This may be a complaint about legibilism, not specifically consequentialism. Godel was pretty clear—a formal system is either incomplete or inconsistent. Any moral or decision system that demands that everything important about a decision is clear and well-understood is going to have similar problems. Your TRUE reasons for a lot of things are not accessible, so you will look for legible reasons to do what you want, and you will find yourself a rationalizing agent, rather than a rational one.
That said, consequentialism is still a useful framework for evaluating how closely your analytic self matches with your acting self. It’s not going to be perfect, but you can choose to get closer, and you can get better at understanding which consequences actually matter to you.
Climbing a mountain has a lot of consequences that you didn’t mention, but probably should consider. It connects you to people in new ways. It gives you interesting stories to tell at parties. It’s a framework for improving your body in various ways. If you die, it lets you serve as a warning to others. It changes your self-image (honestly, this one may be the most important impact).
Maybe. Or maybe the wish itself is about climbing the mountain, just like it says, and the other benefits (which you can unwind all the way back to evolutionary ones) are more like part of the history of the wish.
Quite possibly, but without SOME framework of evaluating wishes, it’s hard to know which wishes (even of oneself) to support and which to fight/deprioritize.
Humans (or at least this one) often have desires or ideas that aren’t, when considered, actually good ideas. Also, humans (again, at least this one) have conflicting desires, only a subset of which CAN be pursued.
It’s not perfect, and it doesn’t work when extended too far into the tails (because nothing does), but consequentialism is one of the better options for judging one’s desires and picking which to pursue.
This is tricky. In the post I mentioned “playing”, where you do stuff without caring about any goal, and most play doesn’t lead to anything interesting. But it’s amazing how many of humanity’s advances were made in this non-goal-directed, playing mode. This is mentioned for example in Feynman’s book, the bit about the wobbling plate.
This may be a complaint about legibilism, not specifically consequentialism. Godel was pretty clear—a formal system is either incomplete or inconsistent. Any moral or decision system that demands that everything important about a decision is clear and well-understood is going to have similar problems. Your TRUE reasons for a lot of things are not accessible, so you will look for legible reasons to do what you want, and you will find yourself a rationalizing agent, rather than a rational one.
That said, consequentialism is still a useful framework for evaluating how closely your analytic self matches with your acting self. It’s not going to be perfect, but you can choose to get closer, and you can get better at understanding which consequences actually matter to you.
Climbing a mountain has a lot of consequences that you didn’t mention, but probably should consider. It connects you to people in new ways. It gives you interesting stories to tell at parties. It’s a framework for improving your body in various ways. If you die, it lets you serve as a warning to others. It changes your self-image (honestly, this one may be the most important impact).
Maybe. Or maybe the wish itself is about climbing the mountain, just like it says, and the other benefits (which you can unwind all the way back to evolutionary ones) are more like part of the history of the wish.
Quite possibly, but without SOME framework of evaluating wishes, it’s hard to know which wishes (even of oneself) to support and which to fight/deprioritize.
Humans (or at least this one) often have desires or ideas that aren’t, when considered, actually good ideas. Also, humans (again, at least this one) have conflicting desires, only a subset of which CAN be pursued.
It’s not perfect, and it doesn’t work when extended too far into the tails (because nothing does), but consequentialism is one of the better options for judging one’s desires and picking which to pursue.
This is tricky. In the post I mentioned “playing”, where you do stuff without caring about any goal, and most play doesn’t lead to anything interesting. But it’s amazing how many of humanity’s advances were made in this non-goal-directed, playing mode. This is mentioned for example in Feynman’s book, the bit about the wobbling plate.