Cluelessness: Summary of the argument, why it matters, and counterarguments

(I wrote this post partly to help orient those interested in participating in the EA Forum’s Cluelessness Critiques Competition. The competition closes August 14th.) I’d like to elicit direct, productive critiques of the argument for cluelessness from my sequence on “unawareness”, which I’ll call the unawareness argument. To that end, this post will: break down the unawareness argument at a high level; explain why the EA community should care about this argument; and summarize the angles for critiquing the argument that I expect to be most productive, and how the sequence responds to existing critiques. Argument breakdown Here’s a new framing of the unawareness argument (compared to how I present it in the sequence). I expect this framing to help readers disentangle different types of disagreements they might have, corresponding to three different premises of the argument. Roughly: What would justify preferring action A over B on impartial altruistic grounds? We’d need to “expect” that according to our epistemically idealized self, A has better expected total consequences across the cosmos (normative premise). But if our understanding of these actions’ consequences is too coarse, then we can’t say how our idealized self would compare their expected values (conceptual premise). And our understanding of any given action’s cosmos-wide consequences is in fact that coarse (empirical premise). So there’s no impartial altruistic justification for preferring any action over another. More precisely: Let’s say that we c-prefer [1] A over B if the reason we prefer A is an impartial altruistic comparison of the actions’ possible consequences. P1. Normative premise: To justify c-preferring A over B, it’s not enough to say (e.g.) that A seems heuristically good. Rather, we need to argue that A has higher “expected value” broadly speaking, meaning: In some sense we “expect” that, if we were idealized agents who could aggregate all of A’s and B’s possible consequences into literal