Vive la différence? Structural diversity as a challenge for metanormative theories

Abstract

Decision-making under normative uncertainty requires an agent to aggregate the assessments of options given by rival normative theories into a single assessment that tells her what to do in light of her uncertainty. But what if the assessments of rival theories differ not just in their content but in their structure—for example, some are merely ordinal while others are cardinal? This article describes and evaluates three general approaches to this “problem of structural diversity”: structural enrichment, structural depletion, and multistage aggregation. Each approach has notable drawbacks, but I tentatively defend multistage aggregation as least bad of the three.