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AGAINST MORAL HEDGING

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 July 2015

Ittay Nissan-Rozen
Ittay Nissan-Rozen*
Affiliation:
The Department of Philosophy and the PEP Program, The Hebrew University, Mount Scopus, Jerusalem, Israel. Email: ittay.nissan@mail.huji.ac.il; URL: http://pluto.huji.ac.il/~ittay/.
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Abstract:

It has been argued by several philosophers that a morally motivated rational agent who has to make decisions under conditions of moral uncertainty ought to maximize expected moral value in his choices, where the expectation is calculated relative to the agent's moral uncertainty. I present a counter-example to this thesis and to a larger family of decision rules for choice under conditions of moral uncertainty. Based on this counter-example, I argue against the thesis and suggest a reason for its failure – that it is based on the false assumption that inter-theoretical comparisons of moral value are meaningful.

Keywords

Moral uncertaintymoral hedgingrisk aversioninter-theoretical comparisons

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Type
Articles
Information
Economics & Philosophy , Volume 31 , Issue 3 , November 2015 , pp. 349 - 369
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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