Consider this essay [...] which takes the point of view that obviously a rational person would kill themselves
That sounded interestingly different from my usual perspective, so I read it, and it doesn’t seem to me to be arguing that at all? At best you could say that it’s arguing that if humans were more rational, then suicide rates would go up, which seems much less controversial.
Hm, I suppose that’s true. But I think the overall point still stands? It’s illustrating a type of thinking that doesn’t make sense to one thinking in terms of concrete, unmodifiable goals in the external world.
Is that really true? If you can have “have other people not suffer horribly” as a goal, you can have “not suffer horribly yourself” as a goal too. And if, on balance, your life seems likely to involve a lot of horrible suffering, then suicide might absolutely make sense even though it would reduce your ability to achieve your other goals.
This is perhaps an intermediate example, but I do think that once you’re talking about internal experiences to be avoided, it’s definitely not all the way at the goal-thinking end.
I’m not convinced. To me, at least, my goals that are about me don’t feel particularly different in kind from my goals that are about other people, nor do my goals that are about experiences feel particularly different from my goals that are about things other than experiences.
(It’s certainly possible to draw your dividing line between, say, “what you want for yourself” and “what other things you want”, but I think that’s an entirely different line from the one drawn in the OP.)
OK. I think I didn’t think through my reply sufficiently. Something seemed off with what you were saying, but I failed to think through what and made a reply that didn’t really make sense instead. But thinking things through a bit more now I think I can lay out my actual objection a bit more clearly.
I definitely think that if you’re taking the point of view that suicide is preferable to suffering you’re not applying what I’m calling goal-thinking. (Remember here that the description I laid out above is not intended as some sort of intensional definition, just my attempt to explicate this distinction I’ve noticed.) I don’t think goal-thinking would consider nonexistence as some sort of neutral point as many do.
I think the best way of explaining this maybe is that goal-thinking—or at-least the extreme version which nobody actually uses—is to simply not consider happiness or suffering as whatever as separate objects worth considering at all, that can be good or bad, or that should be acted on directly; but purely as indicators of whether one is achieving one’s goals—intermediates to be eliminated. In this point of view, suffering isn’t some separate thing to be gotten rid of by whatever means, but simply the internal experience of not achieving one’s goals, the only proper response to which is to go out and do so. You see?
And if we continue in this direction, one can also apply this to others; so you wouldn’t have “not have other people suffer horribly” as a goal in the first place. You would always phrase things in terms of other’s goals, and whether they’re being thwarted, rather than in terms of their experiences.
Again, none of what I’m saying here necessarily follows from what I wrote in the OP, but as I said, that was never intended as an intensional definition. I think the distinction I’m drawing makes sense regardless of whether I described it sufficiently clearly initially.
Happiness, suffering, etc., function as internal estimators of goal-met-ness. Like a variable in a computer program that indicates how you’re doing. Hence, trying to optimize happiness directly runs the risk of finding ways to change the value of the variable without the corresponding real-world things the variable is trying to track. So far, so good.
But! That doesn’t mean that happiness can’t also be a thing we care about. If I can arrange for someone’s goals to be 50% met and for them to feel either as if they’re 40% met or as if they’re 60% met, I probably choose the latter; people like feeling as if their goals are met, and I insist that it’s perfectly reasonable for me to care about that as well as about their actual goals. For that matter, if someone has goals I find terrible, I may actually prefer their goals to go unmet but for them still to be happy.
I apply the same to myself—within reason, I would prefer my happiness to overestimate rather than underestimate how well my goals are being met—but obviously treating happiness as a goal is more dangerous there because the risk of getting seriously decoupled from my goals is greater. (I think.)
I don’t think it’s necessary to see nonexistence as neutral in order to prefer (in some cases, perhaps only very extreme ones) nonexistence to existence-with-great-suffering. Suffering is unpleasant. People hate it and strive to avoid it. Yes, the underlying reason for that is because this helps them achieve other goals, but I am not obliged to care only about the underlying reason. (Just as I’m not obliged to regard sex as existing only for the sake of procreation.)
I don’t know for sure whether we’re really disagreeing. Perhaps that’s a question with no definite answer; the question’s about where best to draw the boundary of an only-vaguely-defined term. But it seems like you’re saying “goal-thinking must only be concerned with goals that don’t involve people’s happiness” and I’m saying I think that’s a mistake and that the fundamental distinction is between doing something as part of a happiness-maximizing process and recognizing the layer of indirection in that and aiming at goals we can see other reasons for, which may or may not happen to involve our or someone else’s happiness.
Obviously you can choose to focus only on goals that don’t involve happiness in any way at all, and maybe doing so makes some of the issues clearer. But I don’t think “involving happiness” / “not involving happiness” is the most fundamental criterion here; the distinction is actually, as your original terminology makes clear, between different modes of thinking.
