Should a monk who has taken vows have a sin budget, because the flesh is weak?
If that helps them achieve their vows overall.
The opportunity for self-serving application of this principle casts a shadow over all applications. I believe this hypothetical monk’s spiritual guide would have little truck with such excuses, rest and food, both in strict moderation, being all the body requires. (I have recently been reading the Sayings of the Desert Fathers and St John Climacus’ “Ladder of Divine Ascent”, works from the first few centuries of Christianity, and the rigours of the lives described there are quite extraordinary.)
Better to compromise with the egoist faction and achieve some good, rather than try killing it with fire and achieve nothing.
“It’s not me that wants this, it’s this other thing I share this body with.” Personally, that sounds to me like thinking gone wrong, whether you yield to or suppress this imaginary person. You appear to be identifying with the altruist faction when you write all this, but is that really the altruist faction speaking, or just the egoist faction pretending not to be? Recognising a conflict should be a first step towards resolving it.
Of course it is. Has it ever been presented as anything else
Once people start saying things like “It really is hard to find a clearer example of an avoidable Holocaust that you can personally do something substantial about now” or “If you don’t sign up your kids for cryonics then you are a lousy parent”, it’s hard to avoid reading a moral tone into them.
These are moral arguments for supporting cryonics, rather than for signing up oneself. BTW, if it’s sinfully self-indulgent to sign up oneself, how can you persuade anyone else to? Does a monk preach “eat, drink, and be merry”?
Finally, when I look at the world, I see almost no-one who values others above themselves. What, then, will the CEV of humanity have to say on the subject?
The opportunity for self-serving application of this principle casts a shadow over all applications.
[…]
Finally, when I look at the world, I see almost no-one who values others above themselves. What, then, will the CEV of humanity have to say on the subject?
I’m confused over what exactly your position is. The first bit I quoted seems to imply that you think that one should sacrifice everything in favor of altruism, whereas the second excerpt seems like a criticism of that position.
My position is that (1) the universal practice of valuing oneself over others is right and proper (and I expect others to rightly and properly value themselves over me, it being up to me to earn any above-baseline favour I may receive), (2) there is room for discussion about what base level of compassion one should have towards distant strangers (I certainly don’t put it at zero), and (3) I take the injunction to love one’s neighbour as oneself as a corrective to a too low level of (2) rather than as a literal requirement, a practical rule of thumb for debiasing rather than a moral axiom. Perfect altruism is not even what I would want to want.
The first bit I quoted seems to imply that you think that one should sacrifice everything in favor of altruism
I’m drawing out what I see as the implications of holding (which I don’t) that we ought to be perfectly altruistic, while finding (as I do) that in practice it is impossible. It leads, as you have found, to uneasy compromises guiltily taken.
I did say right in my original comment (emphasis added):
By going with the leisure budget argument, one is essentially admitting that cryonics isn’t about altruism, it’s about yourself. And of course, there is nothing wrong with that, since none of us is a 100% complete altruist who cares nothing about themselves, nor should we even try to idealize that kind of a person.
I will attempt a resolution: other people are as imortant as me, in pirncipal, since I am not objectively anything special—but I should concentrate my efforts on myself and those close to me, becuase I understand my and their needs better, and can therefore be more effective.
I don’t think that’s a sufficient or effective compromise. If I’m given a choice between saving the life of my child, or the lives of a 1000 other children, I will always save my child. And I will only feel guilt to the extent that I was unable to come up with a 3rd option that saves everybody.
I don’t do it for some indirect reason such as that I understand my children’s needs better or such. I do it because I value my own child’s life more, plain and simple.
You might as well have asked: special to whom>? Even if there is no objective importance or specialiness anywhere, it still follows that I have no objective importance ort specialness.
For the record, you do have a limited supply of willpower. I’m guessing those monks either had extraordinary willpower reserves or nonstandard worldviews that made abstinence actually easier than sin.
It seems they practice that willpower muscle very explicitly for hours every day. Abstinence should actually be pretty easy considering you have very little else to drain your willpower with.
