Illusion of Probability from Post-Measurement Uncertainty
Many important debates in contemporary ethics centre on idealized thought experiments in which agents are assumed to have perfect information about the effects of their actions and other morally relevant features of the choices they face.
If A takes a certain action one person will certainly be killed; if he does not, five people will certainly be killed (Foot 1967); how the one and the five got into that situation, whether blamelessly or recklessly (Thomson 1976: 210–11), is also a matter of certainty. If Betty conceives a child now, it will certainly have a life that is hard but worth living, while if she waits, her child’s life will certainly be better—and the two choices will certainly result in different children being born (Parfit 1984: 358)
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