Welcome to LessWrong! I wouldn’t comment if I didn’t like your post and think it was worth responding to, so please don’t interpret my disagreement as negative feedback. I appreciate your post, and it got me thinking. That said. I disagree with you.
The real point I’m making here is that however we categorize personal happiness, goodness belongs in the same category, because in practice, all other goals seem to stem from one or both of these concepts.
Your claims are probably much closer to true for some people than they are for me, but they are far from accurate for characterizing me or the people who come most readily to mind for me.
Depending on what you mean by goals, either happiness doesn’t really affect my goals, or the force of habit is one of the primary drivers of my goals. Happiness is a major influence on my ordinary behavior, but is seldom something that I think about very much when making long term plans. (I have thought about thinking about happiness in my long term plans, and decided against doing so because striving after personal happiness in my long term plans does not fit with my personal sense of identity even though it is reasonably consistent with my personal sense of ethics.) Like happiness/enjoyment, routine is a major driver of my everyday behavior, and while it is somewhat motivated by happiness, it comes more from conditioning, much of which was done to me by other people, and much of which I chose for myself. Most of the things I do are simply the things I do out of habit.
When I choose things for myself and make long term plans, virtue/goodness is something that I consider, but I also consider things that are far from being virtue/goodness as you used the term and as most other people use the term. The two things that immediately spring to mind as part of my considerations are my sense of identity/self-image and my desire to be significant.
I was an anglophile in my teenage years, and one of the lasting consequences of that phase of my life is that I Do Not Drink Coffee. This isn’t because I don’t think I should drink coffee. This isn’t because I think drinking coffee would make me less happy. It is simply because drinking coffee is one of the things that I do not do. I drink tea. I would be less myself, from my own perspective, if I started drinking coffee than I am by continuing to not drink coffee and by sometimes drinking tea. Not drinking coffee is part of what it means to me to be me.
My dad is a lifelong Cubs fan. I have sometimes joked to him that one of the things he could do to immediately make his life happier is to quit being a Cubs fan and become a Yankees fan. My dad cares about sports. He would be happier if he was a Yankees fan but he is not a Yankees fan. (You could argue that this is loyalty, but I would disagree… My dad’s from the Midwest but he lives on the East Coast now. When other people move from one part of the country to another and their sports allegiances change he doesn’t find that surprising, upsetting, or in any way reprehensible. There are other aspects of life where he does believe people are morally obligated to be loyal, and he finds it reprehensible when other people violate family loyalty and other forms of loyalty that he believes are morally obligatory.)
In terms of strength of terminal values, a sense of personal identity is, in most of the cases that I can think of, stronger than a desire for happiness and weaker than a desire to be good. Sort of. Not really. That’s just what I want to say and believe about myself but it’s not true. It’s easier for me to give an example having to do with sports than one having to do with tea. (Sorry, I grew up with them… and they spring to mind as vivid examples much more so than other subjects, at least for me.)
I’m a very fickle sports fan by most standards. I don’t really have a sport I enjoy watching in particular, and I don’t really have a team that a cheer for, but every once in a while, I will decide to watch sports… usually a tournament. And then I’ll look at a bunch of stats and read a bunch of commentary, and pick what team I think deserves to win, and cheer for that team, for that tournament. Once I pick a team, I can’t change my mind until the tournament is over… It’s not that I don’t want to or think I shouldn’t. It’s that even when I think that I ought to change my mind, I still keep cheering for the same team as I did before...
Sometimes, I don’t realize that I’ll be invited over to someone else’s house for one of the games. Sometimes, when this happens, I’m cheering for a different team than everyone else, and I feel extremely silly for doing this and a little embarrassed about it because I’m not really a fan of that team. They’re just the team I picked for this tournament. So I’ll go over to someone’s house, and I’ll try to root for the same team as everyone else, and it just won’t work. The home team is ahead, and I’ll smile along with everyone else. I won’t get upset that my team is losing. People won’t realize that my team is losing; they’ll just think I don’t care that much about the game… but then, if my team starts to make a comeback, I suddenly get way more interested in the game. I’ll start to reflexively move in certain ways. I’ll pump my fist a little when they score. I’ll try to keep my gestures and vocalization subtle and under control; I’m still embarrassed about rooting for that team… But I’m doing it anyways, because that’s my team, at least for today. Then when the home team comes back again and wins it, I’m disappointed, and I’m even a little more embarrassed about rooting against them than I would have been if they’d lost. This wouldn’t change even if I had some ethical reason for wanting the other team to win. If (after the tournament had begun and I’d picked what team I was cheering for) some wealthy donor announced that he was going to make some big gift to a charity that I believe in if and only if his team won, and his team didn’t happen to be my team… I would start to feel like I should want his team to win. I know who I cheer for doesn’t affect the outcome of the game, but I still feel like it would be more ethical to cheer for the team that would help this philanthropic cause if it won. I’d try to root for them just like I’d try to cheer for the home team if I got invited over to a friend’s house to watch the game. But I wouldn’t actually want that team to win. When the game started and the teams started pulling ahead of and falling behind each other as so often happens in games, my enthusiasm for the game would keep increasing as my team was pulling ahead and keep falling off again when they started losing ground. It’s just what happens when I watch sports.
