I think there’s one fundamental problem here IMO, which is that not everything is fungible, and thus not everything manages to actually comfortably exist on the same axis of values. Fingers are not fungible. At the current state of technology, once severed, they’re gone. In some sense, you could say, that’s a limited loss. But for you, as a human being, it may as well be infinite. You just lost something you’ll never ever have back. All the trillions and quadrillion dollars in the world wouldn’t be enough to buy it back if you regretted your choice. And thus, while in some sense its value must be limited (it’s just the fingers of one single human being after all, no? How many of those get lost every day simply because it would have been a bit more expensive to equip the workshop with a circular saw that has a proper safety stop?), in some other sense the value of your fingers to you is infinite, completely beyond money.
Bit of an aside—but I think this is part of what causes such a visceral reaction in some people to the idea of sex reassignment surgery, which then feeds into transphobic rationalizations and ideologies. The concept of genuinely wanting to get rid of a part of your body that you can’t possibly get back feels so fundamentally wrong on some level to many people, it pretty much alone for them seals the deal that you must either be insane or having been manipulated by some kind of evil outside force.
Lots of things have a value that we might call “infinite” according to this argument. Everything from a human life to reading a book spoiler counts as “something you cannot buy back if you regret it later.”
Even if we choose to label some things as “non-fungible”, we must often weigh them against each other nevertheless. I claim, not that the choice never hurts, but that there is no need to feel guilty about it.
Well, yes, it’s true, and obviously those things do not necessarily all have genuine infinite value. I think what this really means in practice is not that all non-fungible things have infinite value, but that because they are non-fungible, most judgements involving them are not as easy or straightforward as simple numerical comparisons. Preferences end up being expressed anyway, but just because practical needs force a square peg in a round hole doesn’t make it fit any better. I think this in practice manifests in high rates of hesitation or regret for decisions involving such things, and the general difficulty of really squaring decisions like these We can agree in one sense that several trillion dollars in charity are a much greater good than someone not having their fingers cut off, and yet we generally wouldn’t call that person “evil” for picking the latter option because we understand perfectly how to someone their own fingers might feel more valuable. If we were talking about fungible goods we’d feel very differently. Replace cutting one’s fingers with e.g. demolishing their house.
I think the whole concept of labeling goods as “fungible” or “non-fungible” is a category error. Everything trades off against something.
Either you value your fingers more than what [some specific amount of money] will buy you or you don’t. If you value your fingers more, then keeping them is the right call for you.
I agree with your first paragraph. I think the second is off-topic in a way that encourages readers, and possibly you yourself, to get mind-killed. Couldn’t you use a less controversial topic as an example? (Very nearly any topic is less controversial.) And did you really need to compound the problem by assigning motivations to other people whom you disagree with? That’s a really good way to start a flame war.
I think it’s a very visible example that right now is particularly often brought up. I’m not saying it’s all there is to it but I think the fundamental visceral reaction to the very idea of self-mutilation is an important and often overlooked element of why some people would be put off by the concept. I actually think it’s something that makes the whole thing a lot more understandable in what it comes from than the generic “well they’re just bigoted and evil” stuff people come up with in extremely partisan arguments on the topics. These sort of psychological processes—the fact that we may first have a gut-level reaction, and only later rationalize it by constructing an ideological framework to justify why the things that repulses us are evil—are very well documented, and happen all over the place. Does not mean everyone who disagrees with me does so because of it (nor that everyone who agrees doesn’t do it!) but it would be foolish to just pretend this never happens because it sounds a bit offensive to bring up in a debate. The entire concept of rationality is based around the awareness that yeah, we’re constantly affected by cognitive biases like these, and separating the wheat from the chaff is hard work.
And by the way it’s an excellent example of the reverse too. Just like people who are not dysphoric are put off by mutilation, people who are are put off by the feeling of having something grafted onto their bodies that doesn’t belong. Which is sort of the flip side of it. Essentially we tend to have a mental image of our bodies and a strong aversion to that shape being altered or disturbed in some way (which makes all kinds of sense evolutionarily, really). Ironically enough, it’s probably via the mechanism of empathy that someone can see someone else do something to their body that feels “wrong” and cringe/be grossed out on their behalf (if you think trans issues are controversial, consider the reactions some people can have even to things like piercings in particularly sensitive places).
