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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
    108,905
    Topics
    42
    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Evaluating decisions by expected utility collapses the distinction between a decision procedure and a criterion of rightness, a conflation Parfit and Railton both identify as a serious error.

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    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.Expected utility can be formulated at multiple levels of abstraction (act-level, rule-level, character-level), so the procedure/criterion distinction may be illusory rather than fundamental.
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    • 2.If expected utility is the correct criterion of rightness, then agents following it as a procedure are doing what's actually right. The distinction collapses only if it's genuinely misguided.
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    • 3.Parfit and Railton dispute whether the distinction matters normatively, not whether it exists. The error claim requires independent argument about why conflation is wrong.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
    ?
    • 1.A criterion of rightness specifies what makes an act objectively right; a decision procedure is what agents can actually use. These serve fundamentally different purposes.
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    • 2.Expected utility is cognitively accessible to decision-makers but may not track moral reality. Using it as both procedure and criterion smuggles in false epistemological assumptions.
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    • 3.A decision procedure must be implementable with limited information; a criterion of rightness can reference facts unavailable at decision-time. Conflating them obscures this asymmetry.
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