“Rethink Priorities’ Moral Parliament Tool” by Derek Shiller, arvomm, Bob Fischer, Hayley Clatterbuck

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 [...]