My sense of identity also affects my life choices and long term plans. For example, many of my career choices have had as much to do with what roles I can see myself in, as they have they have had to do with what I think would make me happy, what I do well, and what impact I want to have on the world. I think most people can identify with this particular feeling and this comment is long enough already, so I won’t expand on it for now...
By far, the biggest motivator of my personal goals, however, is significance. I want to matter. I don’t want to be evil, but mattering is more important to me than being good… The easiest way for me to explain my moral feelings about significance, is to say that, in practice, I am far more of a deontologist than I am in theory. Karl Marx is an example of someone who matters, but was not what I would call good. He dramatically impacted the world and his net impact has probably been negative, but he didn’t behave in any way that would lead me to consider him evil, so he’s not evil. I would rather become someone who matters and is someone who I would consider good. Norman Borlaug is a significant person whose contributions to the world are pretty much unambiguously good. (Though organic food movement people and other Luddites would erroneously disagree.) Bach, Picasso, and Nabokov are all examples of other people who are extremely significant without necessarily have done anything I would call good. They’ve had a lasting impact on this world.
I want to do that… I don’t want to be the sort of person who would do that. I don’t want to have the traits that allowed Bach to write the sort of music in his time that would be remembered in our time. I want to carve the words “Austin was here” so deep into the world that they can never be erased. (Metaphorically, of course.) I want to matter.
...and not just in that “everybody is important, everybody matters” sort of way...
I would much rather be happy, good, and significant than any two of the three. If I can only be two, I would want to be good and significant. And if I can only be one, I would want to be significant. I don’t want to be evil… there are some things I wouldn’t do even if doing them guaranteed that I would become significant. A few lines I would not cross: I wouldn’t rape or torture anyone. I wouldn’t murder someone I deemed to be innocent. But if the devil and souls were real, I might sell my soul.
Interestingly, the lines I wouldn’t cross for the greater good are different from the lines I wouldn’t cross to obtain significance. I would kill somebody I deemed to be innocent to save the lives of a hundred innocent people… but not to save just two or three innocent people. On the other hand, if the devil and souls were real and he came to me with the offer, I wouldn’t sell my soul to save the lives of a hundred or even a thousand people I deemed to be innocent though I would seriously consider selling my soul to obtain significance. Whatever my values are, they are not well-ordered. (Which is not quite the same as saying they are illogical, though many would interpret it that way.)
Hi, thanks for your reply! I’m not yet sure that we actually disagree. What do you think of with the word happiness? If you’re thinking of happiness simply as “pleasure” then I would agree, that pleasure and goodness alone are not the only psychological motivators. I used happiness to describe someone’s preferred mind-state, the mind-state in which someone would feel the most content. So it’s different for everyone. Some people are happy just to follow their impulses and live in the moment, but other personality types are happier when they have a strong sense of identity, which seems to be what you’re describing.
You also say you want to matter. I think the belief that we will be remembered after our deaths is a one that would lead to happiness, too, so we want to act in such a way that would encourage this belief in ourselves.
I identify with a lot of what you’re saying. I’m less identity-driven than most people, but there are still certain things about myself (being frugal, for example) that, even if I knew changing them would bring me pleasure, I wouldn’t want to simply because I consider them part of my identity. Although it doesn’t make complete sense to me, I think that this small sense of identity contributes to my happy mind-state.
So I’m guessing that your idea of happiness was just a bit more narrow than mine was? But we probably still agree?
Welcome to LessWrong! I wouldn’t comment if I didn’t like your post and think it was worth responding to, so please don’t interpret my disagreement as negative feedback. I appreciate your post, and it got me thinking. That said. I disagree with you.
Your claims are probably much closer to true for some people than they are for me, but they are far from accurate for characterizing me or the people who come most readily to mind for me.
Depending on what you mean by goals, either happiness doesn’t really affect my goals, or the force of habit is one of the primary drivers of my goals. Happiness is a major influence on my ordinary behavior, but is seldom something that I think about very much when making long term plans. (I have thought about thinking about happiness in my long term plans, and decided against doing so because striving after personal happiness in my long term plans does not fit with my personal sense of identity even though it is reasonably consistent with my personal sense of ethics.) Like happiness/enjoyment, routine is a major driver of my everyday behavior, and while it is somewhat motivated by happiness, it comes more from conditioning, much of which was done to me by other people, and much of which I chose for myself. Most of the things I do are simply the things I do out of habit.
When I choose things for myself and make long term plans, virtue/goodness is something that I consider, but I also consider things that are far from being virtue/goodness as you used the term and as most other people use the term. The two things that immediately spring to mind as part of my considerations are my sense of identity/self-image and my desire to be significant.
