People have drives to value different things, but a drive to value is not the same thing as a value. For example, people have an in-group bias (tribalism), but that doesn’t mean that it’s an actual value.
If values are not drives (Note I am saying values are drives, not “driives are values”, “drives to value are values”, or anything else besides “values are drives”), what functional role do they play in the brain? What selection pressure built them into us? Or are they spandrels? If this role is not “things that motivate us to choose one action over another,” why are they motivating you to choose one action over another? If that is their role, you are using a weird definition of “drive”, so define “Fhqwhgads” as “things that motivate us to choose one action over another”, and substitute that in place of “value” in my last argument.
If values are drives, but not all drives are values, then…
(a) if a value is a drive you reflectively endorse and a drive you reflectively endorse is a value, then why would we evolve to reflectively endorse only one of our evolved values?
(b) otherwise, why would either you or I care about what our “values” are?
I agree that values are drives, but not all drives are values. I dispute that we would reflectively endorse more than one of our evolved drives as values. Most people aren’t in a reflective equilibrium, so they appear to have multiple terminal values—but that is only because they aren’t’ in a reflective equilibrium.
What manner of reflection process is it that eliminates terminal values until you only have one left? Not the one that I use (At least, not anymore, since I have reflected on my reflection process). A linear combination (or even a nonlinear combination) of terminal values can fit in exactly the same spot that a single value could in a utility function. You could even give that combination a name, like “goodness”, and call it a single value (though it would be a complex one). So there is nothing inconsistent about having several separate values.
Let me hazard a guess, based on my own previous reflection process, now abandoned due to meta-reflection. First, I would find a pair of thought experiments where I had strong feelings for an object-level choice in each, and I felt I was being inconsistent between them. Of course, object-level choices in two different scenarios can’t be inconsistent. There is a computation that returns both of those answers, namely, whatever was going on in your pre-reflection brain.
For example, “throw the level, redirect the trolley to kill 1 instead of 5” and “don’t butcher the healthy patient and steal their organs to save five.”
The inconsistence is in the two principles I would have automatically come up with to explain two different object-level choices. Or, if my reasons for one emotional reaction are too complicated for me to realize, then it’s between one principle and the emotional reaction. Of course, the force behind the principle comes from the emotional reaction to the thought experiment which motivated it.
Then, I would let the two emotions clash against each other, letting my mind flip between the two scenarios back and forth until one started to weaken. The winner would become stronger, because it survived a clash. And so did the principle my mind coughed up to explain it.
What are the problems with this?
It favors simple principles for the sole reason that they are easier to guess by my conscious mind, which of course doesn’t really have access to the underlying reasons. It just thinks it does. This means it depends on my ignorance of other more complicated principles. This part can be destroyed by the truth.
The strength of the emotion for the object-level choice is often lent to the principle by something besides what you think it is. Yvain covered this in an essay that you, being a hedonistic utilitarian would probably like: Wirehead Gods on Lotus Thrones. His example is that being inactive and incredibly happy without interuption forever sounds good to him if he thinks of Buddhists sitting on lotuses and being happy, but bad if he thinks of junkies sticking needles in their arms and being happy. With this kind of reflection, you consciously think something like: “Of course, sitting on the lotus isn’t inherently valuable, and needles in arms aren’t inherently disvaluable either,” but unconsciously, your emotional reaction to that is what’s determining which explicit principles like “wireheading is good” or “wireheading is bad” you consciously endorse.
All of your standard biases are at play in generating the emotional reactions in the first place. Scope insensitivity, status quo bias, commitment bias, etc.
This reflection process can go down different paths depending on the order that thought experiments are encountered. If you get the “throw switch, redirect trolley” one first, and then are told you are a consequentialist, and that there are other people who don’t throw the switch because then they are personally killing someone, and you think about their thought process and reject it as a bad principle, and then you see the “push the fat man off the bridge” one, and you think “wow, this really feels like I shouldn’t push him off the bridge, but [I have this principle established where I act to save the most lives, not to keep my hands clean]”, and slowly your instinct (like mine did) starts to become “push the fat man off the bridge.” And then you hear the transplant version, and you become a little more consequentialist. And so on. It would be completely different if most people heard the transplant one first (or an even more deontology-skewed thought experiment). I am glad of course, that I have gone down this path as far as I have. Being a consequentialist has good consequences, and I like that! But my past self might not have agreed, and likewise I probably won’t agree with most possible changes to my values. Each version of me judges differences between the versions under its own standards.
There’s the so called sacred vs. secular value divide (I actually think it’s more of a hierarchy, with several layers of increasing sacredness, each of which feels like it should lexically override the last), where pitting a secular value vs a sacred value makes the secular value weaker and the sacred one stronger. But which values are secular or sacred is largely a function of what your peers value.
