The Deeper Inquiry

The philosophy of risk under moral uncertainty is directly relevant to the argument of this chapter. Toby Ord's The Precipice (2020) makes the most systematic recent case for how moral agents should think about risk when the stakes include civilizational-scale outcomes. His analysis of expected value under deep uncertainty — the conditions in which not only probabilities but the full range of possible outcomes is unknown — provides a framework for thinking about why the attempt to develop coordination architecture is worth making even when the probability of success is genuinely uncertain.

The failure analysis literature, particularly the work of Charles Perrow on normal accidents and the subsequent work of Diane Vaughan on organizational accidents, examines how systems fail in ways that are not random but structurally predictable — how the design features that produce normal operation also generate the conditions for catastrophic failure. Providence's design must engage this literature seriously: the anti-capture mechanisms and constitutional audit culture are the primary defenses against the normal accidents of institutional development, and they must be designed with the awareness that every institutional design eventually faces conditions that the design did not anticipate.