Metanormativity: Solving questions of moral and empirical uncertainty

Abstract

How can someone reconcile the desire to eat meat and a tendency toward vegetarian ideals? How should we reconcile contradictory moral values? How can we aggregate different moral theories? How can individual preferences be reasonably aggregated to represent a will, norm, or social decision? Conflict resolution and preference aggregation are tasks that intrigue philosophers, economists, sociologists, decision theorists, and many other scholars, as they constitute a rich interdisciplinary area for research. When trying to address questions about moral uncertainty, a meta-understanding of the concept of normativity can help us develop strategies for dealing with norms themselves. 2nd-order normativity, or norms about norms, is a hierarchical way to think about how to combine many different normative structures and preferences into a single coherent decision. That is what metanormativity is all about: a way to answer: What should we do when we don’t know what to do? In this study, we will review a decision-making strategy for moral uncertainty, the Maximization of Expected Choice-Worthiness. This strategy, proposed by William MacAskill, allows for the aggregation and inter-theoretical comparison of different normative structures, cardinal theories, and ordinal theories. In this study, we will exemplify the metanormative methods proposed by MacAskill, using has an example, a series of vegetarian dilemmas. Given the similarity between this metanormative strategy and expected utility theory, we will also show that both models can be integrated to address decision-making problems in situations of empirical and moral uncertainty. We believe that this kind of ethical-mathematical formalism can help develop strategies to aggregate moral preferences better and resolve conflicts.

BibTeX

@article{correa2020metanormativity,
  title={Metanormativity: solving questions of moral and empirical uncertainty},
  author={Corr{\^e}a, Nicholas Kluge and de Oliveira, Nythamar Fernandes},
  journal={ethic@-An international Journal for Moral Philosophy},
  volume={19},
  number={3},
  pages={790--810},
  year={2020}
}