Let’s look at preference for eating lots of sweets, for example. Society tries to teach us not to eat too much sweets because it’s unhealthy, and from the perspective of someone who likes eating sweets, this often feels coercive. Your explanation applied here would be that upon reflection, people will decide “Actually, eating a bunch of candy every day is great”—and no doubt, to a degree that is true, at least with the level of reflection that people actually do.
However when I decided to eat as much sweet as I wanted, I ended up deciding that sweets were gross, except in very small amounts or as a part of extended exercise where my body actually needs the sugar. What’s happening here is that society has a bit more wisdom than the candy loving kid, tries clumsily to teach the foolish kid that their ways are wrong and they’ll regret it, and often ends up succeeding more in constraining behavior than integrating the values in a way that the kid can make sense of upon reflection.
The OP addresses cases like this:
One thing that can cause confusion here—by design—is that perverted moralities are stabler if they also enjoin nonperversely good behaviors in most cases. This causes people to attribute the good behavior to the system of threats used to enforce preference inversion, imagining that they would not be naturally inclined to love their neighbor, work diligently for things they want, and rest sometimes. Likewise, perverted moralities also forbid many genuinely bad behaviors, which primes people who must do something harmless but forbidden to accompany it with needlessly harmful forbidden behaviors, because that’s what they’ve been taught to expect of themselves.
I agree that the comment you’re replying to is (narrowly) wrong (if understanding ‘prior’ as ‘temporally prior’), because someone might socially acquire a preference not to overeat sugar before they get the chance to learn they don’t want to overeat sugar. ISTM this is repaired by comparing not to ‘(temporally) prior preference’ but something like ‘reflectively stable preference absent coercive pressure’.
The part of OP you quoted only covers part of what I’m saying. It’s not just that we can be pressured into doing good things, it’s also that we have no idea what our intrinsic desires will become as we learn more about they interact with each other and the world, and there is a lot of legitimate change in intrinsic preferences which are more reflectively stable upon sufficiently good reflection, but which nevertheless revert to the shallower preferences upon typical reflection because reflection is hard and people are bad at it.
“Reflectively stable in absence of coercive pressure” is very difficult to actually measure, so it’s more of a hypothetical construct which is easy to get wrong—especially since “absence of coercive pressure” can’t actually exist, so we have to figure out which kinds of coercive pressure we’re going to include in our hypothetical.
The OP addresses cases like this:
I agree that the comment you’re replying to is (narrowly) wrong (if understanding ‘prior’ as ‘temporally prior’), because someone might socially acquire a preference not to overeat sugar before they get the chance to learn they don’t want to overeat sugar. ISTM this is repaired by comparing not to ‘(temporally) prior preference’ but something like ‘reflectively stable preference absent coercive pressure’.
The part of OP you quoted only covers part of what I’m saying. It’s not just that we can be pressured into doing good things, it’s also that we have no idea what our intrinsic desires will become as we learn more about they interact with each other and the world, and there is a lot of legitimate change in intrinsic preferences which are more reflectively stable upon sufficiently good reflection, but which nevertheless revert to the shallower preferences upon typical reflection because reflection is hard and people are bad at it.
“Reflectively stable in absence of coercive pressure” is very difficult to actually measure, so it’s more of a hypothetical construct which is easy to get wrong—especially since “absence of coercive pressure” can’t actually exist, so we have to figure out which kinds of coercive pressure we’re going to include in our hypothetical.
“As calculated prior” is not quite correct, “reflectively stable absent coercive pressure” is a better formulation.