I realize I was making the assumption that the entity choosing which values to have would value ‘maximally’ satisfying those values in some sense, so that if it could freely choose it would choose values that were easy or best to satisfy. But this isn’t necessarily so. It’s humans that have lots of values about their values, and we would have a tough time, I think, choosing our values if we could choose. Perhaps there is dynamic tension between our values (we want our values to have value, and we are constantly asking ourselves what our goals should be and if we really value our current goals) so if our values were unpinned from their connection to an external, immutable framework they might spin to something very different.
So I end up agreeing with you, without values about values (meta-values?), if someone only cared about their object-level values, they would have no reason to modify their values and their utility function might be very stable. I think the instability would come from the reasons for modifying the values. (Obviously, I haven″t read Suzanne Gilbert’s article. I probably should do so before making any other comments on this topic.)
I realize I was making the assumption that the entity choosing which values to have would value ‘maximally’ satisfying those values in some sense, so that if it could freely choose it would choose values that were easy or best to satisfy. But this isn’t necessarily so. It’s humans that have lots of values about their values, and we would have a tough time, I think, choosing our values if we could choose. Perhaps there is dynamic tension between our values (we want our values to have value, and we are constantly asking ourselves what our goals should be and if we really value our current goals) so if our values were unpinned from their connection to an external, immutable framework they might spin to something very different.
So I end up agreeing with you, without values about values (meta-values?), if someone only cared about their object-level values, they would have no reason to modify their values and their utility function might be very stable. I think the instability would come from the reasons for modifying the values. (Obviously, I haven″t read Suzanne Gilbert’s article. I probably should do so before making any other comments on this topic.)