It sounds like you’re assuming that all Morality-speak is a ploy to get others to follow our will, and a way of taking stock of others’ comparable attempts to influence us. I’d like to suggest that there are other ways to construe Morality-speak like ‘hero’ and ‘virtue:’
One could simply treat one’s values and Morality-speak as interchangeable. Why use one language for the second- and third-person, and a totally different language for the first-person? It’s confusing, makes generalizations of your desires difficult, and greatly weakens your rhetorical power (since you seem to be subscribing to a double standard, if only terminologically). If your values are such that you don’t actually give a privileged status to your own welfare as opposed to others, then this linguistic shift conceals an important symmetry.
Morality-speak might be an idealization of one’s optimized values, one’s values once they’ve been brought into optimal reflective equilibrium. What you currently care about might not be what you think you ought care about, even if you ultimately define ‘oughtness’ in terms of the aforementioned preferences. Otherwise it would be incoherent to lament how much one presently likes something, to wish for a reform to one’s secondary concerns that would bring them into greater internal harmony.
Actually, he seems a little worse than this, in that any failure makes him a bad boy, which is an impossible standard.
Two issues: First, he’s probably exaggerating at least a little. Second, it’s clear that he’s adopting the standard in question for utilitarian reasons; he happens to be especially motivated by falling short of some lofty ideal. For most people an at least somewhat less exacting standard would probably be desirable; but since standards are just heuristics for winning, the question of how demanding to be is one for empirical psychology.
It sounds like you’re assuming that all Morality-speak is a ploy to get others to follow our will, and a way of taking stock of others’ comparable attempts to influence us. I’d like to suggest that there are other ways to construe Morality-speak like ‘hero’ and ‘virtue:’
One could simply treat one’s values and Morality-speak as interchangeable. Why use one language for the second- and third-person, and a totally different language for the first-person? It’s confusing, makes generalizations of your desires difficult, and greatly weakens your rhetorical power (since you seem to be subscribing to a double standard, if only terminologically). If your values are such that you don’t actually give a privileged status to your own welfare as opposed to others, then this linguistic shift conceals an important symmetry.
Morality-speak might be an idealization of one’s optimized values, one’s values once they’ve been brought into optimal reflective equilibrium. What you currently care about might not be what you think you ought care about, even if you ultimately define ‘oughtness’ in terms of the aforementioned preferences. Otherwise it would be incoherent to lament how much one presently likes something, to wish for a reform to one’s secondary concerns that would bring them into greater internal harmony.
Two issues: First, he’s probably exaggerating at least a little. Second, it’s clear that he’s adopting the standard in question for utilitarian reasons; he happens to be especially motivated by falling short of some lofty ideal. For most people an at least somewhat less exacting standard would probably be desirable; but since standards are just heuristics for winning, the question of how demanding to be is one for empirical psychology.