This was a useful article, and it’s nice to know the proper word for it. Let me see if I can add to it slightly.
Maybe a prisoner is on death row, and if they run away they are unlikely to suffer the consequences, since they’ll be dead anyway. However, even knowing this, they may still decide to spend their last day on earth nursing bruises, because they value the defiance itself far more than any pain that could be inflicted on them. Perhaps they’d even rather die fighting.
It looks like you don’t reflectively endorse actions taken for explicitly semiotic reasons, and lean toward more pure consequentialism. Based only on what you’ve said, semiotic actions aren’t fallacious when they yield outside benefits in the long run, but are fallacious when they don’t lead to other good things. (Because you treat semiotic acts as only instrumentally valuable, rather than as terminal values.)
However, it seems likely that some semiotic acts can be good in and of themselves. That is, we reflectively endorse them, rather than just doing them because evolution gave us an impulse to signal which we have a hard time fighting. Semiotic impulse is certainly a human universal, and therefore a part of our current utility function, and it seems plausible that it will survive intact in some form even after more careful examination of our values.
It seems like that sorts of the things we do for explicitly symbolic reasons are more likely to fall into this category than normal subconscious signaling. If we didn’t endorse it to some degree, we’d just make sure not to be conscious of doing it, and then keep doing it anyway. To be aware that we’re doing it, it can’t conflict too much with our positive self-image, or societal values, or anything like that.
Of course, just because we naively support a semiotic act explicitly doesn’t mean we still will after closer examination. Maybe we think engagement rings are a touching form of costly signaling at first, but once we understand more about the signaling dynamics at play making us do such things, we decide that conspicuous displays of consumption make society far worse off. You may then decide not to feed Moloch, and try to lessen the keeping up with the Joneses effect.
Personally, I’m rather a fan of the Apollo program, and the idea that long after humanity has killed itself off, the Voyager probe may still survive drifting among the stars, with our last surviving words inscribed in gold.
This was a useful article, and it’s nice to know the proper word for it. Let me see if I can add to it slightly.
Maybe a prisoner is on death row, and if they run away they are unlikely to suffer the consequences, since they’ll be dead anyway. However, even knowing this, they may still decide to spend their last day on earth nursing bruises, because they value the defiance itself far more than any pain that could be inflicted on them. Perhaps they’d even rather die fighting.
It looks like you don’t reflectively endorse actions taken for explicitly semiotic reasons, and lean toward more pure consequentialism. Based only on what you’ve said, semiotic actions aren’t fallacious when they yield outside benefits in the long run, but are fallacious when they don’t lead to other good things. (Because you treat semiotic acts as only instrumentally valuable, rather than as terminal values.)
However, it seems likely that some semiotic acts can be good in and of themselves. That is, we reflectively endorse them, rather than just doing them because evolution gave us an impulse to signal which we have a hard time fighting. Semiotic impulse is certainly a human universal, and therefore a part of our current utility function, and it seems plausible that it will survive intact in some form even after more careful examination of our values.
It seems like that sorts of the things we do for explicitly symbolic reasons are more likely to fall into this category than normal subconscious signaling. If we didn’t endorse it to some degree, we’d just make sure not to be conscious of doing it, and then keep doing it anyway. To be aware that we’re doing it, it can’t conflict too much with our positive self-image, or societal values, or anything like that.
Of course, just because we naively support a semiotic act explicitly doesn’t mean we still will after closer examination. Maybe we think engagement rings are a touching form of costly signaling at first, but once we understand more about the signaling dynamics at play making us do such things, we decide that conspicuous displays of consumption make society far worse off. You may then decide not to feed Moloch, and try to lessen the keeping up with the Joneses effect.
Personally, I’m rather a fan of the Apollo program, and the idea that long after humanity has killed itself off, the Voyager probe may still survive drifting among the stars, with our last surviving words inscribed in gold.