Chance and the Dissipation of our Acts’ Effects

ABSTRACT

If the future is highly sensitive to the past, then many of our acts have long-term consequences whose significance well exceeds that of their foreseeable short-term consequences. According to an influential argument by James Lenman, we should think that the future is highly sensitive to acts that affect people’s identities. However, given the assumption that chancy events are ubiquitous, the effects that our acts have are likely to dissipate over a short span of time. The sets of possible futures left open by alternative acts are typically very similar in the same way that large random samples drawn from the same population are typically very similar.

KEYWORDS:

• cluelessness
• epistemic objection to consequentialism
• objective chance
• butterfly effect
• long-term consequences
• dissipation

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Joanna Burch-Brown [2014] argued that, while individual acts might have massive and unpredictable consequences, we can know something about the typical consequences of types of acts. Tyler Cowen [2006] pointed out that we can make reasonable guesses about certain significant acts. Elinor Mason [2004], Caspar Hare [2011], and Hilary Greaves [2016] argued that we are licensed to assign subjective probabilities in a way that justifies many common-sense ethical verdicts within consequentialist frameworks. Alexander Pruss [2017] suggested that we can ignore the unknown future consequences of our acts in moral deliberation in so far as they do not favour inaction. Dale Dorsey [2012] argued that our absence of evidence about the long-term consequences of our acts allows us to treat the possibility of unforeseen consequences as we treat metaphysical scepticism.

2 Lenman [2000: 353] justified setting aside the possibility of genuine chanciness on the ground that it introduced further problems for consequentionalism:

perhaps [we] must consider not two determinate possible futures but two futures that branch endlessly, assign probabilities to every branching, and seek to maximize the expected goodness … because [this and related] possibilities make matters even more intractable for consequentialists, let us stick to the most tractable cases, in which there are just two possible futures to consider.

In so far as our interest is not consequentialism but instead the sensitivity of the future, we cannot ignore chanciness.

3 The arguments that I develop might work with other interpretations of objective chance, including some Humean interpretations, but the issues are too complex to address here.

4 These numbers are arbitrary and are intended only as illustrative.

5 Thanks to several anonymous referees for helpful feedback on this article.