ABSTRACT

Aggregative theories of moral value have difficulty in ranking worlds that each contain infinitely many valuable events. And, although there are several existing proposals for doing so, few provide a cardinal measure of each world’s value. This raises the even greater challenge of ranking lotteries over such worlds: without cardinal values, we cannot apply expected value theory. How, then, can we compare such lotteries? To date, we have just one method for doing so (proposed separately by Arntzenius, Bostrom, and Meacham), which is to compare the prospects for value at each individual location, and then to represent and compare lotteries by their expected values at each of those locations. But, as I show here, this approach violates several key principles of decision theory and generates some implausible verdicts. I propose an alternative—one that delivers plausible rankings of lotteries, which is implied by a plausible collection of axioms, and that can be applied alongside almost any ranking of infinite worlds.

摘要

道德价值的聚合理论很难对每个包含无限多有价值事件的世界进行排名。而且，尽管有几个现有的建议这样做，但很少有人提供每个世界价值的基本衡量标准。这提出了在这样的世界中对彩票进行排名的更大挑战：如果没有基数，我们就无法应用期望值理论。那么，我们如何比较这些彩票呢？迄今为止，我们只有一种方法（由 Arntzenius、Bostrom 和 Meacham 分别提出），即比较每个位置的价值前景，然后通过每个位置的预期价值来表示和比较彩票。那些地点。但是，正如我在这里所展示的，这种方法违反了决策理论的几个关键原则，并产生了一些令人难以置信的结论。