I think there’s one fundamental problem here IMO, which is that not everything is fungible, and thus not everything manages to actually comfortably exist on the same axis of values. Fingers are not fungible. At the current state of technology, once severed, they’re gone. In some sense, you could say, that’s a limited loss. But for you, as a human being, it may as well be infinite. You just lost something you’ll never ever have back. All the trillions and quadrillion dollars in the world wouldn’t be enough to buy it back if you regretted your choice. And thus, while in some sense its value must be limited (it’s just the fingers of one single human being after all, no? How many of those get lost every day simply because it would have been a bit more expensive to equip the workshop with a circular saw that has a proper safety stop?), in some other sense the value of your fingers to you is infinite, completely beyond money.
Bit of an aside—but I think this is part of what causes such a visceral reaction in some people to the idea of sex reassignment surgery, which then feeds into transphobic rationalizations and ideologies. The concept of genuinely wanting to get rid of a part of your body that you can’t possibly get back feels so fundamentally wrong on some level to many people, it pretty much alone for them seals the deal that you must either be insane or having been manipulated by some kind of evil outside force.
Lots of things have a value that we might call “infinite” according to this argument. Everything from a human life to reading a book spoiler counts as “something you cannot buy back if you regret it later.”
Even if we choose to label some things as “non-fungible”, we must often weigh them against each other nevertheless. I claim, not that the choice never hurts, but that there is no need to feel guilty about it.
Well, yes, it’s true, and obviously those things do not necessarily all have genuine infinite value. I think what this really means in practice is not that all non-fungible things have infinite value, but that because they are non-fungible, most judgements involving them are not as easy or straightforward as simple numerical comparisons. Preferences end up being expressed anyway, but just because practical needs force a square peg in a round hole doesn’t make it fit any better. I think this in practice manifests in high rates of hesitation or regret for decisions involving such things, and the general difficulty of really squaring decisions like these We can agree in one sense that several trillion dollars in charity are a much greater good than someone not having their fingers cut off, and yet we generally wouldn’t call that person “evil” for picking the latter option because we understand perfectly how to someone their own fingers might feel more valuable. If we were talking about fungible goods we’d feel very differently. Replace cutting one’s fingers with e.g. demolishing their house.
I think the whole concept of labeling goods as “fungible” or “non-fungible” is a category error. Everything trades off against something.
Either you value your fingers more than what [some specific amount of money] will buy you or you don’t. If you value your fingers more, then keeping them is the right call for you.
I agree with your first paragraph. I think the second is off-topic in a way that encourages readers, and possibly you yourself, to get mind-killed. Couldn’t you use a less controversial topic as an example? (Very nearly any topic is less controversial.) And did you really need to compound the problem by assigning motivations to other people whom you disagree with? That’s a really good way to start a flame war.
I think it’s a very visible example that right now is particularly often brought up. I’m not saying it’s all there is to it but I think the fundamental visceral reaction to the very idea of self-mutilation is an important and often overlooked element of why some people would be put off by the concept. I actually think it’s something that makes the whole thing a lot more understandable in what it comes from than the generic “well they’re just bigoted and evil” stuff people come up with in extremely partisan arguments on the topics. These sort of psychological processes—the fact that we may first have a gut-level reaction, and only later rationalize it by constructing an ideological framework to justify why the things that repulses us are evil—are very well documented, and happen all over the place. Does not mean everyone who disagrees with me does so because of it (nor that everyone who agrees doesn’t do it!) but it would be foolish to just pretend this never happens because it sounds a bit offensive to bring up in a debate. The entire concept of rationality is based around the awareness that yeah, we’re constantly affected by cognitive biases like these, and separating the wheat from the chaff is hard work.
And by the way it’s an excellent example of the reverse too. Just like people who are not dysphoric are put off by mutilation, people who are are put off by the feeling of having something grafted onto their bodies that doesn’t belong. Which is sort of the flip side of it. Essentially we tend to have a mental image of our bodies and a strong aversion to that shape being altered or disturbed in some way (which makes all kinds of sense evolutionarily, really). Ironically enough, it’s probably via the mechanism of empathy that someone can see someone else do something to their body that feels “wrong” and cringe/be grossed out on their behalf (if you think trans issues are controversial, consider the reactions some people can have even to things like piercings in particularly sensitive places).