User:Tommyren/sandbox

• Comment: The tone occasionally drifts from neutral to speculative. Additionally, the part on ripple effects are overly technical, making the content harder to follow for a general audience. Also there are numerous statements that are repeated unnecessarily. Ktkvtsh (talk) 02:04, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

• Comment: Relies entirely on a single source -Liance^{talk/contribs} 18:59, 9 March 2022 (UTC)

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Cluelessness refers to the concern that the long-run consequences of any action may be mostly unknown. It poses problems for consequentialist decision makers, who make choices by comparing the consequences of some actions against those of others.

Philosophers disagree on whether one must indeed be clueless about most of the consequences of actions. J. J. C. Smart and G. E. Moore argue that the unforeseeable consequences of actions may be too unimportant to count. Environmental forces constrain consequences to decrease in importance as they become increasingly removed from the time and place of the initial actions. Smart writes that the consequences "approximate to zero like the furthermost ripples on a pond after a stone has been dropped into it."

Against the "ripples on a pond" postulate, James Lenman and others argue that even seemingly inconsequential actions have important effects throughout all time. The scholars often invoke the so-called butterfly effect, the idea that small causes can have large impacts. Against the cancellation postulate, many of these scholars also argue that the cancellation will likely not result in a result close to zero, and unforeseeable consequences likely outweigh the foreseeable.

The "ripples on a pond" postulate

However, philosopher Hilary Greaves writes that one cannot assume such diminishing ripple effects. Seemingly unimportant events may make important differences in so-called butterfly effects. If a butterfly flapping its wings might contribute to a hurricane thousands of miles away, then so might a seemingly trivial decision, like whether to help an old lady cross the street, cause extremely positive or negative consequences in the far future. Greaves argue that these positive and negative effects will likely not cancel one another out. Theories of random walks suggest that the cumulative effect of a large number of random independent events tends to increase as the number of steps increases.

However, while the actual unforeseeable effects of an action will likely turn out to be large, Greaves argues that if one makes choices based on the expected effects of actions, then the good and the bad can cancel out in expectation. The expected unforeseeable effects may not differ between two actions in a way that would affect the decision. For each of the actions, one may have no evidence that This line of thinking is called the Principle of Indifference. Nevertheless, philosophers generally consider the principle as problematic, pointing to the paradox that if one has no evidence for whether an action would lead to a good or bad outcome, and if one has no evidence for whether an an action would lead to a good outcome or a particularly bad outcome, which is a subset of the bad outcomes, then one comes to the nonsensical result that one would have equal credence in whether an action would lead to a particularly bad outcome or one of the bad outcomes in general.

Recognizing the paradox, Greaves nevertheless argues that the Principle of Indifference holds for certain kinds of actions and outcomes. In some cases, one clearly has an equal amount of reason to believe that the outcomes of one action are better or worse than those of another. One clearly cannot expect the result of one coin flip to be different from that of another, so the fact that the results of coin flips are unforeseeable need not trouble decision makers who make decisions based on expected effects and who must decide between one of two coin flips as what determines the course of action.

According to Greaves, decision-making becomes more difficult when the Principle of Indifference does not hold. In these cases, one expects not to have an equal amount of evidence to believe that the outcomes of one action would be better or worse than those of another. However, at the time of the decision, the decision maker has no expectation about which side receives more support from evidence. Deciding where one should donate one's money may involve such a case of complex cluelessness, as different charitable causes, like disaster relief and animal welfare, lead to very different kinds of unforeseeable consequences.