Moral Gambling

What is the role of moral risk in moral epistemology?

Pascal's Wager suggests that we might profitably think about the expected value of our belief about God as follows:

If God exists and I believe he exists, I get infinite gains
If God exists and I don't believe he exists, I incur infinite costs. (NB: one only actually needs one of these infinities to make the argument go though)
If God does not exist and I believe he exists, I get minor costs (in this life only).
If God does not exist and I do not believe he exists, I get minor gains (in this life only).

You can quibble with the exact values, but the point is that, given any finitely small probability that God exists, you should gamble that he exists. Pascal actually thinks you get minor gains if you falsely believe God exists and minor costs if you are right that he doesn't exist, but that seems to go against Paul's "most of all to be pitied" line. Pascal is not a strong voluntarist about belief, so technically his conclusion is that you should put yourself in situations that are likely to form the belief in God in you.

Now, consider a similar case:

According to many pro-life proponents, even if it is uncertain when a human rights-bearer begins, so long as there is some probability that it begins at conception (or implantation), then we should regard such a being as a human rights-bearer, since the cost of getting it wrong is that we wind up having murdered an innocent life. This argument doesn't provide a full-strength pro-life position, in my opinion, since there may be cases where the (probabilistically modified) cost to the infant/fetus is less than that to the mother, but the argument is popular with pro-life people.

A third case is less popular:

Consider the question of egalitarianism vs. complementarianism: if egalitarianism is right, then complementarianism is fundamentally subjugation of women (and, quite probably, inherently abusive). If complementarianism is right... egalitarians don't seem to incur any cost that complementarians don't also incur if they are wrong, such as violating the Word of God. Provided we think the harms of complementarianism being wrong are great enough, even if we think it more probable than egalitarianism, we should--following the same logic as the prior two cases--bet on egalitarianism.

In the latter two arguments, we can call the argument a "Deference to Love" argument. That is, we are preferring the view which has the greater expected moral value to others.

Now, the technicality noted in Pascal's argument is relevant: I am no voluntarist about (most) beliefs, including (most) moral beliefs. So, I am not claiming that this is, in itself, an argument for the relevant beliefs. Rather, it is an argument for a certain attitude in investigating the beliefs in question. This is the kind of attitude which is often taken by deconstructing Christians, I think, and it is rational (and perhaps unavoidable). Occasionally one might take a wrong turn with these arguments, particularly if one gets wrong what the costs of getting things wrong are.

Second, one might quibble with the use of expected value in moral theorizing. Maybe we should use some other method of weighing such risks. The point remains that we are doing something reasonably called "moral gambling" and we should think about how we take such risks into account.

Third, one might argue that those who hold the view one opposes are all going to hell, thus heavily weighting things in one's favor in the calculus. I don't think this works, however, since one has actually introduced a third view: the conjunction of one's original view and the view that hell awaits those who don't hold it. Lacking an argument for the conjunction (and, from a Christian point of view, such an argument should be pretty hard to come by), it will be exceedingly unlikely, and the other side might easily make the move in return if there is no argument to bias the weights.