Dr Shang Long Yeo1
1National University Of Singapore, Singapore
Abstract:
In gathering the public’s moral judgments to inform public policy, various authors have proposed that we filter, launder, or otherwise correct for unreliable moral judgments. One standard method involves identifying judgments that are unreliable according to a theory-neutral standard (for instance, judgments subject to framing effects), and excluding them from consideration when forming policy. While this increases the accuracy of the policymaking procedure, it may also be disrespectful — because it denies an agent’s claim to influencing policy, because it exposes an agent to inappropriate evaluation, and because it undercuts their expressed reasons for supporting their preferred policy.
Are there more respectful methods of debiasing, and what are their strengths and weaknesses? In this talk, I consider some alternative methods of debiasing and preliminarily evaluate them. These methods include: 1) changing the elicitation conditions to improve reliability, but accepting the agent’s judgment in those conditions, whatever it may be, 2) suggesting the hypothesis that the agent may be unreliable, but leaving them to decide whether or not to exclude their own judgment, 3) surveying the agent’s second-order judgments about moral reliability and using those as the relevant standard for exclusion.