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In the end, what do you get from that commitment? Why did you make it in the first place, if not for a selfish reason? What is the place of “honor”, if it is no

by derefr 5y ago

In the end, what do you get from that commitment? Why did you make it in the first place, if not for a selfish reason? What is the place of “honor”, if it is not a code that it makes you happy to live by? People’s terminal preferences are the root of who they are. There is no goal that exists beyond one’s terminal preferences. You can prefer to obey some moral distinction, but you prefer it because that increases your happiness/life satisfaction (or at least, you have absorbed enough second-hand examples that you believe it will increase your happiness/life satisfaction.) If it didn’t, why would your brain ever bother to spit out a “you should do it” answer? > My desires are often fleeting and dishonorable...selfish and wanton. I think you’re confusing societal mores that you’ve chosen to adhere to (e.g. monogamy) with some sort of objective moral function that all humans will somehow be judged by regardless of whether anyone is doing the judging. If you’re sleeping around (the thing I’m assuming you’re talking about here) but you’re in a polyamorous relationship, with a partner who experiences compersion rather than jealousy when people outside of your relationship do things to make you happy — is that act still “dishonorable” or “wanton” of you? What would those words mean, for that to be true? If everyone important to you wants you to enjoy yourself, and you do enjoy yourself, then who is saying no? And, given that, if your marriage partner does say no to something that would make you happy, how is that anything other than an incompatibility between you; something that could have been avoided by ensuring compatibility before commitment? IMHO, you are rationalizing staying in a relationship with a partner whose preferences do overlap with yours enough for life with them to be generally pleasant; but where in some ways their preferences are extremely incompatible with your own. But, because you are embedded in a society mostly consisting of potential partners who also have those same extremely-incompatible preferences to your own, it doesn’t feel like you’d actually have any luck finding a partner whose preferences cohere more closely to your own. You satisficed, and now are attempting to construct a philosophy that makes satisficing seem optimal, so that you can have one fewer regret. People should really spend more time looking outside their own culture for partners. It can turn out that what is “dishonorable” or “wanton” to you, is just regular respectable behavior in another culture in another part of the world. The objectivity of social mores is an illusion created by cultural isolation. (FYI: this is just the standard University “introduction to meta-ethics” stuff, just applied to romantic social mores in particular.)

zepto 5y ago
> People’s terminal preferences are the root of who they are. There is no goal that exists beyond one’s terminal preferences. You can prefer to obey some moral distinction, but you prefer it because that increases your happiness/life satisfaction. If it didn’t, why would your brain ever bother to spit out a “you should do it” answer? This is circular reasoning. You have baked in the assumption that people operate by maximizing their individual self-interest. A simple answer to why one might do it, even if it didn’t maximize their own happiness/satisfaction, is that they are genuinely focused on a less individualistic aim. Self-sacrifice in service of higher value doesn’t necessarily make one happy, but it can be part of one’s nature to recognize that one’s own sacrifice benefits others in some way.
- derefr 5y ago
  You misunderstand what I mean by “happiness”, I think. (Probably because I should have said “predicted utility of all agents similar to oneself”, but I didn’t, because that’s pretty dang jargon-y, and assumes you’ve walked through the relevant thought experiments about self-sacrifice to help other copies of yourself, etc.) If someone martyrs themselves, then in the moment they do that, they’re thinking that that is a good thing to do — i.e. the reward calculation in their brain comes out in favour of doing that thing instead of anything else they could be doing instead. They expect that good things will happen due to this—things that cohere with their preferences. This is still true even if they don’t live to see those good things happen, because brains are adaptation executors, not fitness maximizers: we prefer the kinds of things that made our lineage successful, not the things that make us successful. But those are still preferences! “Being of use to others” is a preference. You do it because that’s the thing your brain releases reward chemicals when you do. This is what you are terming something being “part of one’s nature”; “your nature” is equivalent to “your preference function.” And, if you can assume that to be true for a second, then I can restate my point in terms of it: many of the things people have terms for in their preference functions are based on adhering to an abstract role or identity, something like “an honorable person”, their understanding of which was inculcated by local, culturally-contextual societal mores. For most people, doing something “because it’s honorable” isn’t a post-hoc rationalization of some spiritual connection to the concept of honor that informs their life. Instead, it’s an instrumental preference — a thing you do in order to work toward some higher-level preference you have — where the higher-level preference is “cohere more closely with my own understanding of what it means to be honorable.” In these cases, people don’t like X and dislike Y because their brain is directly telling them that X is good and Y isn’t (where they then notice a class of such preferential distinctions they’re making, and then call that class of distinctions “honor” because it seems to be the same as a class of distinctions that other people call “honor.”) Instead, people like X and dislike Y because they learned a concept like “honor” from their societal context, and they learned that their society considers X to be honorable and Y to be dishonorable; and so they then prefer to do X and not do Y because they want to live in the image of what they believe honor to be, as learned from their society. For these people, if they experience other cultures’ conceptions of these abstract concepts, and through that learn more about what these abstract concepts can mean to different people, this is usually enough to shift how they understand the abstract concept itself; and due to that, they will usually end up with different instrumental preferences—because now what they have learned “is honorable”, is a different set of things. (Compare and contrast: etiquette. “What is etiquette” can feel objective if you never leave the culture you were born into. But you’ll have a very different idea of things being or not being “polite” if you experience a variety of different cultures that all have developed different customs around etiquette.)

