Jointly organised by the Institute for Futures Studies (IFFS) and the Australian National University (ANU)

How should we make decisions when we’re uncertain about what we ought, morally, to do?

Very often we are uncertain about what we ought, morally, to do. We do not know how to weigh the interests of animals against humans, how strong our duties are to improve the lives of distant strangers, or how to think about the ethics of bringing new people into existence. But we still need to act. Though economists and philosophers have extensively studied the issue of decision-making in the face of uncertainty about matters of fact, the question of decision-making given fundamental moral uncertainty has been neglected.

In Moral Uncertainty (Oxford University Press 2020) philosophers William MacAskill, Krister Bykvist, and Toby Ord try to fill this gap. They argue that there are rules that govern how one ought to make decisions under moral uncertainty. But which rule one should use depends on the content of one's moral hypotheses.

Join us for a symposium on the book on 4 February. The symposium will be held online. 

To register, please click on this link.

The book is available to download for free, through this link: Download Moral Uncertainty

Schedule

Each speaker will offer a comment on the book (30 mins), which will be responded to by the authors (10 mins) and followed by a discussion (20 mins).

Thursday 4 February, all times CET (Stockholm)

9:15 Introduction

9:30 – 10:30 Christian Barry (ANU)

10:30 – 10:45 break

10:45 – 11:45 Katie Steele (ANU), Pamela Robinson (ANU)

11:45 – 15:00 Lunch and on-line mingle time

15:05 – 16:05 Christian Tarsney (GPI, Oxford)

16:05 – 16:30 break

16:30 – 17:30 Jeff Russell (USC)