Some of the contest entries do at least briefly attempt that, I think. E.g. this post gives an argument that one should c-prefer "low-footprint capacity-building" over "doing nothing". And this post more generally argues that "donate $5 to Make-A-Wish Foundation" is c-dispreferable to some mixed action (maybe that's not specific enough for what you have in mind). (I don't yet buy either of these arguments, though.)

Alternatively, if you posit incommensurable values then you should probably reject P1.

It's a fair point that deference principles come into conflict with prospective reasons in Hare's case, and the prospective reasons argument seems really plausible there. I don't feel very confident, but here's how I'm thinking about this:

• Deference to the idealized self isn't actually necessary for my argument.
  • I wrote P1 in those terms as one way of making precise the idea that we should account for hypotheses we're unaware of, when weighing up prospective reasons.^[1]
  • But we could instead just directly say, as I do in the sequence: Insofar as we're impartial altruists, (1) we want to in some sense weigh up all possible outcomes by their value and plausibility; and (2) our values are defined over metaphysically possible outcomes, not over the extremely coarse-grained versions of such outcomes we conceive of. So when we (perhaps roughly, informally) compare actions as impartial altruists, we should do so in a way that tries to account for fine-grainings of possible outcomes that we haven't explicitly conceived of.
• Still, I'm pretty sympathetic to the "deference to the idealized self" idea, so how do I reconcile this with Hare's case? Well, it's not clear to me that this particular deference principle is substantively analogous to the deference principle invoked in Hare's case, even though they're structurally similar.
  • The deference principle I'm invoking is, roughly: (D1) My current evidence doesn't warrant considering A c-preferable to B, from the perspective of an agent who assesses that evidence the way I'd want to if I didn't have my computational (etc.) limits. So I, in my current decision situation, shouldn't consider A c-preferable.
  • The principle in Hare's case is, roughly: (D2) If I had more evidence (thereby putting me in a different decision situation), I wouldn't be warranted in considering A c-preferable to B no matter what that evidence is. So I shouldn't consider A c-preferable.
  • It seems plausible to me that we should endorse D1 but not D2, because:
    • If you ask me why I don't c-prefer A over B, and I invoke D1, my answer only makes reference to features of the decision problem I'm actually in — it's just that those features are assessed from a less computationally limited perspective.
    • Whereas if you asked me why I don't c-prefer taking the sugar, and I invoked D2, I wouldn't be telling you why my actual decision problem fails to recommend taking the sugar. I'd be telling you that versions of myself in different problems don't c-prefer taking the sugar. They're more informed versions of myself, yes. But those versions of myself have different reasons!
      • (Compare to how it's coherent for an agent who endorses causal decision theory to two-box when "dropped into" Newcomb's problem, yet to commit to one-box in the future if the prediction of their decision hasn't yet been made. The former agent has different reasons than the latter.)
  • (Anyway, again, not confident in this, and I think the more important point is that the cluelessness argument as such doesn't depend on deference principles.)

1. ^{^}

   In particular, this framing doesn't require that humans even have well-defined "hypotheses" in our epistemic state. I don't think the alternative framing I use in the sequence itself requires us to have unrealistically precisely defined hypotheses, either. But this was a bit of a sticking point when discussing the problem of unawareness with one thoughtful interlocutor — which is (AIUI) what led to Jesse writing the post on deference to the idealized self that I'm drawing on.

Hi Richard, thanks for the reply! I'll reply to your critiques of two premises in separate comments.

DiGiovanni’s case for imprecise credences rests heavily on the intuition that it would be objectionably arbitrary to settle on any precise number given the breadth of our uncertainty in the face of conflicting considerations. I get the intuition: from the inside, I’m not sure how I would go about determining a precise credence in non-arbitrary fashion. But I think this confuses a procedural question (by what process should we settle on a credence?) with the substantive epistemic question of what credence is in fact most warranted. The latter question might have a precise answer even if we can’t easily articulate a general high-level process that will reliably yield this correct answer.

I don't understand your critique yet, can you explain this more? The claim "Precise credences are arbitrary" doesn't assume we need to "easily articulate a general high-level process". I'm making the substantive epistemic claim: in basically any particular real-world case, when I compare one precise credence to another, it doesn't seem to me that the net balance of reasons favors one over the other. These reasons can and do include hard-to-articulate intuitions and such — my argument is that even when we account for all those, choosing one precise credence seems totally arbitrary. Denying that seems like an extraordinary claim, to me, see e.g. the intuition pump from this post.

That's all about P2a, separate from whether judgments like "A is all-things-considered c-better than B, independent of precise credences per se" are arbitrary. I think it's important to separate these things, as I do with the split of P2a vs. P2b.

I'm not sure how to make progress on our disagreement about P2b, other than to say: I think you're too hastily jumping from "we need to take some things as foundational (not requiring further justification), on pain of radical skepticism" to "these particular gestalt judgments about c-preferability can reasonably be taken as foundational (+ not undermined by defeaters)". The latter seems very implausible to me, for the reason I give in the table here (response to "Some actions are obviously c-preferable to others...").

there's some reason, that does not come to mind rn, why bracketing over those would fail to provide action guidance?

The worry is very similar to the worry about bracketing on persons: identity of person-moments is super fragile.

