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??
non-consequentialist wishes can make you go in circles
I feel like you’re responding to an objection that doesn’t make sense in the first place for more basic reasons. Why is “going around in circles” bad? Well, it’s bad by consequentialist lights—if your preferences exclusively involve the state of the world in the distant future, then going around in circles is bad according to your preferences. But that’s begging the question. If your care about other things too, then there isn’t necessarily any problem with “going around in circles”. See my silly “restaurant customer” example here.
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.
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 feel like you’re responding to an objection that doesn’t make sense in the first place for more basic reasons. Why is “going around in circles” bad? Well, it’s bad by consequentialist lights—if your preferences exclusively involve the state of the world in the distant future, then going around in circles is bad according to your preferences. But that’s begging the question. If your care about other things too, then there isn’t necessarily any problem with “going around in circles”. See my silly “restaurant customer” example here.
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.