Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Rethink Priorities' Moral Parliament Tool, published by Derek Shiller on July 17, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
Link to tool: https://parliament.rethinkpriorities.org
(1 min) Introductory Video
(6 min) Basic Features Video
Executive Summary
This post introduces Rethink Priorities' Moral Parliament Tool, which models ways an agent can make decisions about how to allocate goods in light of normative uncertainty.
We treat normative uncertainty as uncertainty over worldviews. A worldview encompasses a set of normative commitments, including first-order moral theories, values, and attitudes toward risk. We represent worldviews as delegates in a moral parliament who decide on an allocation of funds to a diverse array of charitable projects.
Users can configure the parliament to represent their own credences in different worldviews and choose among several procedures for finding their best all-things-considered philanthropic allocation.
The relevant procedures are metanormative methods. These methods take worldviews and our credences in them as inputs and produce some action guidance as an output. Some proposed methods have taken inspiration from political or market processes involving agents who differ in their conceptions of the good and their decision-making strategies. Others have modeled metanormative uncertainty by adapting tools for navigating empirical uncertainty.
We show that empirical and metanormative assumptions can each make large differences in the outcomes. Moral theories and metanormative methods differ in their sensitivity to particular changes.
We also show that, taking the results of the EA Survey as inputs to a moral parliament, no one portfolio is clearly favored. The recommended portfolios vary dramatically based on your preferred metanormative method.
By modeling these complexities, we hope to facilitate more transparent conversations about normative uncertainty, metanormative uncertainty, and resource allocation.
Introduction
Decisions about how to do the most good inherently involve moral commitments about what is valuable and which methods for achieving the good are permissible. However, there is deep disagreement about central moral claims that influence our cause prioritization:
How much do animals matter?
Should we prioritize present people over future people?
Should we aim to maximize overall happiness or also care about things like justice or artistic achievement?
The answers to these questions can have significant effects on which causes are most choiceworthy. Understandably, many individuals feel some amount of moral uncertainty, and individuals within groups (such as charitable organizations and moral communities) may have different moral commitments. How should we make decisions in light of such uncertainty?
Rethink Priorities' Moral Parliament Tool allows users to evaluate decisions about how to allocate goods in light of uncertainty over different worldviews. A worldview encompasses a set of normative commitments, including first-order moral theories, values, and attitudes toward risk.[1] We represent worldviews as delegates in a moral parliament who decide on an allocation of funds to a diverse array of charitable projects.
Users can configure the parliament to represent their own credences in different worldviews and choose among several procedures for finding their best all-things-considered philanthropic allocation.
How does it work?
The Moral Parliament tool has three central components: Worldviews, Projects, and Allocation Strategies for making decisions in light of worldview uncertainty. It embodies a three-stage strategy for navigating uncertainty:
What are the worldviews in which I place some non-trivial credence?
What do they individually recommend that I do?
How do I aggregate and arbitrate among these recommendations...

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