Another possibility is that our intuitive sense of justice is a set of heuristics: moral machinery that’s very useful but far from infallible. We have a taste for punishment. This taste, like all tastes, is subtle and complicated, shaped by a complex mix of genetic, cultural, and idiosyncratic factors. But our taste for punishment is still a taste, implemented by automatic settings and thus limited by its inflexibility. All tastes can be fooled. We fool our taste buds with artificial sweeteners. We fool our sexual appetites with birth control and pornography, both of which supply sexual gratification while doing nothing to spread our genes. Sometimes, however, our tastes make fools of us. Our tastes for fat and sugar make us obese in a world of abundance. Drugs of abuse hijack our reward circuits and destroy people’s lives. To know whether we’re fooling our tastes or whether our tastes are fooling us, we have to step outside the limited perspective of our tastes: To what extent is this thing—diet soda, porn, Nutella, heroin—really serving our bests interests? We should ask the same question about our taste for punishment.
Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them, New York, 2013, p. 272
Hmmm… does he say something that goes beyond his condescending style? If he wants to criticize naive pleasure-hedonism, fine, but to talk of “best interests” without bothering to specify what he means by that phrase strikes me as an attempt to grab my utility function. At best it seems like a way to signal “Look how rational I am!” without having to admit to the banal motivation of wanting to sell books.
He’s saying that our desire for punishment is potentially a lost purpose. How is that an attempt to grab the utility function?
When, then, is it a lost purpose? Deterrence is a consequentialist mode of punishment.
Also, I’d be interested to hear why you read this as condescending; I don’t see where you’re coming from with that.
“I know what’s good for you better than you do” is condescending until proven otherwise ;-). To know my good, you must do more than point out that I suffer from cognitive biases. If you say, “The sky is not green”, you haven’t demonstrated what I would call real knowledge, and you’re not entitled to speak of others as ignorant for holding their own views (most of which will usually be, “the sky is blue”, since it is blue). You haven’t engaged with their views: you’ve merely stated a particularly obvious negative conclusion (eliminating part of the search space) as if it were a positive conclusion (identifying the portion of the search space where the truth actually lives).
(This may be part of the same underlying complex of ideas that makes me prefer constructive mathematics.)
I’m not seeing it. To me, it seems like you’re going to lengths to construe his writing in a way that you can take offense to. I don’t actually think you are doing so, but your reframing is so distant from the tone I perceive that I can’t understand what you are doing.
I read it as suggesting, in a fairly humble if flowery tone, that a number of other ancestral urges have been coopted for things that are demonstrably not in our best interest, and that desire for punishment is potentially on the same level. It’s a suggestion worth investigating, in my view.
Or do you think that discouraging someone from drinking sugary sodas is on the same level? That could explain the disconnect.
Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them, New York, 2013, p. 272
Hmmm… does he say something that goes beyond his condescending style? If he wants to criticize naive pleasure-hedonism, fine, but to talk of “best interests” without bothering to specify what he means by that phrase strikes me as an attempt to grab my utility function. At best it seems like a way to signal “Look how rational I am!” without having to admit to the banal motivation of wanting to sell books.
He’s saying that our desire for punishment is potentially a lost purpose. How is that an attempt to grab the utility function?
Also, I’d be interested to hear why you read this as condescending; I don’t see where you’re coming from with that.
When, then, is it a lost purpose? Deterrence is a consequentialist mode of punishment.
“I know what’s good for you better than you do” is condescending until proven otherwise ;-). To know my good, you must do more than point out that I suffer from cognitive biases. If you say, “The sky is not green”, you haven’t demonstrated what I would call real knowledge, and you’re not entitled to speak of others as ignorant for holding their own views (most of which will usually be, “the sky is blue”, since it is blue). You haven’t engaged with their views: you’ve merely stated a particularly obvious negative conclusion (eliminating part of the search space) as if it were a positive conclusion (identifying the portion of the search space where the truth actually lives).
(This may be part of the same underlying complex of ideas that makes me prefer constructive mathematics.)
I’m not seeing it. To me, it seems like you’re going to lengths to construe his writing in a way that you can take offense to. I don’t actually think you are doing so, but your reframing is so distant from the tone I perceive that I can’t understand what you are doing.
I read it as suggesting, in a fairly humble if flowery tone, that a number of other ancestral urges have been coopted for things that are demonstrably not in our best interest, and that desire for punishment is potentially on the same level. It’s a suggestion worth investigating, in my view.
Or do you think that discouraging someone from drinking sugary sodas is on the same level? That could explain the disconnect.