Uninformed Good: Why Benefits Received Without Knowledge of Their Costs Are Not Categorically Good
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: A benefit can be real while the judgment that it is good remains uninformed. I developuninformed good as a graded concept: a benefit received without adequate understanding of itsrelevant costs, wherever those costs fall. Disclosure may lower, raise, or leave unchanged therecipient’s evaluation. A benefit that remains equally good after its costs are understood is thelimiting categorical case in my sense; whether such cases occur is an open question, not a resultestablished here. The primary aim is descriptive: to ask how often uninformed benefits producereal harm, for whom, and under which conditions. A separate philosophical hypothesis holds thatomission is outwardly negative; it is not presented as an empirical finding. I distinguishdeliberate concealment, chosen ignorance, and unavoidable incomplete knowledge; examinesdemands and last-minute requests for forgiveness or reentry; and confronts invisible-supportevidence as a genuine challenge to blanket disclosure rules. I argue for timely disclosure ofmaterial known costs while recognizing costs of disclosure and limits of knowledge. Ninerevised predictions, a field-oriented distributional inquiry, and two possible experiments specifyhow the empirical claims could be tested. No new data are reported.
Author: Withington, Cole David
Institution: Portland State University
Language: English
Subfield: General Decision Sciences
Field: Decision Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225642328
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