Is there good reason to suppose that Gal’s desire for internal combustion is irrational, and if so, where’s her mistake?
There are many possible reasons, eg it would be surprising if her values in other areas agreed with those of the House of Saud, which benefits from the sale of gasoline, and the slightly worse performance & greater price of internal combustion increases the risk of various bad outcomes (though we’d also have to consider the possibility that it reduces the chance of accidents). So she may have made a mistake by not considering other effects of her choice—see this comment re:death.
More fundamentally, she talks about “motivational reform”, but we haven’t established that her motivations are well-defined. She explicitly doesn’t know if her preference is a terminal value. If briefly playing around with fuel cells would change her ‘revealed’ preference, do we call that “motivational reform,” or say that it helps her achieve her true goals without interference from false or incomplete information? What goal does that chosen definition serve, since labels don’t fall from the sky?
There are many possible reasons, eg it would be surprising if her values in other areas agreed with those of the House of Saud, which benefits from the sale of gasoline, and the slightly worse performance & greater price of internal combustion increases the risk of various bad outcomes (though we’d also have to consider the possibility that it reduces the chance of accidents). So she may have made a mistake by not considering other effects of her choice—see this comment re:death.
More fundamentally, she talks about “motivational reform”, but we haven’t established that her motivations are well-defined. She explicitly doesn’t know if her preference is a terminal value. If briefly playing around with fuel cells would change her ‘revealed’ preference, do we call that “motivational reform,” or say that it helps her achieve her true goals without interference from false or incomplete information? What goal does that chosen definition serve, since labels don’t fall from the sky?