Is Normative Uncertainty Irrelevant if Your Descriptive Uncertainty Depends on It?

Abstract

According to ‘Excluders’, descriptive uncertainty— but not normative uncertainty — matters to what we ought to do. Recently, several authors have argued that those wishing to treat normative uncertainty differently from descriptive uncertainty face a dependence problem because one’s descriptive uncertainty can depend on one’s normative uncertainty. The aim of this paper is to determine whether the phenomenon of dependence poses a decisive problem for Excluders. I argue that existing arguments fail to show this, and that, while stronger ones can be found, Excluders can escape them.