And whether a value becomes stronger or weaker through this process depends largely on which pairs of thought experiments you happen to think of. Is a particular value, say “artistic expression”, being compared to the value of life, and therefore growing weaker, or is it being compared to the value of not being offended, and therefore growing stronger?
So that you don’t ignore my question like you did the one in the last post, I’ll reiterate it. (And I’ll add some other questions).
What process of reflection are you using that you think leads people toward a single value?
Does it avoid the problems with my old one that I described?
Is this a process of reflection most people would meta-reflectively endorse over alternative ones that don’t shrink them down to one value? (If you are saying that people who have several values are out of reflective equilibrium, then you’d better argue for this point.)
I endorse the the process you rejected. I don’t think the problems you describe are inevitable. Given that, if people’s values cause them conflict in object-level choices, they should decide what matters more, until they’re at a reflective equilibrium and have only one value.
But how do you avoid those problems? Also, why should contemplating tradeoffs between how much we can get values force us to pick one? I bet you can imagine tradeoffs between bald people being happy, and people with hair being happy, but that doesn’t mean you should change your value from “happiness” to one of the two. Which way you choose in each situation depends on how many bald people there are, and how many non-bald people there are. Similarly, with the right linear combination, these are just tradeoffs, and there is no reason to stop caring about one term because you care about the other more. And you didn’t answer my last question. Why would most people meta-reflectively endorse this method of reflection?
1, as you said, can be destroyed by the truth (if they’re actually wrong), so it’s part of a learning process. 2 isn’t a problem once you isolate the principle by itself, outside of various emotional factors. 3 is a counterargument against any kind of decisionmaking, it means that we should be careful, not that we shouldn’t engage in this sort of reflection. 4 is the most significant of these problems, but again it’s just something to be careful about, same is in 3. As for 5, that’s to be solved by realizing that there are no sacred values.
why should contemplating tradeoffs between how much we can get values force us to pick one?
It doesn’t, you’re right. At least, contemplating tradeoffs doesn’t by itself guarantee that people would choose only one value, But it can force people to endorse conclusions that would seem absurd to them—preserving one apparent value at the expense of another. Once confronted, these tensions lead to the reduction to one value.
As for why people would meta-reflectively endorse this method of reflection—simply, because it makes sense.
People have drives to value different things, but a drive to value is not the same thing as a value. For example, people have an in-group bias (tribalism), but that doesn’t mean that it’s an actual value.
If values are not drives (Note I am saying values are drives, not “driives are values”, “drives to value are values”, or anything else besides “values are drives”), what functional role do they play in the brain? What selection pressure built them into us? Or are they spandrels? If this role is not “things that motivate us to choose one action over another,” why are they motivating you to choose one action over another? If that is their role, you are using a weird definition of “drive”, so define “Fhqwhgads” as “things that motivate us to choose one action over another”, and substitute that in place of “value” in my last argument.
If values are drives, but not all drives are values, then… (a) if a value is a drive you reflectively endorse and a drive you reflectively endorse is a value, then why would we evolve to reflectively endorse only one of our evolved values? (b) otherwise, why would either you or I care about what our “values” are?
I agree that values are drives, but not all drives are values. I dispute that we would reflectively endorse more than one of our evolved drives as values. Most people aren’t in a reflective equilibrium, so they appear to have multiple terminal values—but that is only because they aren’t’ in a reflective equilibrium.
What manner of reflection process is it that eliminates terminal values until you only have one left? Not the one that I use (At least, not anymore, since I have reflected on my reflection process). A linear combination (or even a nonlinear combination) of terminal values can fit in exactly the same spot that a single value could in a utility function. You could even give that combination a name, like “goodness”, and call it a single value (though it would be a complex one). So there is nothing inconsistent about having several separate values.
Let me hazard a guess, based on my own previous reflection process, now abandoned due to meta-reflection. First, I would find a pair of thought experiments where I had strong feelings for an object-level choice in each, and I felt I was being inconsistent between them. Of course, object-level choices in two different scenarios can’t be inconsistent. There is a computation that returns both of those answers, namely, whatever was going on in your pre-reflection brain.
For example, “throw the level, redirect the trolley to kill 1 instead of 5” and “don’t butcher the healthy patient and steal their organs to save five.”
The inconsistence is in the two principles I would have automatically come up with to explain two different object-level choices. Or, if my reasons for one emotional reaction are too complicated for me to realize, then it’s between one principle and the emotional reaction. Of course, the force behind the principle comes from the emotional reaction to the thought experiment which motivated it.
