This post strikes me as saying something extremely obvious and uncontroversial, like “I care about what happens in the future, but I also care about other things, e.g. not getting tortured right now”. OK, yeah duh, was anyone disputing that??
I’m thinking about cases where you want to do something, and it’s a simple action, but the consequences are complex and you don’t explicitly analyze them—you just want to do the thing. In such cases I argue that reducing the action to its (more complex) consequences feels like shoehorning.
For example: maybe you want to climb a mountain because that’s the way your heuristics play out, which came from evolution. So we can “back-chain” the desire to genetic fitness; or we can back-chain to some worldly consequences, like having good stories to tell at parties as another commenter said; or we can back-chain those to fitness as well, and so on. It’s arbitrary. The only “bedrock” is that when you want to climb the mountain, you’re not analyzing those consequences. The mountain calls you, it doesn’t need to be any more complex than that. So why should we say it’s about consequences? We could just say it’s about the action.
And once we allow ourselves to do actions that are just about the action, it seems calling ourselves “consequentialists” is somewhere between wrong or vacuous. Which is the point I was making in the post.
I’m thinking about cases where you want to do something, and it’s a simple action, but the consequences are complex and you don’t explicitly analyze them—you just want to do the thing. In such cases I argue that reducing the action to its (more complex) consequences feels like shoehorning.
For example: maybe you want to climb a mountain because that’s the way your heuristics play out, which came from evolution. So we can “back-chain” the desire to genetic fitness; or we can back-chain to some worldly consequences, like having good stories to tell at parties as another commenter said; or we can back-chain those to fitness as well, and so on. It’s arbitrary. The only “bedrock” is that when you want to climb the mountain, you’re not analyzing those consequences. The mountain calls you, it doesn’t need to be any more complex than that. So why should we say it’s about consequences? We could just say it’s about the action.
And once we allow ourselves to do actions that are just about the action, it seems calling ourselves “consequentialists” is somewhere between wrong or vacuous. Which is the point I was making in the post.