Draft:Cluelessness

• Comment: The tone occasionally drifts from neutral to speculative. Additionally, the part on ripple effects are overly technical, making the content harder to follow for a general audience. Also there are numerous statements that are repeated unnecessarily. Ktkvtsh (talk) 02:04, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

• Comment: Relies entirely on a single source -Liance^{talk/contribs} 18:59, 9 March 2022 (UTC)

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Cluelessness refers to the concern that the full consequences of any action may be mostly unknown. It poses problems for consequentialist decision makers, who make choices by comparing the consequences of some actions to those of others.

Philosophers disagree on whether one must indeed be clueless about the consequences of actions. J. J. C. Smart argues that the unforeseeable consequences of actions may be too unimportant to count. Environmental forces can constrain consequences to decrease in importance as they become increasingly removed from the initial time and place. Smart writes that the consequences may "approximate to zero like the furthermost ripples on a pond after a stone has been dropped into it."

In contrast, James Lenman and others argue that even seemingly inconsequential actions have important unforeseeable effects. Against the "ripples on a pond" postulate, these scholars invoke so-called butterfly effects where small causes can have large downstream impacts. Against the cancellation postulate, these scholars argue that the cancellation will likely not lead to a net result close to zero.

The "ripples on a pond" postulate

Philosophers often highlight the role of environmental forces when arguing that the unforeseeable consequences of actions can become less and less important over time. Describing the unpredictable effects of actions as ripples on a pond,

However, other philosophers like James Lenman and Hilary Greaves contend that one cannot assume diminishing ripple effects. These scholars refer to butterfly effects where small events have effects that become increasingly significant. Greaves writes that if she helps an old lady cross the street, the old lady will reach her destination sooner so that she meets some other people earlier. Each of those people in turn meets still other people earlier. Such minute timing shifts affect more and more people and will likely eventually change the exact moment two lovers conceive a child. Since which sperm fertilizes the egg depends significantly on the exact timing, the resulting child may become a very different person. The identity of the child and the identities of the child's descendants all result from an initial act of everyday kindness, and the moral implications of many of these unforeseeable identity changes likely exceeds the intrinsic value of helping an old lady cross the street.

The cancellation postulate

Nevertheless, philosophers more concerned about the cluelessness worry write that the unforeseeable effects of a decision will likely not cancel out. Greaves cites theories of random walks, in which the cumulative net effect of a large number of random independent steps tends to increase as the number of steps increases.

The principle of indifference

While the actual unforeseeable net effects of an action will likely turn out to be large, the good and the bad may cancel out in expectation. A decision maker may believe that an action will lead to significant net consequences but not know whether the consequences will be good or bad. However, if this decision maker assigns equal credence to the outlook that the consequences will be good and the outlook that the consequences will be equally bad, then the unforeseen consequences will have zero expected effects. Thus, whether cluelessness impedes consequentialist decision-making may depend on whether one can assign equal credence to beliefs about which choice will lead to the best unforeseeable consequences.

One may adopt a principle of Indifference that indeed assigns equal credence to beliefs about the optimal choice. The principle states that if one has no reason to believe that one choice is better or worse than another, then one should give equal credence to the idea that either choice is the best.

Nevertheless, philosophers generally question the principle of indifference by pointing to a paradox of multiple partitions. The paradox states that in a world with Choices A, B, and C, if one has no knowledge at all about the situation, then one must assign roughly 33 percent of one's credence to Choice A when weighing one choice against another. However, if one reframes the situation as choosing between choosing Choice A and not choosing Choice A, then one must assign a 50-percent credence to Choice A. Choice A would simultaneously have a 33-percent and 50-percent credence.

Greaves nevertheless argues that the principle of Indifference applies for certain kinds of actions and outcomes. In some cases, one clearly has an equal amount of reason to believe that the outcomes of one action are better or worse than those of another. One clearly cannot expect the result of one coin flip to be different from that of another, so the fact that the results of coin flips are unforeseeable need not trouble decision makers who must decide between one of two coin flips as what determines the course of action. Greaves describes such cases of cluelessness as simple cluelessness.

However, in cases of complex cluelessness, one expects not to have an equal amount of evidence to believe that the outcomes of one action would be better or worse than those of another. However, at the time of the decision, the decision maker has no expectation about which side receives more support from evidence. Deciding where one should donate one's money may involve such a case of complex cluelessness, as different charitable causes, like disaster relief and animal welfare, lead to very different kinds of unforeseeable consequences.