Draft:Cluelessness

• Comment: The tone occasionally drifts from neutral to speculative. Additionally, the part on ripple effects are overly technical, making the content harder to follow for a general audience. Also there are numerous statements that are repeated unnecessarily. Ktkvtsh (talk) 02:04, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

• Comment: Relies entirely on a single source -Liance^{talk/contribs} 18:59, 9 March 2022 (UTC)

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Cluelessness refers to the concern that the consequences of any action may be mostly unknown at the time of the action. It is difficult to know the consequences for certain because the action has effects throughout all time, and unforeseeable consequences in the future can be so important that they vastly outweigh what is immediately foreseeable. Cluelessness can pose concerns for consequentialist decision makers, who make choices by comparing the consequences of some options against those of others.

The magnitude of unforeseeable consequences

For any action, the vast majority of its long-term consequences may be unknown. Some philosophers like G. E. Moore and J. J. C. Smart write about how consequences may become less important as they become increasingly removed from the time and place of the initial decision. However, philosopher Hilary Greaves writes that one cannot assume such diminishing ripple effects, as seemingly unimportant ripple effects may make important differences. For example, helping an old lady cross the street may allow her to meet someone earlier than they otherwise would. Such minute scheduling shifts may pass one from person to person and would eventually determine the conception of a couple's child, as which sperm fertilizes the egg depends significantly on the exact timing. The very existence of a child, and the existence of that child's descendants, may therefore result from the ripple effects of an unrelated act of kindness. Greaves also writes that the many important unforeseeable effects of a decision may not cancel one another out. Greaves cites theories of random walks, in which the cumulative effect of a large number of random independent steps tends to increase as the number of steps increases.

However, while the actual unforeseeable effects of an action will likely turn out to be large, Greaves argues that if one makes choices based on the expected effects of two actions, as determined by some subjective criteria, then the expected unforeseeable effects may not differ between the two actions in a way that would affect the decision. A naïve explanation is that if some effects of two actions are purely unforeseeable, then one has no evidence for whether each action leads to a good or bad unforeseeable outcome, and one cannot expect one to be better than another. This line of thinking is called the Principle of Indifference. Nevertheless, philosophers generally consider the principle as problematic, pointing to the paradox that if one has no evidence for whether an action would lead to a good outcome or a bad outcome, and if one has no evidence for whether an an action would lead to a good outcome or a particularly bad outcome, which is a subset of the bad outcomes, then one comes to the nonsensical result that one would have equal credence in whether an action would lead to a particularly bad outcome or one of the bad outcomes in general.

Recognizing the paradox, Greaves nevertheless argues that the Principle of Indifference holds for certain kinds of actions and outcomes. In some cases, one clearly has an equal amount of reason to believe that the outcomes of one action are better or worse than those of another. One clearly cannot expect the result of one coin flip to be different from that of another, so the fact that the results of coin flips are unforeseeable need not trouble decision makers who make decisions based on expected effects and who must decide between one of two coin flips as what determines the course of action.

According to Greaves, decision-making becomes more difficult when the Principle of Indifference does not hold. In these cases, one expects not to have an equal amount of evidence to believe that the outcomes of one action would be better or worse than those of another. However, at the time of the decision, the decision maker has no expectation about which side receives more support from evidence. Deciding where one should donate one's money may involve such a case of complex cluelessness, as different charitable causes, like disaster relief and animal welfare, lead to very different kinds of unforeseeable consequences.