Decision under normative uncertainty

While ordinary decision theory focuses on empirical uncertainty, real decision-makers also face normative uncertainty: uncertainty about value itself. From a purely formal perspective, normative uncertainty is comparable to (Harsanyian or Rawlsian) identity uncertainty in the ‘original position’, where one’s future values are unknown. A comprehensive decision theory must address twofold uncertainty – normative and empirical. We present a simple model of twofold uncertainty, and show that the most popular decision principle – maximizing expected value (‘Expectationalism’) – has different formulations, namely Ex-Ante Expectationalism, Ex-Post Expectationalism, and hybrid theories. These alternative theories recommend different decisions, reasoning modes, and attitudes to risk. But they converge under an interesting (necessary and sufficient) condition.

Truth and Uncertainty in Political Justification

Political deliberation and decision-making typically take place in circumstances of substantial uncertainty about what should be done. Some of this uncertainty concerns decision-relevant empirical facts and some of it concerns decision-relevant normative facts. It is widely accepted that uncertainty about empirical facts should make us cautious and that political justification must take such uncertainty into account. Some have argued, however, that uncertainty about empirical and normative facts is not symmetrical, and that normative uncertainty does not demand the same caution. This chapter argues that the argument against symmetry does not work in the political context and that political justification must take normative uncertainty into account.

Ethics of Uncertainty As an Extension of Virtue Epistemology

Uncertainty can’t be understood without taking into account both properties of the problem situation and agent’s knowledge about it. The correspondence of knowledge and situation of decision-making is crucial for understanding the onto-epistemological nature of uncertainty. At the same time, this correspondence is the key topic in virtue epistemology, especially in its ‘non-classical’, regulatory, branch, related to works of R. Roberts and W.J. Wood. In this article, genetic consultation is chosen as an example of such a problematic situation since a doctor and a patient explicitly deal with the uncertainty of genetic risks. The problems of communication and joint decision-making in the context of medical-genetic consultation are comprehensively described in bioethics. At the same time, its social dimension is limited to the direct interaction of two individual agents, that allows us to use it as a model for constructing the ethics of uncertainty. In this article, four forms of uncertainty are identified: descriptive, normative and radical uncertainties, and translation uncertainty. Referring to the approaches of virtue epistemology, the author brings each of these forms into conformity with the proposed regulatory principle. The regulations assume that generating or disseminating knowledge under conditions of uncertainty require taking into account the incompleteness of the presented model of reality in its four aspects. A modelled fragment of reality could change in a predictable (descriptive uncertainty) or unexpected (radical uncertainty) way. The goals and values of a model’s user can not be hierarchically ordered, and may also change in the future (normative uncertainty). User’s interpretations of the model may be diverse, and can never be strictly defined by the intentions of the model’s author (indeterminancy of translation, or uncertainty whether success of co-reference is achieved).

The Evidentialist's Wager

Suppose that an altruistic agent who is uncertain between evidential and causal decision theory finds herself in a situation where these theories give conflicting verdicts. We argue that even if she has significantly higher credence in CDT, she should nevertheless act in accordance with EDT. First, we claim that the appropriate response to normative uncertainty is to hedge one's bets. That is, if the stakes are much higher on one theory than another, and the credences you assign to each of these theories are not very different, then it is appropriate to choose the option that performs best on the high-stakes theory. Second, we show that, given the assumption of altruism, the existence of correlated decision makers will increase the stakes for EDT but leave the stakes for CDT unaffected. Together these two claims imply that whenever there are sufficiently many correlated agents, the appropriate response is to act in accordance with EDT.

Theoretical and methodological foundations of continuous pedagogical education: pre-university component

The problem of pre-university pedagogical education is actualized with the goal of identifying its theoretical and methodological foundations, analyzing the features and specifics in the context of continuous pedagogical education. By means of the methods of theoretical analysis of literature, contextual and dynamic analysis of pedagogical systems: a) the socio-educational and practical importance of pre-university education in the context of its normative uncertainty, semantic categorical “blurring”, lack of scientific substantiation is emphasized; b) the factors that complicate the process of pre-university education are named; c) the concepts of “continuous pe-dagogical education”, “pre-university education” are theoretically formulated; d) revealed the theoretical and methodological foundations of pre-university education; e) the subjects are characterized; f) the types are differentiated (school, university and mixed); g) the functions of pre-university education in its integration, socializing, adaptive, motivational and personality-developing interpretations are studied, and its principles (humanism, continuity, social partnership, continuity, integrity) are systematized, and generalized signs (integrativity, practice-oriented, mo-bility).

RELATIVITY OF DEVIANT BEHAVIOR (ON THE EXAMPLE OF THE ATTITUDE TO SOCIAL NORMS OF STUDENTS IN KAZAN)

The basis for regulating behavior in society is social norms that fix the existing system of values of society. The changes that are currently taking place in all spheres of modern Russian society are undermining the established foundations of life and disturbing the balance of the entire system as a whole. The greatest influence, and above all negative, they have on the development of culture and spiritual life. The ongoing reassessment of values leads to a decline in the significance of certain norms. The value-normative uncertainty characteristic of modern Russian society actualizes the problem of studying deviance in its environment. Modern Russian youth is focused on rapid achievement of high material well-being, but socially approved means of achieving success are very limited. The spread and popularization of new destructive behaviors in the youth environment at the current level of development of technical means of communication is much faster than the scientific and pedagogical community responds to these risks. The reasons for the increase in negative deviation in Russia are also, first, the changed system of values, in the structure of which the rapid achievement of material well-being, understood as enrichment, is rapidly beginning to dominate; second, the blurring of social norms leads to the destruction of even elementary moral prohibitions, which allows a significant part of individuals to enter into various kinds of connections with criminal structures. Based on the analysis of the works of classics of sociology and the results of empirical research, the article describes deviant behavior in terms of changing social forms in the minds of young people. Respondents were selected for focus groups using the snowball method. 20 students living in a dormitory of Kazan Federal University were selected, including students living on the territory of the Universiade Village and students living on the campus of KFU.

Statistical Normalization Methods in Interpersonal and Intertheoretic Comparisons

A major problem for interpersonal aggregation is how to compare utility across individuals; a major problem for decision-making under normative uncertainty is the formally analogous problem of how to compare choice-worthiness across theories. We introduce and study a class of methods, which we call statistical normalization methods, for making interpersonal comparisons of utility and intertheoretic comparisons of choice-worthiness. We argue against the statistical normalization methods that have been proposed in the literature. We argue, instead, in favor of normalization of variance: we claim that this is the account that most plausibly gives all individuals or theories ‘equal say’. To this end, we provide two proofs that variance normalization has desirable properties that all other normalization methods lack, though we also show how different assumptions could lead one to axiomatize alternative statistical normalization methods.