Let's say I donate to AMF. There are some far-future person-moments for which I am clueful that donating to AMF seriously harms them, because these person-moments only exist in the possible worlds corresponding to [insert far-future backfire risk here]. And we can say the same substituting in "benefits" for "harms". We then end up a maximal bracket-set on which the donation is good, and one on which the donation is bad.

(If this needs more unpacking, I'm happy to do that!)

(I endorse this comment. Not exactly sure I'd put the worry in these terms, and I wonder if Titotal's crux is normative neartermism — but if so, I'd just say that that's out scope because it's not impartial.)

I’m one of the judges of the competition. My comments shouldn't be taken as a full review of a post. And, unfortunately, I won’t have capacity to comment on every post or engage with all replies. Thanks so much to everyone who entered! 

I think this post contains a few important misunderstandings of the argument. Sorry this wasn't super clear from the summary; the argument is very nuanced, and it's important to look at the full sequence to understand how the epistemology I'm arguing for works.

• P1 says we need to expect our idealized self's (perhaps imprecise) EV(A) to be higher than EV(B), not that we need to know this.
  • In your coin flip example, the idealized self might know the laws of physics in such detail that they're certain the coin will land heads. But they might also know these laws in such detail that they're certain it will land tails. From your perspective, these possibilities are just as plausible, so that's why you're justified in a credence of (roughly) 0.5.
  • So the "prefer A only if you expect your idealized self to prefer A" reasoning generalizes regular old EV reasoning. I might say more on this in another post, but basically, the reason I used the former framing was to (1) avoid P1 requiring us to assign literal EVs ourselves, and (2) have P1 require that we shouldn't just ignore hypotheses that we haven't conceived of (but our idealized self has).
  • (I recommend reading Jesse's post on Ideal Reflection in full, for more context.)
• Several of your proposed counterexamples to the premises, if I understand them correctly, are claims that we can still compare two options with imprecise "EV" in principle. Which I don't deny.
  • Your "q<p and Q<P" example is a case where we can compare imprecise "EVs".
  • Same with "I can have beliefs about me being able to lift less than a really buff guy even if I am uncertain about how much each of us could lift". This is not a counterexample to P3 — it's a case where the quantity in question is not so coarse-grained that the consequent of P2 ("A’s and B’s 'EVs' are incomparable") applies.
• When I said, "C-preferability is (arguably) not something we can directly perceive": in the context of the rest of the counterpoint, my point was that c-preferability needs to be justified by analysis of the possible consequences themselves (or an appeal to an intuition that we have reason to believe implicitly tracks such an analysis). I'm not saying we need to directly perceive consequences in order to have beliefs about them.
• On your "martingale" comment: I think you're implicitly assuming the only options are "update towards higher 'EV'", "update towards lower 'EV'", or "no update". The point of the imprecise framework argued for in post #2 is that there's a fourth option, "update of ambiguous direction". That's consistent with each precisification of the "EV" being a martingale.

I don't see what difference the stochastic dominance point makes to the conclusion. Under severe imprecision (P3), it seems at least as hard to compare actions with the (imprecise) stochastic dominance relation, as with (imprecise) EV-broadly-construed.

I’m one of the judges of the competition. My comments shouldn't be taken as a full review of a post. And, unfortunately, I won’t have capacity to comment on every post or engage with all replies. Thanks so much to everyone who entered! 

Thanks for this. I have some sympathy to the critique of maximality as far as it goes. (Though personally I'm not that compelled by the symmetry arguments for your proposed alternative, the midpoint rule.)

My worry is that the threat of indeterminacy recurs, at the level of vague degrees of ex ante betterness. When I try to weigh up the reasons in favor of any A vs. B w.r.t. their total consequences, fully accounting for unawareness, I really don't see why I should consider the "upper endpoint" larger or smaller in absolute value than the "lower endpoint". I think the arguments in posts #3 and #4 of the sequence support this worry, though I didn't explicitly frame them in such terms and used the precise-endpoints formalism. You acknowledge that this is possible here:

Just as we can admit vagueness in the endpoints of our imprecise credences, we can admit corresponding vagueness in the value yielded by D. This makes it difficult to say whether a given option is better than the null action when D is close to 0, which seems quite plausible: cases where D ≈ 0 are exactly the kinds of cases where betterness or comparative justification may be too unclear or too vague to discriminate either way.

But I would like to see more of an argument that this isn't our situation, perhaps building on what you say in your appendix about low-footprint capacity-building.

(If we are indeed in a situation where even the "endpoints" are hopelessly vague, then I don't think your defense of first-order wagering goes through either. You can have insensitivity to mild sweetening under vague degrees of betterness; it doesn't assume maximality.)

Hi Impartial, thanks for this reply! Can't speak for Jesse, but I definitely agree with this:

It is important not to lose sight of the fact that overall indeterminacy is not to be avoided tout court. We should avoid it where, and only where, it does not actually obtain from an impartial altruistic point of view.

So, if bracketing (either TD or BU) is entirely non-action-guiding for the reasons Jesse mentions, that doesn't bear on whether bracketing is a good normative theory. But it does bear on your claim at the start of your post: "Bottom-up, person-centered bracketing can thus preserve principled impartial action guidance".

(As another judge of the competition: Seconded!)