The Evidentialist's Wager

Abstract

Suppose that an altruistic agent who is uncertain between evidential and causal decision theory finds herself in a situation where these theories give conflicting verdicts. We argue that even if she has significantly higher credence in CDT, she should nevertheless act in accordance with EDT. First, we claim that the appropriate response to normative uncertainty is to hedge one's bets. That is, if the stakes are much higher on one theory than another, and the credences you assign to each of these theories are not very different, then it is appropriate to choose the option that performs best on the high-stakes theory. Second, we show that, given the assumption of altruism, the existence of correlated decision makers will increase the stakes for EDT but leave the stakes for CDT unaffected. Together these two claims imply that whenever there are sufficiently many correlated agents, the appropriate response is to act in accordance with EDT.

Infinite Aggregation and Risk

“…If so, it may be physically impossible to cause changes in value at infinitely many different locations, and so the problems raised below may not arise. (But they may still arise if we adopt an evidential decision theory for moral decision-making-seeMacAskill et al (2021). )3 Specifically, we will have a countably infinite number of them.…”