Dealing with Moral Uncertainty: Do Logical Properties Help?

If an agent is unsure about which moral theory or principle should guide her action in a decision situation, she faces moral uncertainty. In recent years, various strategies have been explored to deal with this type of uncertainty. In this paper, we briefly mention two strategies from the literature that make use of credence distributions over moral theories, namely “my favourite theory” and “maximizing expected choice-worthiness”. As an alternative, we propose a two-step procedure which uses the concept of aggregation over structural properties. It is standard in the theory of collective choice and has recently been applied to the Kuhnian problem of theory choice as well. The idea is to explore how a morally-motivated rational agent may assess different moral theories on the basis of fundamental properties. These properties are ranked on a common scale of qualitative verdicts. This method enables an outside observer to make comparisons across competing moral theories and then conclude to what degree these theories fulfil a set of postulated properties. By doing so, we try to render the reasons more transparent that lie behind different types of credence ascriptions.