That sounded interestingly different from my usual perspective, so I read it, and it doesn’t seem to me to be arguing that at all? At best you could say that it’s arguing that if humans were more rational, then suicide rates would go up, which seems much less controversial.
Hm, I suppose that’s true. But I think the overall point still stands? It’s illustrating a type of thinking that doesn’t make sense to one thinking in terms of concrete, unmodifiable goals in the external world.
Is that really true? If you can have “have other people not suffer horribly” as a goal, you can have “not suffer horribly yourself” as a goal too. And if, on balance, your life seems likely to involve a lot of horrible suffering, then suicide might absolutely make sense even though it would reduce your ability to achieve your other goals.
This is perhaps an intermediate example, but I do think that once you’re talking about internal experiences to be avoided, it’s definitely not all the way at the goal-thinking end.
I’m not convinced. To me, at least, my goals that are about me don’t feel particularly different in kind from my goals that are about other people, nor do my goals that are about experiences feel particularly different from my goals that are about things other than experiences.
(It’s certainly possible to draw your dividing line between, say, “what you want for yourself” and “what other things you want”, but I think that’s an entirely different line from the one drawn in the OP.)
OK. I think I didn’t think through my reply sufficiently. Something seemed off with what you were saying, but I failed to think through what and made a reply that didn’t really make sense instead. But thinking things through a bit more now I think I can lay out my actual objection a bit more clearly.
I definitely think that if you’re taking the point of view that suicide is preferable to suffering you’re not applying what I’m calling goal-thinking. (Remember here that the description I laid out above is not intended as some sort of intensional definition, just my attempt to explicate this distinction I’ve noticed.) I don’t think goal-thinking would consider nonexistence as some sort of neutral point as many do.
I think the best way of explaining this maybe is that goal-thinking—or at-least the extreme version which nobody actually uses—is to simply not consider happiness or suffering as whatever as separate objects worth considering at all, that can be good or bad, or that should be acted on directly; but purely as indicators of whether one is achieving one’s goals—intermediates to be eliminated. In this point of view, suffering isn’t some separate thing to be gotten rid of by whatever means, but simply the internal experience of not achieving one’s goals, the only proper response to which is to go out and do so. You see?
And if we continue in this direction, one can also apply this to others; so you wouldn’t have “not have other people suffer horribly” as a goal in the first place. You would always phrase things in terms of other’s goals, and whether they’re being thwarted, rather than in terms of their experiences.
Again, none of what I’m saying here necessarily follows from what I wrote in the OP, but as I said, that was never intended as an intensional definition. I think the distinction I’m drawing makes sense regardless of whether I described it sufficiently clearly initially.
I see things slightly differently.
Happiness, suffering, etc., function as internal estimators of goal-met-ness. Like a variable in a computer program that indicates how you’re doing. Hence, trying to optimize happiness directly runs the risk of finding ways to change the value of the variable without the corresponding real-world things the variable is trying to track. So far, so good.
But! That doesn’t mean that happiness can’t also be a thing we care about. If I can arrange for someone’s goals to be 50% met and for them to feel either as if they’re 40% met or as if they’re 60% met, I probably choose the latter; people like feeling as if their goals are met, and I insist that it’s perfectly reasonable for me to care about that as well as about their actual goals. For that matter, if someone has goals I find terrible, I may actually prefer their goals to go unmet but for them still to be happy.
I apply the same to myself—within reason, I would prefer my happiness to overestimate rather than underestimate how well my goals are being met—but obviously treating happiness as a goal is more dangerous there because the risk of getting seriously decoupled from my goals is greater. (I think.)
I don’t think it’s necessary to see nonexistence as neutral in order to prefer (in some cases, perhaps only very extreme ones) nonexistence to existence-with-great-suffering. Suffering is unpleasant. People hate it and strive to avoid it. Yes, the underlying reason for that is because this helps them achieve other goals, but I am not obliged to care only about the underlying reason. (Just as I’m not obliged to regard sex as existing only for the sake of procreation.)
I mean, are you actually disagreeing with me here? I think you’re just describing an intermediate position.
I don’t know for sure whether we’re really disagreeing. Perhaps that’s a question with no definite answer; the question’s about where best to draw the boundary of an only-vaguely-defined term. But it seems like you’re saying “goal-thinking must only be concerned with goals that don’t involve people’s happiness” and I’m saying I think that’s a mistake and that the fundamental distinction is between doing something as part of a happiness-maximizing process and recognizing the layer of indirection in that and aiming at goals we can see other reasons for, which may or may not happen to involve our or someone else’s happiness.
Obviously you can choose to focus only on goals that don’t involve happiness in any way at all, and maybe doing so makes some of the issues clearer. But I don’t think “involving happiness” / “not involving happiness” is the most fundamental criterion here; the distinction is actually, as your original terminology makes clear, between different modes of thinking.