On Acting Under Uncertainty

On Acting Under Uncertainty

The framework does not tell you what to do. This is not a failure of the framework but a feature of the situation. The situation is one of genuine uncertainty—not just uncertainty about facts but uncertainty about values, about what matters, about what would count as a good outcome. In such situations, no framework can provide a decision procedure that takes inputs and produces correct outputs. What frameworks can do is illuminate the landscape in which decisions are made, clarify what is at stake, reveal considerations that might otherwise be missed. But the decision itself remains yours, remains irreducibly a matter of judgment in the face of uncertainty, remains something that no amount of analysis can remove from the realm of risk.

This is uncomfortable. Part of what people want from frameworks is relief from the burden of decision, the comfort of being told what to do by something authoritative enough that the decision is no longer theirs. The framework refuses to provide this comfort, not because it is perversely withholding but because the comfort is not available, because no framework can legitimately provide it, because anyone who claims to have a decision procedure for life under genuine uncertainty is either deceived or deceiving. The existentialists were right about this: you are condemned to freedom, which means condemned to decision in the absence of guaranteed correctness, condemned to responsibility for choices whose outcomes you cannot fully foresee, condemned to the anxiety that comes from knowing that you could be wrong and that being wrong has consequences.

But the existentialists sometimes wrote as if this condemnation meant that all choices are equally groundless, as if the absence of guaranteed correctness implies the absence of any guidance at all. This is not the implication of the framework. The framework does provide guidance—not decision procedures but considerations, not algorithms but orientations. It says: attend to the scale of the problem and match your intervention to it. It says: protect your integration because integration is what makes you you. It says: examine the gods you serve and ask whether their viability aligns with yours. It says: notice where you are in the affect space and ask whether that is where you want to be. It says: remember that your suffering is real and your flourishing is possible. None of this tells you what specifically to do on Tuesday morning, but all of it shapes how you approach the question of what to do, orients you in the landscape where decisions are made, provides something less than certainty but more than nothing.