Just added to my Big Bright Green Manifesto Machine. You might need to read this through a couple times; it’s a difficult concept since it lives in a collective blind spot for us:
Doing ethics without probability is like performing surgery with a wooden spoon — it’s a blunt instrument capable of only the most basic operations, and more likely to kill the patient than heal them. Implicitly, we understand this need for probability in making ethical judgements, yet most people recoil when the calculus of probabilities is made explicit, because it seems cold, because the math frightens and confuses them, or because letting odds remain unestimated and unacknowledged allows people to confuse positive outcomes with moral behavior, sweeping hidden risks under the rug when things go well, or claiming ignorance when they don’t. It’s time to acknowledge — directly, explicitly, mathematically — that morality needs probability. For ethics to move forward it must be integrated with our knowledge of randomness and partial entailment.
Here’s an example of how we already take probability into account implicitly. If we retrieve our lost ball from someone’s yard without asking first, we justify this based on our belief that the owner is more likely to be bothered by us interrupting their dinner, than by our temporary trespass on their lawn. The greater the probability of great harm, the higher the level of certainty we demand. Our most heated debates involve situations where the probability of harm from both action and inaction is high. If someone’s dog is stuck in a hot car on a sunny day, should you break in and try to save it? Does the chance of a dog dying of heatstroke justify a forced entry that will probably result in expensive damage and an irate owner (though it’s possible they would be grateful instead). If you decide to break in, how long should you wait first? What prior distribution should you put on the owner’s return time, and how do you update your prior as time goes by? If the waiting time is chi-square on low degrees of freedom, your concern for the dog might be unjustified. If it follows the unreliable friend distribution, you may be that dog’s only hope.
As I hope is becoming clear, questions of morality cannot be resolved without asking questions about probability. If the example above seems trivial (perhaps the owner’s property rights trump your concern for a dog), then substitute the animal for a toddler who looks uncomfortably warm. Now how long do you wait, and how do you deal with the risk that smashing a window might harm the child?