Then, I would let the two emotions clash against each other, letting my mind flip between the two scenarios back and forth until one started to weaken. The winner would become stronger, because it survived a clash. And so did the principle my mind coughed up to explain it.
What are the problems with this?
It favors simple principles for the sole reason that they are easier to guess by my conscious mind, which of course doesn’t really have access to the underlying reasons. It just thinks it does. This means it depends on my ignorance of other more complicated principles. This part can be destroyed by the truth.
The strength of the emotion for the object-level choice is often lent to the principle by something besides what you think it is. Yvain covered this in an essay that you, being a hedonistic utilitarian would probably like: Wirehead Gods on Lotus Thrones. His example is that being inactive and incredibly happy without interuption forever sounds good to him if he thinks of Buddhists sitting on lotuses and being happy, but bad if he thinks of junkies sticking needles in their arms and being happy. With this kind of reflection, you consciously think something like: “Of course, sitting on the lotus isn’t inherently valuable, and needles in arms aren’t inherently disvaluable either,” but unconsciously, your emotional reaction to that is what’s determining which explicit principles like “wireheading is good” or “wireheading is bad” you consciously endorse.
All of your standard biases are at play in generating the emotional reactions in the first place. Scope insensitivity, status quo bias, commitment bias, etc.
This reflection process can go down different paths depending on the order that thought experiments are encountered. If you get the “throw switch, redirect trolley” one first, and then are told you are a consequentialist, and that there are other people who don’t throw the switch because then they are personally killing someone, and you think about their thought process and reject it as a bad principle, and then you see the “push the fat man off the bridge” one, and you think “wow, this really feels like I shouldn’t push him off the bridge, but [I have this principle established where I act to save the most lives, not to keep my hands clean]”, and slowly your instinct (like mine did) starts to become “push the fat man off the bridge.” And then you hear the transplant version, and you become a little more consequentialist. And so on. It would be completely different if most people heard the transplant one first (or an even more deontology-skewed thought experiment). I am glad of course, that I have gone down this path as far as I have. Being a consequentialist has good consequences, and I like that! But my past self might not have agreed, and likewise I probably won’t agree with most possible changes to my values. Each version of me judges differences between the versions under its own standards.
There’s the so called sacred vs. secular value divide (I actually think it’s more of a hierarchy, with several layers of increasing sacredness, each of which feels like it should lexically override the last), where pitting a secular value vs a sacred value makes the secular value weaker and the sacred one stronger. But which values are secular or sacred is largely a function of what your peers value.
And whether a value becomes stronger or weaker through this process depends largely on which pairs of thought experiments you happen to think of. Is a particular value, say “artistic expression”, being compared to the value of life, and therefore growing weaker, or is it being compared to the value of not being offended, and therefore growing stronger?
So that you don’t ignore my question like you did the one in the last post, I’ll reiterate it. (And I’ll add some other questions). What process of reflection are you using that you think leads people toward a single value? Does it avoid the problems with my old one that I described? Is this a process of reflection most people would meta-reflectively endorse over alternative ones that don’t shrink them down to one value? (If you are saying that people who have several values are out of reflective equilibrium, then you’d better argue for this point.)
Edited: formatting.
I endorse the the process you rejected. I don’t think the problems you describe are inevitable. Given that, if people’s values cause them conflict in object-level choices, they should decide what matters more, until they’re at a reflective equilibrium and have only one value.
But how do you avoid those problems? Also, why should contemplating tradeoffs between how much we can get values force us to pick one? I bet you can imagine tradeoffs between bald people being happy, and people with hair being happy, but that doesn’t mean you should change your value from “happiness” to one of the two. Which way you choose in each situation depends on how many bald people there are, and how many non-bald people there are. Similarly, with the right linear combination, these are just tradeoffs, and there is no reason to stop caring about one term because you care about the other more. And you didn’t answer my last question. Why would most people meta-reflectively endorse this method of reflection?
1, as you said, can be destroyed by the truth (if they’re actually wrong), so it’s part of a learning process. 2 isn’t a problem once you isolate the principle by itself, outside of various emotional factors. 3 is a counterargument against any kind of decisionmaking, it means that we should be careful, not that we shouldn’t engage in this sort of reflection. 4 is the most significant of these problems, but again it’s just something to be careful about, same is in 3. As for 5, that’s to be solved by realizing that there are no sacred values.
It doesn’t, you’re right. At least, contemplating tradeoffs doesn’t by itself guarantee that people would choose only one value, But it can force people to endorse conclusions that would seem absurd to them—preserving one apparent value at the expense of another. Once confronted, these tensions lead to the reduction to one value.
As for why people would meta-reflectively endorse this method of reflection—simply, because it makes sense.