, die das Zusammenspiel zwischen Kognition und der Struktur der Umwelt betont. Empirisch ist das Ziel, moralische Urteile und Verhalten unter epistemischen Bedingungen zu untersuchen, denen Menschen in der realen Welt begegnen. Das erste Projekt diskutiert aus der Perspektive ökologischer Rationalität wie das Zusammenspiel von Heuristiken und Umwelt hilft, moralisches Verhalten zu verstehen, das inkonsistent erscheint, solange es durch Charaktereigenschaften erklärt wird. Aus dieser Perspektive ist es entscheidend, soziale Umwelten zu untersuchen, da Urteile und Verhalten in moralischen Situationen oft nicht durch speziell moralische Regeln sondern durch moralisch neutrale, soziale Heuristiken entstehen können, d...

Rational decision theory (including rational game theory 1 ) has played important roles in more formally oriented ethics, from providing the definition of 'utility' in welfare ethics to much more substantial contributions, like the justification of morals in game-theoretic reconstructions of contractarian ethics. Further uses of rational decision theory in ethics include: the justification of morals by means of rational decisions in an original position; the axiomatic justification of utilitarianism; risk ethics etc. So there are many ways in which rational decision theory has actually been used in ethics. These various endeavours are rather intricate, and it is far from clear which role(s) rational decision theory should play in ethics. There is a role for empirical (psychological or economic) decision theory in ethics too. However this introduction as well as this whole issue of Ethical Theory and Moral Practice deals with rational decision theory only; therefore, the addendum "rational" in the following will often be omitted. During the last decades, several proposals have been made to justify certain systems of morals in a decision-theoretic fashion (e.g.