That fails to include weighing of that against other considerations. If you’re thirsty, there’s plenty of water, and you’re not trying to stay thirsty, you “should drink water” only if the other considerations don’t mean that drinking water is a bad idea despite the fact that it would quench your thirst. And in order to know that someone’s other considerations don’t outweigh the benefit of drinking water, you need to know so much about the other person that that situation is pretty much never going to happen with any nontrivial “should”.
That fails to include weighing of that against other considerations.
By hypothesis, there are no other significant considerations. I think most of the time, people’s rational considerations are about as simple as my hypothetical makes them out to be. Lumifer thinks they’re generally much more complicated. That’s an empirical debate that we probably can’t settle.
But there’s also the question of whether or not ‘shoulds’ can be ultimately personal. Suppose two lotteries. The first is won when your name is drawn out of a hat. Only one name is drawn, and so there’s only one possible winner. That’s a ‘personal’ lottery. Now take an impersonal lottery, where you win if your chosen 20 digit number matches the one drawn by the lottery moderators. Supposing you win, it’s just because your number matched theirs. Anyone whose number matched theirs would win, but it’s very unlikely that there will be more than one winner (or even one).
I’m saying that, leaving the empirical question aside, ‘shoulds’ bind us in the manner of an impersonal lottery. If we have a certain set of reasons, then they bind us, and they equally bind everyone who has that set of reasons (or something equivalent).
Lumifer is saying (I think) that ‘shoulds’ bind us in the manner of the personal lottery. They apply to each of us personally, though it’s possible that by coincidence two different shoulds have the same content and so it might look like one should binds two people.
A consequence of Lumifer’s view, it seems to me, is that a given set of reasons (where reasons are things that can apply equally to many individuals) is never sufficient to determine how we should act. This seems to me to be a very serious problem for the view.
That fails to include weighing of that against other considerations. If you’re thirsty, there’s plenty of water, and you’re not trying to stay thirsty, you “should drink water” only if the other considerations don’t mean that drinking water is a bad idea despite the fact that it would quench your thirst. And in order to know that someone’s other considerations don’t outweigh the benefit of drinking water, you need to know so much about the other person that that situation is pretty much never going to happen with any nontrivial “should”.
By hypothesis, there are no other significant considerations. I think most of the time, people’s rational considerations are about as simple as my hypothetical makes them out to be. Lumifer thinks they’re generally much more complicated. That’s an empirical debate that we probably can’t settle.
But there’s also the question of whether or not ‘shoulds’ can be ultimately personal. Suppose two lotteries. The first is won when your name is drawn out of a hat. Only one name is drawn, and so there’s only one possible winner. That’s a ‘personal’ lottery. Now take an impersonal lottery, where you win if your chosen 20 digit number matches the one drawn by the lottery moderators. Supposing you win, it’s just because your number matched theirs. Anyone whose number matched theirs would win, but it’s very unlikely that there will be more than one winner (or even one).
I’m saying that, leaving the empirical question aside, ‘shoulds’ bind us in the manner of an impersonal lottery. If we have a certain set of reasons, then they bind us, and they equally bind everyone who has that set of reasons (or something equivalent).
Lumifer is saying (I think) that ‘shoulds’ bind us in the manner of the personal lottery. They apply to each of us personally, though it’s possible that by coincidence two different shoulds have the same content and so it might look like one should binds two people.
A consequence of Lumifer’s view, it seems to me, is that a given set of reasons (where reasons are things that can apply equally to many individuals) is never sufficient to determine how we should act. This seems to me to be a very serious problem for the view.
Correct, I would agree to that.
Why so?