Options in Ethics: Essays on Collective and Diachronic Action

Abstract

This dissertation is about what we ought to do in situations where the significance of our actions depends, in part, on what others do or on what we ourselves do at other choice points.Chapter One shows that that any plausible normative theory can be self-defeating. Whenever it’s the case that what a given agent ought to do depends on what she later does or on what other agents do, it can be best for each agent at each choice point to act in one way, given how others are going to act, even though it would have been much better if everyone acted in some other way. In these situations, each of us ought to act based on everything that we know, even when acting on this knowledge is self-defeating. Nevertheless, we can still be accountable for the fact that we failed to perform some alternative, better set of actions available to us. Chapter Two argues that information about what an individual will do bears on what she ought to do by revealing limits to what she can do. I argue further that whether you ought to commit yourself to a course of action that requires you to resist certain impulses depends on your abilities when you commit. You must have the ability, then, to resist when you subsequently carry out the action. The fact that you will be able to resist when the time for action arrives is irrelevant to whether you should commit yourself now. Chapter Three argues that the strength of the decision-theoretic case for “doing one’s part” in largescale collective action problems depends on whether we adopt Causal Decision Theory (“CDT”), which says to perform the action that your evidence tells you will produce the best results, or Evidential Decision Theory (“EDT”), which says to perform the action that constitutes the best evidence for the best results. Whenever individuals’ decisions are somewhat correlated, it can turn out on EDT that you ought to do your part, not because doing so brings about positive consequences, but because it indicates to you that positive consequences are likely to come about from others doing their part.