by derefr 5y ago

zepto 5y ago

> People’s terminal preferences are the root of who they are. There is no goal that exists beyond one’s terminal preferences. You can prefer to obey some moral distinction, but you prefer it because that increases your happiness/life satisfaction. If it didn’t, why would your brain ever bother to spit out a “you should do it” answer? This is circular reasoning. You have baked in the assumption that people operate by maximizing their individual self-interest. A simple answer to why one might do it, even if it didn’t maximize their own happiness/satisfaction, is that they are genuinely focused on a less individualistic aim. Self-sacrifice in service of higher value doesn’t necessarily make one happy, but it can be part of one’s nature to recognize that one’s own sacrifice benefits others in some way.

derefr 5y ago
You misunderstand what I mean by “happiness”, I think. (Probably because I should have said “predicted utility of all agents similar to oneself”, but I didn’t, because that’s pretty dang jargon-y, and assumes you’ve walked through the relevant thought experiments about self-sacrifice to help other copies of yourself, etc.) If someone martyrs themselves, then in the moment they do that, they’re thinking that that is a good thing to do — i.e. the reward calculation in their brain comes out in favour of doing that thing instead of anything else they could be doing instead. They expect that good things will happen due to this—things that cohere with their preferences. This is still true even if they don’t live to see those good things happen, because brains are adaptation executors, not fitness maximizers: we prefer the kinds of things that made our lineage successful, not the things that make us successful. But those are still preferences! “Being of use to others” is a preference. You do it because that’s the thing your brain releases reward chemicals when you do. This is what you are terming something being “part of one’s nature”; “your nature” is equivalent to “your preference function.” And, if you can assume that to be true for a second, then I can restate my point in terms of it: many of the things people have terms for in their preference functions are based on adhering to an abstract role or identity, something like “an honorable person”, their understanding of which was inculcated by local, culturally-contextual societal mores. For most people, doing something “because it’s honorable” isn’t a post-hoc rationalization of some spiritual connection to the concept of honor that informs their life. Instead, it’s an instrumental preference — a thing you do in order to work toward some higher-level preference you have — where the higher-level preference is “cohere more closely with my own understanding of what it means to be honorable.” In these cases, people don’t like X and dislike Y because their brain is directly telling them that X is good and Y isn’t (where they then notice a class of such preferential distinctions they’re making, and then call that class of distinctions “honor” because it seems to be the same as a class of distinctions that other people call “honor.”) Instead, people like X and dislike Y because they learned a concept like “honor” from their societal context, and they learned that their society considers X to be honorable and Y to be dishonorable; and so they then prefer to do X and not do Y because they want to live in the image of what they believe honor to be, as learned from their society. For these people, if they experience other cultures’ conceptions of these abstract concepts, and through that learn more about what these abstract concepts can mean to different people, this is usually enough to shift how they understand the abstract concept itself; and due to that, they will usually end up with different instrumental preferences—because now what they have learned “is honorable”, is a different set of things. (Compare and contrast: etiquette. “What is etiquette” can feel objective if you never leave the culture you were born into. But you’ll have a very different idea of things being or not being “polite” if you experience a variety of different cultures that all have developed different customs around etiquette.)