What do you think your second order “want to want to help” desire is based on or came from? For example one possibility is that someone previously appealed to your occasional (first order) desire to help strangers and suggested you generalize it, which caused you to have a cached thought that that’s what you “should” do. I mean this seems to be exactly what Peter Singer’s Drowning Child argument tries to do, and a lot of people cite it as their introduction/conversion to EA. (And you also say that you personally did it to others.)
Or suppose you only have your second order desire because it’s useful for gaining/maintaining your social status. I imagine it might be hard to work with or socialize with other EAs, if you told them that you didn’t even “want to want to help” :)
For me personally, I feel like I already “help” a decent amount (motivated by my first order desires), given my moral credences/uncertainties. My second order desires include both doing more and less, depending on whether I feel like I’ve done too much or too little “altruism” recently or overall, although they don’t kick in much and I mostly just go with doing whatever I want (e.g., find interesting) at the moment.
What do you think your second order “want to want to help” desire is based on or came from? For example one possibility is that someone previously appealed to your occasional (first order) desire to help strangers and suggested you generalize it, which caused you to have a cached thought that that’s what you “should” do. I mean this seems to be exactly what Peter Singer’s Drowning Child argument tries to do, and a lot of people cite it as their introduction/conversion to EA. (And you also say that you personally did it to others.)
Or suppose you only have your second order desire because it’s useful for gaining/maintaining your social status. I imagine it might be hard to work with or socialize with other EAs, if you told them that you didn’t even “want to want to help” :)
For me personally, I feel like I already “help” a decent amount (motivated by my first order desires), given my moral credences/uncertainties. My second order desires include both doing more and less, depending on whether I feel like I’ve done too much or too little “altruism” recently or overall, although they don’t kick in much and I mostly just go with doing whatever I want (e.g., find interesting) at the moment.