I would guess this is something someone already explored somewhere, but the act-omission distinction seems a natural consequence of intractability of “actions not taken”?
The model is this: the moral agent takes a sample from some intractably huge action space. Evaluates each sampled action by some moral function M (for example by rejection sampling based on utility), and does something.
From an external perspective, morality likely is about the moral function M (and evaluating agents based on that), in contrast to evaluating them based on the sampling procedure.
I would guess this is something someone already explored somewhere, but the act-omission distinction seems a natural consequence of intractability of “actions not taken”?
The model is this: the moral agent takes a sample from some intractably huge action space. Evaluates each sampled action by some moral function M (for example by rejection sampling based on utility), and does something.
From an external perspective, morality likely is about the moral function M (and evaluating agents based on that), in contrast to evaluating them based on the sampling procedure.