“Your true self”, or “your true motivations”. There’s a tendency sometimes to call people’s subconscious beliefs and goals their “true” beliefs and goals, e.g. “He works every day in order to be rich and famous, but deep down inside, he’s actually afraid of success.” Sometimes this works the other way and people’s conscious beliefs and goals are called their “true” beliefs and goals in contrast to their unconscious ones. I think this is never really a useful idea, and the conscious self should just be called the conscious self, the subconscious self should just be called the subconscious self, and neither one of them needs to be privileged over the other as the “real” self. Both work together to dictate behavior.
“Rights”. This is probably obvious to most consequentialists, but framing political discussions in terms of rights, as in “do we have the right to have an ugly house, or do our neighbors not have the right not to look at an ugly house if they don’t want to?” is usually pretty useless. Similarly, “freedom” is not really a good terminal value, because pretty much anything can be defined as freedom, e.g. “by making smoking in restaurants illegal, the American people have the freedom not to smell smoke in a restaurant if they don’t want to.”
Sometimes this works the other way and people’s conscious beliefs and goals are called their “true” beliefs and goals in contrast to their unconscious ones.
Most examples I recall, of pointing out which—conscious vs unconscious—is the “true” motivation, were attempts to attack someone’s behavior. An accuser picks one motivation that is disagreeable or unpleasant, and uses it to cast aspersion on a positive behavior.
I don’t think that one self is being privileged over the other solely because of confusion as to which motivations really dictate behavior. It largely depends on which is more convenient for the accuser who designates the “true” self.
Also, you may want to put your two bad concepts into different comments. That way they can be upvoted or downvoted separately.
“Your true self”, or “your true motivations”. There’s a tendency sometimes to call people’s subconscious beliefs and goals their “true” beliefs and goals, e.g. “He works every day in order to be rich and famous, but deep down inside, he’s actually afraid of success.” Sometimes this works the other way and people’s conscious beliefs and goals are called their “true” beliefs and goals in contrast to their unconscious ones. I think this is never really a useful idea, and the conscious self should just be called the conscious self, the subconscious self should just be called the subconscious self, and neither one of them needs to be privileged over the other as the “real” self. Both work together to dictate behavior.
“Rights”. This is probably obvious to most consequentialists, but framing political discussions in terms of rights, as in “do we have the right to have an ugly house, or do our neighbors not have the right not to look at an ugly house if they don’t want to?” is usually pretty useless. Similarly, “freedom” is not really a good terminal value, because pretty much anything can be defined as freedom, e.g. “by making smoking in restaurants illegal, the American people have the freedom not to smell smoke in a restaurant if they don’t want to.”
Most examples I recall, of pointing out which—conscious vs unconscious—is the “true” motivation, were attempts to attack someone’s behavior. An accuser picks one motivation that is disagreeable or unpleasant, and uses it to cast aspersion on a positive behavior.
I don’t think that one self is being privileged over the other solely because of confusion as to which motivations really dictate behavior. It largely depends on which is more convenient for the accuser who designates the “true” self.
Also, you may want to put your two bad concepts into different comments. That way they can be upvoted or downvoted separately.