I don’t see any limit to or problem with consequentialism here, only an overly narrow conception of consequences.
In the mountain example, well, it depends on what you, in fact, want. Some people (like my 12yo past self) actually do want to reach the top of the mountain. Other people, like my current self, want things like take a break from work, get light physical exercise, socialize, look at nature for a while because I think it’s psychologically healthy, or get a sense of accomplishment after having gotten up early and hiked all the way up. All of those are consequences, and I don’t see what you’d want that isn’t a consequence.
Whether consequentialism is impractical to think about everyday things is question I’d want to keep striclty separate from the philosophical component… but I don’t see the impracticality in this example, either. When I debated going hiking this summer, I made a consequentialist cost-benefit analysis, however imperfectly.
Some people (like my 12yo past self) actually do want to reach the top of the mountain. Other people, like my current self, want things like take a break from work, get light physical exercise, socialize, look at nature for a while because I think it’s psychologically healthy, or get a sense of accomplishment after having gotten up early and hiked all the way up.
There’s plenty of consequentialism debate in other threads, but here I’d just like to say that this snippet is a kind of unintentionally sad commentary on growing up. It’s probably not even sad to you; but to me it evokes a feeling of “how do we escape from this change, even temporarily”.
Reading this reply evoked memories for me of thinking along similar lines. Like that it used to be nice and simple with goals being tied to easily understood achievements (reach the top, it doesn’t matter how I get there!) and now they’re tied to more elusive things--
-- but they are just memories because at some point I made a conceptual shift that got me over it. The process-oriented things don’t feel like they’re in a qualitatively different category anymore; yeah they’re harder to measure, but they’re just as real as the straight-forward achievements. Nowadays I only worry about how hard they are to achieve.
I don’t see any limit to or problem with consequentialism here, only an overly narrow conception of consequences.
In the mountain example, well, it depends on what you, in fact, want. Some people (like my 12yo past self) actually do want to reach the top of the mountain. Other people, like my current self, want things like take a break from work, get light physical exercise, socialize, look at nature for a while because I think it’s psychologically healthy, or get a sense of accomplishment after having gotten up early and hiked all the way up. All of those are consequences, and I don’t see what you’d want that isn’t a consequence.
Whether consequentialism is impractical to think about everyday things is question I’d want to keep striclty separate from the philosophical component… but I don’t see the impracticality in this example, either. When I debated going hiking this summer, I made a consequentialist cost-benefit analysis, however imperfectly.
There’s plenty of consequentialism debate in other threads, but here I’d just like to say that this snippet is a kind of unintentionally sad commentary on growing up. It’s probably not even sad to you; but to me it evokes a feeling of “how do we escape from this change, even temporarily”.
Reading this reply evoked memories for me of thinking along similar lines. Like that it used to be nice and simple with goals being tied to easily understood achievements (reach the top, it doesn’t matter how I get there!) and now they’re tied to more elusive things--
-- but they are just memories because at some point I made a conceptual shift that got me over it. The process-oriented things don’t feel like they’re in a qualitatively different category anymore; yeah they’re harder to measure, but they’re just as real as the straight-forward achievements. Nowadays I only worry about how hard they are to achieve.