And well it should be! I am inherently suspicious of any argument that claims people are “wrong” to value something, that does not itself rely upon other values. Often such arguments really consist of subtly hidden, value-laden assertions, which are strengthened by pretending to be something they are not (such as e.g. ironclad philosophical arguments). In the case of this article, the value-laden assertion is this:
If a particular value you hold was arrived at via a causal process that could plausibly have gone the other way (i.e. there’s a counterfactual world in which you ended up with a different value as a result of this causal process), then you shouldn’t consider that value worth preserving against value drift.
Note that this assertion is extremely value-laden! It contains a claim about what you should do, which the original article completed omitted in favor of obfuscatory talk regarding the neurological processes behind “valuing”. And since (as I discussed above) any value you hold is the result of a causal process that could plausibly have gone the other way, the assertion simplifies to the following:
You shouldn’t consider any values worth preserving against value drift.
This is, again, a normative statement—and not a particularly compelling one at that. I don’t find the idea of relinquishing all my values—of becoming an agent whose utility function is 0 everywhere—at all attractive, and absent an unimaginably strong argument in favor of such, I can’t imagine such a prospect ever being attractive to me. The goal of metaethical theory is not to produce counterintuitive results (even if some people might think that’s the goal); the goal of metaethical theory is to produce a framework that explains and justifies the moral intuitions we already have.
My aim is not to make any normative claims here. As you note, you had to infer one from what I wrote, and that’s an inference you made, not me. That you can fit a pattern to the data doesn’t mean the generative process suggested by the pattern is there. Of course, maybe I am myself mistaken about my own intent since I don’t have perfect capacities of introspection, but I am not trying to claim anyone is doing anything wrong, only that opposing value drift seems strange to me, and when I look at why someone would want to avoid value drift, the most accurate and parsimonious theory I’ve been able to reason my way to is one of attachment to present values and fear of impermanence rather than any principled stance that some particular set of values is best and we would not want to move away from them.
It is however also true that I wouldn’t consider any value worth preserving against drift, since I expect conditions to either cause a value to remain steady for its usefulness or not, or put another way the evidence determines the values, not the values the evidence. Presumably whatever values are settled on in a particular environment are adaptive to that environment, and it seems odd to me to try to attach to anything other than what is useful and adaptive in the conditions you find yourself in. You might read this as making a normative claim, but I see this as more a statement of what minds do: they adapt to survive or fail to adapt and parish. Normativity is an inference we make from there about the purpose of adaptation that leads to survival, but seems not baked in to the act of adaptation that leads to survival itself.
My aim is not to make any normative claims here. As you note, you had to infer one from what I wrote, and that’s an inference you made, not me. That you can fit a pattern to the data doesn’t mean the generative process suggested by the pattern is there. Of course, maybe I am myself mistaken about my own intent since I don’t have perfect capacities of introspection, but I am not trying to claim anyone is doing anything wrong, only that opposing value drift seems strange to me, and when I look at why someone would want to avoid value drift, the most accurate and parsimonious theory I’ve been able to reason my way to is one of attachment to present values and fear of impermanence rather than any principled stance that some particular set of values is best and we would not want to move away from them.
It is however also true that I wouldn’t consider any value worth preserving against drift, since I expect conditions to either cause a value to remain steady for its usefulness or not, or put another way the evidence determines the values, not the values the evidence. Presumably whatever values are settled on in a particular environment are adaptive to that environment, and it seems odd to me to try to attach to anything other than what is useful and adaptive in the conditions you find yourself in. You might read this as making a normative claim, but I see this as more a statement of what minds do: they adapt to survive or fail to adapt and parish. Normativity is an inference we make from there about the purpose of adaptation that leads to survival, but seems not baked in to the act of adaptation that leads to survival itself.