Looking into your link now, but it was my understanding that the effect was weaker if the participant didn’t believe in it, not nonexistent (i.e. disbelieving in ego depletion has a placebo effect.)
Wikipedia, Font Of All Knowledge concurrs:
An individual’s perceived level of fatigue has been shown to influence their subsequent performance on a task requiring self-regulation, independent of their actual state of depletion.[14] This effect is known as illusory fatigue. This was shown in an experiment in which participants engaged in a task that was either depleting or non-depleting, which determined each individual’s true state of depletion. Ultimately, when participants were led to believe their level of depletion was lower than their true state of depletion, they performed much better on a difficult working memory task. This indicates that an increased perceived level of fatigue can hinder self-regulatory performance independent of the actual state of depletion.
[...]
An experiment by Carol Dweck and subsequent work by Roy Baumeister and Kathleen Vohs has shown that beliefs in unlimited self-control helps mitigate ego depletion for a short while, but not for long. Participants that were led to believe that they will not get fatigued performed well on a second task but were fully depleted on a third task.[16]
ETA: It seems the Wikipedia citation is to a replication attempt of your link. They found the effect was real, but it only lessened ego depletion—subjects who were told they had unlimited willpower still suffered suffered ego depletion, just less strongly. So yup, placebo.
They found the effect was real, but it only lessened ego depletion—subjects who were told they had unlimited willpower still suffered suffered ego depletion, just less strongly. So yup, placebo.
I’m not sure the word “placebo” makes sense when you are discussing purely psychological phenomena. Obviously any effects will be related to psychology- its not like they gave them a pill.
I … think it’s supposed to be regulated at least partially by glucose levels? So in some of the experiments, they were giving them sugar pills, or sugar water or something? I’m afraid this isn’t actually my field :(
But of course, no phenomenon is purely psychological (unless the patient is a ghost.) For example, I expect antidepressant medication is susceptible to the placebo effect.
Take, for example, the reaction to our claim that the glucose version of the resource argument is false (Kurzban 2010a ). Inzlicht & Schmeichel, scholars who have published widely in the willpower-as-resource literature, more or less casually bury the model with the remark in their commentary that the “mounting evidence points to the conclusion that blood glucose is not the proximate mechanism of depletion.” ( Malecek & Poldrack express a similar view.) Not a single voice has been raised to defend the glucose model, and, given the evidence that we advanced to support our view that this model is unlikely to be correct, we hope that researchers will take the fact that none of the impressive array of scholars submitting comments defended the view to be a good indication that perhaps the model is, in fact, indefensible. Even if the opportunity cost account of effort turns out not to be correct, we are pleased that the evidence from the commentaries – or the absence of evidence – will stand as an indication to audiences that it might be time to move to more profitable explanations of subjective effort.
While the silence on the glucose model is perhaps most obvious, we are similarly surprised by the remarkably light defense of the resource view more generally. As Kool & Botvinick put it, quite correctly in our perception: “Research on the dynamics of cognitive effort have been dominated, over recent decades, by accounts centering on the notion of a limited and depletable ‘resource’” (italics ours). It would seem to be quite surprising, then, that in the context of our critique of the dominant view, arguably the strongest pertinent remarks come from Carter & McCullough, who imply that the strength of the key phenomenon that underlies the resource model – two-task “ego-depletion” studies – might be considerably less than previously thought or perhaps even nonexistent. Despite the confidence voiced by Inzlicht & Schmeichel about the two-task findings, the strongest voices surrounding the model, then, are raised against it, rather than for it. (See also Monterosso & Luo , who are similarly skeptical of the resource account.)
Indeed, what defenses there are of the resource account are not nearly as adamant as we had expected. Hagger wonders if there is “still room for a ‘resource’ account,” given the evidence that cuts against it, conceding that “[t]he ego-depletion literature is problematic.” Further, he relies largely on the argument that the opportunity cost model we offer might be incomplete, thus “leaving room” for other ideas.
