Against Moral Hedging

Ittay Nissan-Rozen*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

24 Scopus citations

Abstract

It has been argued by several philosophers that a morally motivated rational agent who has to make decisions under conditions of moral uncertainty ought to maximize expected moral value in his choices, where the expectation is calculated relative to the agent's moral uncertainty. I present a counter-example to this thesis and to a larger family of decision rules for choice under conditions of moral uncertainty. Based on this counter-example, I argue against the thesis and suggest a reason for its failure-that it is based on the false assumption that inter-theoretical comparisons of moral value are meaningful.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)349-369
Number of pages21
JournalEconomics and Philosophy
Volume31
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Nov 2015

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © 2015 Cambridge University Press.

Keywords

  • Moral uncertainty
  • inter-theoretical comparisons
  • moral hedging
  • risk aversion

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