“Resolving radical cluelessness with metanormative bracketing” by Anthony DiGiovanni
Description
Audio note: this article contains 381 uses of latex notation, so the narration may be difficult to follow. There's a link to the original text in the episode description.
(This post will be much easier to follow if you’ve first read either “Should you go with your best guess?” or “The challenge of unawareness for impartial altruist action guidance”. But it's meant to be self-contained, assuming the reader is familiar with the basic idea of cluelessness.)
According to the view that we’re clueless, the far-future consequences of many of our actions are so ambiguous that we can’t say if they’re good, bad, or neutral in expectation. Concerningly, this view doesn’t even let us say that the most obviously bad actions are, well, bad. I’ll show how we can take cluelessness seriously and still rule out these actions in a principled way.
To see the worry, consider this story. You’re a fairly thoughtful longtermist who one day comes across the idea of cluelessness. You’re skeptical, but you find yourself grudgingly agreeing that predictions about the far future are mostly made-up. Claims like “this intervention will increase expected total welfare across the cosmos” start to seem fake. Still, surely [...]
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Outline:
(09:56 ) The problems and why previous work doesn't fully solve them
(10:57 ) Problem 1: Radical cluelessness due to indeterminate beliefs
(14:03 ) Problem 2: Tradeoff between infectious incomparability and stakes-insensitivity
(18:38 ) Metanormative bracketing
(19:35 ) Setup
(26:48 ) Does metanormative bracketing have an individuation problem?
(30:49 ) A full metanormative bracketing choice rule
(32:06 ) Step 1: Ruling out the worst options
(34:25 ) Step 2: Stakes-sensitively ranking the remaining options
(36:26 ) Summary of the choice rule
(37:29 ) Why metanormative bracketing avoids radical cluelessness
(40:11 ) Implications of metanormative bracketing
(40:29 ) Cluelessness and cause prioritization
(41:53 ) On arbitrariness and neartermism vs. longtermism
(48:29 ) Other potential implications to explore
(52:04 ) Acknowledgments
(52:30 ) Appendix: Example where metanormative bracketing is sensitive to individuation of normative views
(55:59 ) References
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First published:
October 29th, 2025
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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