The opportunity for self-serving application of this principle casts a shadow over all applications. I believe this hypothetical monk’s spiritual guide would have little truck with such excuses, rest and food, both in strict moderation, being all the body requires. (I have recently been reading the Sayings of the Desert Fathers and St John Climacus’ “Ladder of Divine Ascent”, works from the first few centuries of Christianity, and the rigours of the lives described there are quite extraordinary.)
“It’s not me that wants this, it’s this other thing I share this body with.” Personally, that sounds to me like thinking gone wrong, whether you yield to or suppress this imaginary person. You appear to be identifying with the altruist faction when you write all this, but is that really the altruist faction speaking, or just the egoist faction pretending not to be? Recognising a conflict should be a first step towards resolving it.
These are moral arguments for supporting cryonics, rather than for signing up oneself. BTW, if it’s sinfully self-indulgent to sign up oneself, how can you persuade anyone else to? Does a monk preach “eat, drink, and be merry”?
Finally, when I look at the world, I see almost no-one who values others above themselves. What, then, will the CEV of humanity have to say on the subject?
[…]
I’m confused over what exactly your position is. The first bit I quoted seems to imply that you think that one should sacrifice everything in favor of altruism, whereas the second excerpt seems like a criticism of that position.
My position is that (1) the universal practice of valuing oneself over others is right and proper (and I expect others to rightly and properly value themselves over me, it being up to me to earn any above-baseline favour I may receive), (2) there is room for discussion about what base level of compassion one should have towards distant strangers (I certainly don’t put it at zero), and (3) I take the injunction to love one’s neighbour as oneself as a corrective to a too low level of (2) rather than as a literal requirement, a practical rule of thumb for debiasing rather than a moral axiom. Perfect altruism is not even what I would want to want.
I’m drawing out what I see as the implications of holding (which I don’t) that we ought to be perfectly altruistic, while finding (as I do) that in practice it is impossible. It leads, as you have found, to uneasy compromises guiltily taken.
I did say right in my original comment (emphasis added):
I will attempt a resolution: other people are as imortant as me, in pirncipal, since I am not objectively anything special—but I should concentrate my efforts on myself and those close to me, becuase I understand my and their needs better, and can therefore be more effective.
I don’t think that’s a sufficient or effective compromise. If I’m given a choice between saving the life of my child, or the lives of a 1000 other children, I will always save my child. And I will only feel guilt to the extent that I was unable to come up with a 3rd option that saves everybody.
I don’t do it for some indirect reason such as that I understand my children’s needs better or such. I do it because I value my own child’s life more, plain and simple.
Important to whom?
You might as well have asked: special to whom>? Even if there is no objective importance or specialiness anywhere, it still follows that I have no objective importance ort specialness.
For the record, you do have a limited supply of willpower. I’m guessing those monks either had extraordinary willpower reserves or nonstandard worldviews that made abstinence actually easier than sin.
It seems they practice that willpower muscle very explicitly for hours every day. Abstinence should actually be pretty easy considering you have very little else to drain your willpower with.
If you think so.
Looking into your link now, but it was my understanding that the effect was weaker if the participant didn’t believe in it, not nonexistent (i.e. disbelieving in ego depletion has a placebo effect.)
Wikipedia, Font Of All Knowledge concurrs:
ETA: It seems the Wikipedia citation is to a replication attempt of your link. They found the effect was real, but it only lessened ego depletion—subjects who were told they had unlimited willpower still suffered suffered ego depletion, just less strongly. So yup, placebo.
I’m not sure the word “placebo” makes sense when you are discussing purely psychological phenomena. Obviously any effects will be related to psychology- its not like they gave them a pill.
I … think it’s supposed to be regulated at least partially by glucose levels? So in some of the experiments, they were giving them sugar pills, or sugar water or something? I’m afraid this isn’t actually my field :(
But of course, no phenomenon is purely psychological (unless the patient is a ghost.) For example, I expect antidepressant medication is susceptible to the placebo effect.
See here.
If it isn’t, you’re doing something wrong.
ETA: By which I don’t mean that it is easy to do it right. Practicing anything involves a lot of doing it wrong while learning to do it right.