Julian: “You have to un-assume the decision before you stand any chance of clear thought.”
Of course the decision-theoretic logic of this is unassailable, but I continue to worry that the real-world application to humans is nontrivial.
Here, I have a parable. Suppose Jones is a member of a cult, and holds it as a moral principle that it is good and right and virtuous to obey the Great Leader. So she tries to obey, but feels terrible about failing to obey perfectly, and she ends up having a nervous breakdown and removing herself from the cult in shame. Then, afterwards, as a defensive emotional reaction, she adopts an individualist philosophy and comes up with all sorts of clever arguments to the effect that the Great Leader isn’t special at all and really no one has any duty to obey or even listen to her!
So then Jones reads “The Bottom Line,” and realizes her adoption of individualism wasn’t rational, and was simply a reaction to having been hurt so badly. If she had only been better at obeying the Great Leader, then, as a matter of (subjunctive) fact, she never would have come up with all those clever arguments, and wouldn’t have found them convincing if someone else had told them to her. At this point, as rationalists, we advise Jones to clear her mind, unassume her decision to leave the cult, and reëvaluate the matter cleanly. But this advice might be underspecified: if she is supposed to reëvaluate her choice using her current morality, the decision is obvious: stay free. If she is supposed to reëvaluate using her original cult-morality, the decision is obvious: crawl back to the Great Leader, begging for forgiveness.
You can’t reset yourself to a state a perfect emptiness; you have to reset yourself to something. Nor can you reset yourself to a state of perfect emptiness in order to decide what to reset yourself to; that’s just an infinite regress.
I guess the best answer I can give to someone in such a dilemma (the answer I give myself) is to say, “Rational agents act to preserve their current goal system; my past self was confused, I cannot be bound by the terms of her confusion; I can only act from who I am, now, what I want, now.”
But then that sounds like saying that the principle of the bottom line doesn’t apply across morality changes. Which is a little suspicious.
Julian: “You have to un-assume the decision before you stand any chance of clear thought.”
Of course the decision-theoretic logic of this is unassailable, but I continue to worry that the real-world application to humans is nontrivial.
Here, I have a parable. Suppose Jones is a member of a cult, and holds it as a moral principle that it is good and right and virtuous to obey the Great Leader. So she tries to obey, but feels terrible about failing to obey perfectly, and she ends up having a nervous breakdown and removing herself from the cult in shame. Then, afterwards, as a defensive emotional reaction, she adopts an individualist philosophy and comes up with all sorts of clever arguments to the effect that the Great Leader isn’t special at all and really no one has any duty to obey or even listen to her!
So then Jones reads “The Bottom Line,” and realizes her adoption of individualism wasn’t rational, and was simply a reaction to having been hurt so badly. If she had only been better at obeying the Great Leader, then, as a matter of (subjunctive) fact, she never would have come up with all those clever arguments, and wouldn’t have found them convincing if someone else had told them to her. At this point, as rationalists, we advise Jones to clear her mind, unassume her decision to leave the cult, and reëvaluate the matter cleanly. But this advice might be underspecified: if she is supposed to reëvaluate her choice using her current morality, the decision is obvious: stay free. If she is supposed to reëvaluate using her original cult-morality, the decision is obvious: crawl back to the Great Leader, begging for forgiveness.
You can’t reset yourself to a state a perfect emptiness; you have to reset yourself to something. Nor can you reset yourself to a state of perfect emptiness in order to decide what to reset yourself to; that’s just an infinite regress.
I guess the best answer I can give to someone in such a dilemma (the answer I give myself) is to say, “Rational agents act to preserve their current goal system; my past self was confused, I cannot be bound by the terms of her confusion; I can only act from who I am, now, what I want, now.”
But then that sounds like saying that the principle of the bottom line doesn’t apply across morality changes. Which is a little suspicious.