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Well, I don't believe that morality has anything to do with whether you enjoy what you do. I don't think I completely understand how I perceive morality, thou

Well, I don't believe that morality has anything to do with whether you enjoy what you do. I don't think I completely understand how I perceive morality, though, so I wouldn't want to get in an argument about it. So perhaps we are on the same page. I don't think that the pursuit of self-sacrifice is inherently noble (or useful), but I don't think that the pursuit of self-actualization is inherently noble (or useful) either. I think that we should be enacting policies and laws encouraging people to act for the overall good of society, which often, but not always, will correlate with their own purely selfish aims. I think that it's possible to do that in a way that creates a better world than what we would find when everyone acts in their own interest alone.

grandalf 17y ago
Fair enough. It sounds like your view could be described as a utilitarian value system that you impose after the fact based on a preconceived notion of some ends you hope society will achieve. You also seem to perceive that there exists a true greater good. I challenge you to introspect on that issue. I personally don't believe that the greater good really exists, and I attribute the creation of the meme to religious leaders who used their divine authority to declare what the greater good is so that the faithful would work to promote it in order to save their souls from eternal damnation -- notice the parallels with the modern secular notion? More mathematically, every individual has a set of interests/preferences. You can consider a function that maps from possible choices (individual, state, etc.) to everyone's preferences and try to maximize the amount of utility generated. But the problem for planners is that sometimes what is in an individual's best interest is not actually what the person wants. So calculating the greater good involves myriad assumptions and fudges... and at its core any notion of the greater good involves making an aesthetic choice of how to transfer benefit/harm across some set of people. For instance, any notion of the greater good applied to US politics probably neglects the harm inflicted on those who live just across the border who would be happy to work in the US but starve due to US immigration policies. Pretty soon the concept of the greater good (for any meaningful policy choice) conflicts with the idea of nationhood itself and becomes meaningless.
- mquander 17y ago
  I recognize upon reading your comment that it is really quite a cycle -- culture changes our opinion about what the greater good is, and then we all go and talk about how to reorganize the culture to get it! I'll think about this some more tonight.

grandalf 17y ago

Fair enough. It sounds like your view could be described as a utilitarian value system that you impose after the fact based on a preconceived notion of some ends you hope society will achieve. You also seem to perceive that there exists a true greater good. I challenge you to introspect on that issue. I personally don't believe that the greater good really exists, and I attribute the creation of the meme to religious leaders who used their divine authority to declare what the greater good is so that the faithful would work to promote it in order to save their souls from eternal damnation -- notice the parallels with the modern secular notion? More mathematically, every individual has a set of interests/preferences. You can consider a function that maps from possible choices (individual, state, etc.) to everyone's preferences and try to maximize the amount of utility generated. But the problem for planners is that sometimes what is in an individual's best interest is not actually what the person wants. So calculating the greater good involves myriad assumptions and fudges... and at its core any notion of the greater good involves making an aesthetic choice of how to transfer benefit/harm across some set of people. For instance, any notion of the greater good applied to US politics probably neglects the harm inflicted on those who live just across the border who would be happy to work in the US but starve due to US immigration policies. Pretty soon the concept of the greater good (for any meaningful policy choice) conflicts with the idea of nationhood itself and becomes meaningless.

mquander 17y ago
I recognize upon reading your comment that it is really quite a cycle -- culture changes our opinion about what the greater good is, and then we all go and talk about how to reorganize the culture to get it! I'll think about this some more tonight.