Less snarkily: I don’t think that looking at “what people want” is the same thing as determining what’s actually good. Someone with an intense desire to make themselves as miserable as possible (not in the “pleasure from masochism” sense, like really genuinely bad) seems obviously misguided.ehhh? in the end there is nothing else to draw “good” from than what people want at some level, unless you’re into like, strong moral objectivism, which seems like a straightforwardly ridiculous position. “what would you do without morality” etc.
i’d probably agree with modifying the pain-creature to want things i think are good, just as much as i’d agree with modifying a paperclipper to want things i think are good. i don’t really think “misguided” has meaning here, except in the sense of being mistaken about what you value (which is easy to be, but doesn’t sound like what you mean)
This is probably another instance of disagreement about moral realism/objectivism, because to me the idea of “what would you do without morality” is like… I’d go be homeless and hang out at the library all day and probably eventually die of hypothermia? Like, it’s asking me what I’d do if I found out that my sense that pain is bad and pleasure is good went away. I would say “I wouldn’t function”, but who cares about functioning in a scenario like that! Why should we give that hypothetical any weight whatsoever if it gives us no guidance as to how to act or what to believe? Why wouldn’t you focus on the 0.0000000000001% chance that moral realism is true, since that’s where 100% of the value and disvalue lie?
Do you not, like, have things you want?
I have impuleses, and unless I know that some long term goal is *actually good* I’ll probably just end up doing whatever is easiest at the moment, which for me is pacing and reading random shit and ruminating and tumblring. If I had a sufficient amount of structure it mighty not turn out that way I guess.
edit: There are things that I would do (crash a psychiatrists’ conference to give an unsolicited speech against involuntary commitment, go out to visit Esther, [redacted], but none of them would provide me with a steady source of income to prevent me from running out of money after a few months.
Okay, I’ve been kinda shitposty about this, but I want to engage with this seriously because it’s fucking fascinating.
I want things. These wants are (mostly) stable and accessible—by which I mean I generally know what I want, and that won’t change very quickly. In any given situation, if you ask me “what I want” I have a pretty good answer. (The hard part is managing tradeoffs).
And one of the strangest things I seem to have learned as an adult—and I say “seem to” because this still baffles me utterly—is that for some people that isn’t true.
Did you know that some people don’t like making decisions? I didn’t. I didn’t for years.
I mean, I kinda knew my dad didn’t like making decisions. But I thought that was a bizarre quirk. I didn’t expect that to be a common trait.
There’s an interaction that basically everyone’s had. You’re hanging out with a few friends (or your family or something), and you decide to go out for dinner. And someone asks “where should we go?” And then everyone stares at each other awkwardly and doesn’t say anything.
And for years I thought I knew what was going on here. Everyone knew where they wanted to go. They had a mental list. But they didn’t want to force their idea on everyone else, so they were being polite and not saying anything and waiting for someone else to pick. And I should also be polite and let someone else choose instead.
It never occurred to me that these people didn’t generally have a mental list of like five places they’d like to go, ranked in order of how much they’d like to go there. It never occurred to me that people might find it a relief for me to suggest some place to go. It never occured to me until I was twenty-five years old.
Sure, making decisions can be stressful. And sometimes it’s so stressful that I get anxious and put off decisions until way too late. But the anxiety isn’t about what I want. It’s about managing tradeoffs, and managing information I don’t have. (In particular, one of the things I want is “for all my friends to be happy” and I don’t always know what will make them happiest).
But in general I know what I want. And I do the things I want to do. And apparently this isn’t how a lot of people experience the world.
So this is why moral realism always feels, not just false, but totally incoherent to me. To the extent that I don’t really understand what it would mean for moral realism to be true.
I want to do things. And I generally do the things I want to do. This is almost entirely what determines my actions.
So if you’re making an argument about whether I should take a course of action, it can do one of two things: either it can convince me to want something else, or it can convince me that I will get more of what I want by doing something else.
Now the second is clearly not a “moral” argument. It’s purely pragmatic. And I don’t think the second is really “moral” either—and it’s certainly not amenable to pure logical reasoning.
So if you’re making a moral argument, I’m not sure what it’s supposed to be doing. You can’t say “you should do this, even though you don’t want to.” That’s like saying “this is green, even though it’s red.”
If I want to do something, that’s cause to do it. And if I don’t want to do it, I don’t have a reason to do it.
Turns out that different people are different psychologically. Which means, inter alia, that they build up their mental structures in different ways, and use subtly-but-sometimes-importantly different processes to deal with the same kind of inputs and achieve the same general results.
I honestly believe that this kind of thing, more than almost anything else, is influenced by upbringing and other early childhood factors. You learn how to human from your parents and early influences…and if you learn something that’s blatantly wrong for your niche, the world will beat it out of you right quick…but the world doesn’t care how you get the desired result so long as you do, and therefore a wide range of internal mind-designs can evolve and thrive so long as they’re more-or-less functional.
My family growing up was intensely prescriptive, in a “you’d better get results X Y and Z or EVERYTHING WILL BE TERRIBLE FOREVER” kind of way, but it wasn’t moralistic. The demands weren’t framed as appeals to some kind of abstract, objective, Mundum-like normative truth of the world. They were framed as “if you don’t get results X Y and Z, you will not get the things you want out of life, and you will be miserable.” And when I was in a position to say “I think that’s not true,” the response took the form of “you don’t really know what you want” or “you don’t understand the gravity of the consequences,” not “it doesn’t matter what you want because Moral Demands.”
So it feels like no surprise that my instincts here line up with those of @jadagul. I frame basically every motivational force in my mindscape as some kind of desire that I possess, with long-term desires often conflicting with short-term desires and thus demanding some kind of internal arbitration. If I labor to improve the universe, it’s because I have some kind of desire to adhere to my ethical schema, etc.
But I gather that people who were raised in a more moralistic way may find it more intuitive to characterize the same tensions as being conflicts between “desire” and some kind of (partly- or wholly-externally-imposed) morality. This looks exactly the same from the outside, except in edge cases, but I imagine that the qualia involved may be profoundly different.