Ethical theories don’t need to be simple. I used to have the belief that ethical theories ought to be simple/elegant/non-arbitrary for us to have a shot at them being the correct theory, a theory that intelligent civilizations with different evolutionary histories would all converge on. This made me think that NU might be that correct theory. Now I’m confident that this sort of thinking was confused: I think there is no reason to expect that intelligent civilizations with different evolutionary histories would converge on the same values, or that there is one correct set of ethics that they “should” converge on if they were approaching the matter “correctly”. So, looking back, my older intuition feels confused now in a similar way as ordering the simplest food in a restaurant in expectation of anticipating what others would order if they also thought that the goal was that everyone orders the same thing. Now I just want to order the “food” that satisfies my personal criteria (and these criteria do happen to include placing value on non-arbitrariness/simplicity/elegance, but I’m a bit less single-minded about it).
Your way of unifying psychological motivations down to suffering reduction is an “externalist” account of why decisions are made, which is different from the internal story people tell themselves. Why think all people who tell different stories are mistaken about their own reasons? The point “it is a straw man argument that NUs don’t value life or positive states“ is unconvincing, as others have already pointed out. I actually share your view that a lot of things people do might in some way trace back to a motivating quality in feelings of dissatisfaction, but (1) there are exceptions to that (e.g., sometimes I do things on auto-pilot and not out of an internal sense of urgency/need, and sometimes I feel agenty and do things in the world to achieve my reflected life goals rather than tend to my own momentary well-being), and (2) that doesn’t mean that whichever parts of our minds we most identify with need to accept suffering reduction as the ultimate justification of their actions. For instance, let’s say you could prove that a true proximate cause why a person refused to enter Nozick’s experience machine was that, when they contemplated the decision, they felt really bad about the prospect of learning that their own life goals are shallower and more self-centered than they would have thought, and *therefore* they refuse the offer. Your account would say: “They made this choice driven by the avoidance of bad feelings, which just shows that ultimately they should accept the offer, or choose whichever offer reduces more suffering all-things-considered.“ Okay yeah, that’s one story to tell. But the person in question tells herself the story that she made this choice because she has strong aspirations about what type of person she wants to be. Why would your externally-imported justification be more valid (for this person’s life) than her own internal justification?
Ethical theories don’t need to be simple. I used to have the belief that ethical theories ought to be simple/elegant/non-arbitrary for us to have a shot at them being the correct theory, a theory that intelligent civilizations with different evolutionary histories would all converge on. This made me think that NU might be that correct theory. Now I’m confident that this sort of thinking was confused: I think there is no reason to expect that intelligent civilizations with different evolutionary histories would converge on the same values, or that there is one correct set of ethics that they “should” converge on if they were approaching the matter “correctly”. So, looking back, my older intuition feels confused now in a similar way as ordering the simplest food in a restaurant in expectation of anticipating what others would order if they also thought that the goal was that everyone orders the same thing. Now I just want to order the “food” that satisfies my personal criteria (and these criteria do happen to include placing value on non-arbitrariness/simplicity/elegance, but I’m a bit less single-minded about it).
Your way of unifying psychological motivations down to suffering reduction is an “externalist” account of why decisions are made, which is different from the internal story people tell themselves. Why think all people who tell different stories are mistaken about their own reasons? The point “it is a straw man argument that NUs don’t value life or positive states“ is unconvincing, as others have already pointed out. I actually share your view that a lot of things people do might in some way trace back to a motivating quality in feelings of dissatisfaction, but (1) there are exceptions to that (e.g., sometimes I do things on auto-pilot and not out of an internal sense of urgency/need, and sometimes I feel agenty and do things in the world to achieve my reflected life goals rather than tend to my own momentary well-being), and (2) that doesn’t mean that whichever parts of our minds we most identify with need to accept suffering reduction as the ultimate justification of their actions. For instance, let’s say you could prove that a true proximate cause why a person refused to enter Nozick’s experience machine was that, when they contemplated the decision, they felt really bad about the prospect of learning that their own life goals are shallower and more self-centered than they would have thought, and *therefore* they refuse the offer. Your account would say: “They made this choice driven by the avoidance of bad feelings, which just shows that ultimately they should accept the offer, or choose whichever offer reduces more suffering all-things-considered.“ Okay yeah, that’s one story to tell. But the person in question tells herself the story that she made this choice because she has strong aspirations about what type of person she wants to be. Why would your externally-imported justification be more valid (for this person’s life) than her own internal justification?