That is too easy. When you see “someone choose to X”, you’ll usually take it to mean that the bloke could’ve done otherwise, ergo, if he choose to do something that did him wrong, he’s responsible and hence, deserves the result he’s obtained.
Maybe you can stretch the definition of responsibility too (stretch away http://yudkowsky.net/rational/the-simple-truth ), but the idea that people could do otherwise, or deserve their fate if they chose to do something ‘wrong’, knowing it was wrong to do it … even barring the idea of a deserved fate, people often fall back to human nature, resorting to their heuristics and “general feeling about doing this or that”.
That’s not a choice. That’s more like a curse, when your environmental conditions are just right and strong enough to give such processes PREDOMINANCE over your own ‘rational’ sophisticated mind. In such cases, you won’t act rationally anymore; you’ve already been taken over, even if temporarily. We’ve been discussing akrasia and ego depletion a bit lately, this falls in the same category. Rationality is but the last layer of your mind. It floats over all those hardwired components of your mind. It is pretty fragile and artificial, at least when it comes to act rationally, as opposed to thinking rationally, or even easier, thinking about rationality.
So whether someone “choose it”, or not, whatever meaning is bestowed upon the word choice, is not the most important thing. It’s to understand why someone did something of a disservice to himself, and how he could be helped out of it, and if he should be helped out of it in the first place.
This question is totally meaningless for materialists and consequentialists. The entire business of attaching blame and deserts must be abandoned in favour of questions either to do with predictions about the world or to do with what will give the best total effect.
I’ll do a post on this when I’ve composed it, but the start of it is the case of Phineas Gage.
I think this is too extreme. Maybe blame and desert are best dispensed with, but it seems likely that we (our volitions) terminally disvalue interference with deliberate, ‘responsible’ choices, even if they’re wrong, but not interference with compulsions. Even if that’s not the case, it also seems likely that something like our idea of responsible vs. compulsive choice is a natural joint, predicting an action’s evidential value about stable, reflectively endorsed preferences, which is heuristically useful in multiple ways.
I don’t think that needs to be a terminal value. People’s deliberate choices provide information about what will actually make them happy; with compulsions, we have evidence that those things won’t really make them happy.
I agree that it’s useful to have words to distinguish what we want long-term when we think about it, and what we want short-term when tempted, and I’ve just done a post on that subject. However, I don’t see how that helps rescue the idea of blame and deserving.
I think this is too extreme. Maybe blame and desert are best dispensed with, but it seems likely that we (our volitions) terminally disvalue interference with deliberate, ‘responsible’ choices, even if they’re wrong, but not interference with compulsions. Even if that’s not the case, it also seems likely that something like our idea of responsible vs. compulsive choice is a (natural joint)[http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/02/where-boundary.html], predicting an action’s evidential value about stable, reflectively endorsed preferences, which is heuristically useful in multiple ways.
That is too easy. When you see “someone choose to X”, you’ll usually take it to mean that the bloke could’ve done otherwise, ergo, if he choose to do something that did him wrong, he’s responsible and hence, deserves the result he’s obtained.
Maybe you can stretch the definition of responsibility too (stretch away http://yudkowsky.net/rational/the-simple-truth ), but the idea that people could do otherwise, or deserve their fate if they chose to do something ‘wrong’, knowing it was wrong to do it … even barring the idea of a deserved fate, people often fall back to human nature, resorting to their heuristics and “general feeling about doing this or that”.
That’s not a choice. That’s more like a curse, when your environmental conditions are just right and strong enough to give such processes PREDOMINANCE over your own ‘rational’ sophisticated mind. In such cases, you won’t act rationally anymore; you’ve already been taken over, even if temporarily. We’ve been discussing akrasia and ego depletion a bit lately, this falls in the same category. Rationality is but the last layer of your mind. It floats over all those hardwired components of your mind. It is pretty fragile and artificial, at least when it comes to act rationally, as opposed to thinking rationally, or even easier, thinking about rationality.
So whether someone “choose it”, or not, whatever meaning is bestowed upon the word choice, is not the most important thing. It’s to understand why someone did something of a disservice to himself, and how he could be helped out of it, and if he should be helped out of it in the first place.
This question is totally meaningless for materialists and consequentialists. The entire business of attaching blame and deserts must be abandoned in favour of questions either to do with predictions about the world or to do with what will give the best total effect.
I’ll do a post on this when I’ve composed it, but the start of it is the case of Phineas Gage.
I think this is too extreme. Maybe blame and desert are best dispensed with, but it seems likely that we (our volitions) terminally disvalue interference with deliberate, ‘responsible’ choices, even if they’re wrong, but not interference with compulsions. Even if that’s not the case, it also seems likely that something like our idea of responsible vs. compulsive choice is a natural joint, predicting an action’s evidential value about stable, reflectively endorsed preferences, which is heuristically useful in multiple ways.
I don’t think that needs to be a terminal value. People’s deliberate choices provide information about what will actually make them happy; with compulsions, we have evidence that those things won’t really make them happy.
I agree that it’s useful to have words to distinguish what we want long-term when we think about it, and what we want short-term when tempted, and I’ve just done a post on that subject. However, I don’t see how that helps rescue the idea of blame and deserving.
In case there was any confusion, I didn’t mean to say it does.
I think this is too extreme. Maybe blame and desert are best dispensed with, but it seems likely that we (our volitions) terminally disvalue interference with deliberate, ‘responsible’ choices, even if they’re wrong, but not interference with compulsions. Even if that’s not the case, it also seems likely that something like our idea of responsible vs. compulsive choice is a (natural joint)[http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/02/where-boundary.html], predicting an action’s evidential value about stable, reflectively endorsed preferences, which is heuristically useful in multiple ways.