You may want to be a little more careful with how you formulate this. Saying that a good idea is one that has good consequences, and a bad idea is one that has bad consequences, doesn’t invite regress… it may be that you have a different mechanism for evaluating whether a consequence is good/bad than you do for evaluating whether an idea is good/bad.
For example, I might assert that a consequence is good if it makes me happy, and bad if it makes me unhappy. (I don’t in fact assert this.) I would then conclude that an idea is good if its consequences make me happy, and bad if its consequences make me unhappy. No regress involved.
(And note that this is different from saying that an idea is good if the idea makes me happy. If it turns out that the idea “I could drink drain cleaner” makes me happy, but that actually drinking drain cleaner makes me unhappy, then it’s a bad idea by the first theory but a good idea by the second theory.)
A certain amount of precision is helpful when thinking about these sorts of things.
You may want to be a little more careful with how you formulate this. Saying that a good idea is one that has good consequences, and a bad idea is one that has bad consequences, doesn’t invite regress… it may be that you have a different mechanism for evaluating whether a consequence is good/bad than you do for evaluating whether an idea is good/bad.
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A certain amount of precision is helpful when thinking about these sorts of things.
If you reread the sentence in which I discuss a regress, you will notice it begins with “if” and says that a certain method would result in a regress, the point being you have to do something else. So it was your mistake.
You may want to be a little more careful with how you formulate this. Saying that a good idea is one that has good consequences, and a bad idea is one that has bad consequences, doesn’t invite regress… it may be that you have a different mechanism for evaluating whether a consequence is good/bad than you do for evaluating whether an idea is good/bad.
For example, I might assert that a consequence is good if it makes me happy, and bad if it makes me unhappy. (I don’t in fact assert this.) I would then conclude that an idea is good if its consequences make me happy, and bad if its consequences make me unhappy. No regress involved.
(And note that this is different from saying that an idea is good if the idea makes me happy. If it turns out that the idea “I could drink drain cleaner” makes me happy, but that actually drinking drain cleaner makes me unhappy, then it’s a bad idea by the first theory but a good idea by the second theory.)
A certain amount of precision is helpful when thinking about these sorts of things.
If you reread the sentence in which I discuss a regress, you will notice it begins with “if” and says that a certain method would result in a regress, the point being you have to do something else. So it was your mistake.