You seem to be answering my question after all, even if you don’t ask it: the answer is that it doesn’t bother you. Consider the situation I mentioned, fleshed out a bit. Suppose someone is deciding whether to clean his room or browse internet. “It would be better to clean the room,” he says, and then browses the net. The normal akratic person in this situation would be upset that he did not manage to clean the room. You would say, “Actually, I wanted to browse the net instead, obviously, since that’s what I did.”
But then suppose it happens again day after day. The akratic person will be upset again and again, in the same way. You will instead say, “Apparently my desire to browse the net is pretty strong.”
At long last the person cleans the room. He says, “I managed to overcome my akrasia.” You say, “The room was messy enough that I actually preferred to clean it.”
The main problem with your attitude is that it seems to depend on denying moral realism: right at the beginning, when you say that you must have preferred browsing the net, the other person may say, “Sure, I preferred browsing the net. But that’s bad, because it would have been objectively better to clean the room.”
Sure, I absolutely reject moral realism, and see no way to judge whether browsing the net or cleaning your room is better than in terms of preference satisfaction. I’ve covered this position extensively elsewhere.
I disagree and have argued the point on LW at other times. But I think the most obvious problem is the fact that you talk about “ontology”, as though moral realism implies the existence of moral atoms, or something like that.
I’m seeing a deep division between our worldviews. Because I take the phenomenological and existentialist stances, ontology and metaphysics are separated rather than combined because there is no true ontology one might hold, and thus although I may not have moral truth in my ontology (model of the world) nothing prevents you from having it as a construct in your understand of your lifeworld, so you’re right that to me it looks like at least positing the existence of moral essence as a useful sense-making structure, although I assume you take more a nuanced view than proposing an equivalent of moral phlogiston.
But maybe we should discuss this issue elsewhere than this thread? I’ll just say that there are moral realist positions that seem sensible, but I believe they only stand by rejecting phenomenology or existentialism, hence why I don’t hold them, and instead end up closer to what’s often called the moral constructivist position where moral “facts” are derived from intersubjective experience yet remain false in the normal meaning of the word.
You seem to be answering my question after all, even if you don’t ask it: the answer is that it doesn’t bother you. Consider the situation I mentioned, fleshed out a bit. Suppose someone is deciding whether to clean his room or browse internet. “It would be better to clean the room,” he says, and then browses the net. The normal akratic person in this situation would be upset that he did not manage to clean the room. You would say, “Actually, I wanted to browse the net instead, obviously, since that’s what I did.”
But then suppose it happens again day after day. The akratic person will be upset again and again, in the same way. You will instead say, “Apparently my desire to browse the net is pretty strong.”
At long last the person cleans the room. He says, “I managed to overcome my akrasia.” You say, “The room was messy enough that I actually preferred to clean it.”
The main problem with your attitude is that it seems to depend on denying moral realism: right at the beginning, when you say that you must have preferred browsing the net, the other person may say, “Sure, I preferred browsing the net. But that’s bad, because it would have been objectively better to clean the room.”
Sure, I absolutely reject moral realism, and see no way to judge whether browsing the net or cleaning your room is better than in terms of preference satisfaction. I’ve covered this position extensively elsewhere.
https://mapandterritory.org/nothing-is-forbidden-but-some-things-are-good-b57f2aa84f1b
Moral realism is simply at odds with the structure of the world as we find it, so I find it unhelpful to include it in my ontology.
I disagree and have argued the point on LW at other times. But I think the most obvious problem is the fact that you talk about “ontology”, as though moral realism implies the existence of moral atoms, or something like that.
I’m seeing a deep division between our worldviews. Because I take the phenomenological and existentialist stances, ontology and metaphysics are separated rather than combined because there is no true ontology one might hold, and thus although I may not have moral truth in my ontology (model of the world) nothing prevents you from having it as a construct in your understand of your lifeworld, so you’re right that to me it looks like at least positing the existence of moral essence as a useful sense-making structure, although I assume you take more a nuanced view than proposing an equivalent of moral phlogiston.
But maybe we should discuss this issue elsewhere than this thread? I’ll just say that there are moral realist positions that seem sensible, but I believe they only stand by rejecting phenomenology or existentialism, hence why I don’t hold them, and instead end up closer to what’s often called the moral constructivist position where moral “facts” are derived from intersubjective experience yet remain false in the normal meaning of the word.
I replied on the open thread.