What Is Cluelessness?

When we don't know what we don't know.

It is deeply immoral to allow this woman to write poetry.

Nearly every ethical system says that we should care about the consequences of our actions at least sometimes. You might think it’s wrong to murder people or lie or allow Rupi Kaur to write poetry no matter what, even if it leads to better outcomes overall. But if you’re deciding whether to donate money to charity, it matters whether the charity is the Against Malaria Foundation or Assassins Without Borders, which ensures that underprivileged politicians have an equal chance to get murdered.

But this creates a problem, because we don’t know what the consequences of our actions are.

You can see this with a simple thought experiment. Let’s say you let someone go ahead of you in line at the coffeeshop, which means they go home slightly faster. They were planning to have sex with their spouse tonight, and as it happens their spouse is ovulating. Because you let them go home a little bit earlier, their semen contains different sperm than it would otherwise, and they conceive a different child. You letting them go ahead of you in the coffeeshop line may very well be the most impactful action you’ve done in your entire life.

Now, you might say, surely any indirect effects of your actions fade out over time. But if you think about the thought experiment, that can’t be true. Imagine that one of the person’s sperm would conceive Adolf Hitler, and the other would conceive Norman Borlaug. (They’re from a very distinguished family.) If anything, the effects would compound over time: on one hand, the rippling effects of millions of people murdered; on the other hand, hundreds of millions saved from famine.

Luckily, this kind of cluelessness isn’t very morally problematic. The reason is that we have no reason to believe that any sperm is better than any other sperm, given our current state of knowledge. It might be that letting them go ahead of you in line replaces Adolph Hitler with Norman Borlaug, or it might be that letting them go ahead of you in line replaces Norman Borlaug with Adolph Hitler. Even though this is plausibly the most impactful decision of your life, there’s no possible way you could know which way it goes, so you might as well not worry about it.

(It’s still admittedly pretty trippy to think about all the effects you have on the world via making conceptions happen a few minutes earlier or later.)

The more serious problem is what’s called complex cluelessness. We talked earlier about regular uncertainty versus Knightian uncertainty. When you change the timing of someone’s conception, you’re in a situation of regular uncertainty. You understand how sperm works, how sex works, and the kinds of people that exist. You’re very uncertain about whether you’re replacing Norman Borlaug with Adolph Hitler, but you know that you can’t possibly figure it out.

However, when we do good, many situations are instead situations of Knightian uncertainty. You can tell that you’re in a situation of Knightian uncertainty, because when you think about it too hard you want to bash your head repeatedly against the wall and scream.

One important kind of complex cluelessness is population ethics. Population ethics is basically the question of whether, all things equal, it’s good for more happy people to exist. Population ethics comes up a lot:

• Is it morally good, morally neutral, or morally wrong to have a child that you reasonably believe will have a happy and fulfilled life?

• If you know saving a person’s life will increase the human population, does that count for or against saving their life?

• If destroying animal habitats reduces the number of animals in the world, does that make it wronger?

• Should we stop eating meat, even though that means that people will farm fewer animals and thus fewer chickens and cows will exist?

• If we drive humanity extinct, is that bad just because it’s probably unpleasant for the people alive at the time, or also because of the many future generations who won’t exist?

Unfortunately, every solution to this problem is a nightmare. Philosophers have tried, but it’s very hard to come up with a robust solution that accords with all our intuitions.

There are many similarly complex questions. For example, if you’re thinking about animal welfare, it matters a lot which animals are sentient, and also defining consciousness is a complete nightmare. If you’re thinking about global poverty, it matters whether Westerners donating money tends to reduce the quality of local institutions and thus trap people in poverty in the long term. If you’re thinking about existential risk, it matters whether speeding up the development of a particular technology means you get it before people who would do worse things with it do, or whether it creates a competition where people are cutting corners on safety to try to develop the technology as fast as possible.

Many people’s intuitions suggest that it’s not appropriate to treat complex cluelessness the same way we treat simple cluelessness. This is why we scream about population ethics and not about the possibility that people who cut in front of us in line might be intending to have penis-in-vagina sex later today.