I was an anglophile in my teenage years, and one of the lasting consequences of that phase of my life is that I Do Not Drink Coffee. This isn’t because I don’t think I should drink coffee. This isn’t because I think drinking coffee would make me less happy. It is simply because drinking coffee is one of the things that I do not do. I drink tea. I would be less myself, from my own perspective, if I started drinking coffee than I am by continuing to not drink coffee and by sometimes drinking tea. Not drinking coffee is part of what it means to me to be me.
My dad is a lifelong Cubs fan. I have sometimes joked to him that one of the things he could do to immediately make his life happier is to quit being a Cubs fan and become a Yankees fan. My dad cares about sports. He would be happier if he was a Yankees fan but he is not a Yankees fan. (You could argue that this is loyalty, but I would disagree… My dad’s from the Midwest but he lives on the East Coast now. When other people move from one part of the country to another and their sports allegiances change he doesn’t find that surprising, upsetting, or in any way reprehensible. There are other aspects of life where he does believe people are morally obligated to be loyal, and he finds it reprehensible when other people violate family loyalty and other forms of loyalty that he believes are morally obligatory.)
In terms of strength of terminal values, a sense of personal identity is, in most of the cases that I can think of, stronger than a desire for happiness and weaker than a desire to be good. Sort of. Not really. That’s just what I want to say and believe about myself but it’s not true. It’s easier for me to give an example having to do with sports than one having to do with tea. (Sorry, I grew up with them… and they spring to mind as vivid examples much more so than other subjects, at least for me.)
I’m a very fickle sports fan by most standards. I don’t really have a sport I enjoy watching in particular, and I don’t really have a team that a cheer for, but every once in a while, I will decide to watch sports… usually a tournament. And then I’ll look at a bunch of stats and read a bunch of commentary, and pick what team I think deserves to win, and cheer for that team, for that tournament. Once I pick a team, I can’t change my mind until the tournament is over… It’s not that I don’t want to or think I shouldn’t. It’s that even when I think that I ought to change my mind, I still keep cheering for the same team as I did before...
Sometimes, I don’t realize that I’ll be invited over to someone else’s house for one of the games. Sometimes, when this happens, I’m cheering for a different team than everyone else, and I feel extremely silly for doing this and a little embarrassed about it because I’m not really a fan of that team. They’re just the team I picked for this tournament. So I’ll go over to someone’s house, and I’ll try to root for the same team as everyone else, and it just won’t work. The home team is ahead, and I’ll smile along with everyone else. I won’t get upset that my team is losing. People won’t realize that my team is losing; they’ll just think I don’t care that much about the game… but then, if my team starts to make a comeback, I suddenly get way more interested in the game. I’ll start to reflexively move in certain ways. I’ll pump my fist a little when they score. I’ll try to keep my gestures and vocalization subtle and under control; I’m still embarrassed about rooting for that team… But I’m doing it anyways, because that’s my team, at least for today. Then when the home team comes back again and wins it, I’m disappointed, and I’m even a little more embarrassed about rooting against them than I would have been if they’d lost. This wouldn’t change even if I had some ethical reason for wanting the other team to win. If (after the tournament had begun and I’d picked what team I was cheering for) some wealthy donor announced that he was going to make some big gift to a charity that I believe in if and only if his team won, and his team didn’t happen to be my team… I would start to feel like I should want his team to win. I know who I cheer for doesn’t affect the outcome of the game, but I still feel like it would be more ethical to cheer for the team that would help this philanthropic cause if it won. I’d try to root for them just like I’d try to cheer for the home team if I got invited over to a friend’s house to watch the game. But I wouldn’t actually want that team to win. When the game started and the teams started pulling ahead of and falling behind each other as so often happens in games, my enthusiasm for the game would keep increasing as my team was pulling ahead and keep falling off again when they started losing ground. It’s just what happens when I watch sports.
My sense of identity also affects my life choices and long term plans. For example, many of my career choices have had as much to do with what roles I can see myself in, as they have they have had to do with what I think would make me happy, what I do well, and what impact I want to have on the world. I think most people can identify with this particular feeling and this comment is long enough already, so I won’t expand on it for now...
By far, the biggest motivator of my personal goals, however, is significance. I want to matter. I don’t want to be evil, but mattering is more important to me than being good… The easiest way for me to explain my moral feelings about significance, is to say that, in practice, I am far more of a deontologist than I am in theory. Karl Marx is an example of someone who matters, but was not what I would call good. He dramatically impacted the world and his net impact has probably been negative, but he didn’t behave in any way that would lead me to consider him evil, so he’s not evil. I would rather become someone who matters and is someone who I would consider good. Norman Borlaug is a significant person whose contributions to the world are pretty much unambiguously good. (Though organic food movement people and other Luddites would erroneously disagree.) Bach, Picasso, and Nabokov are all examples of other people who are extremely significant without necessarily have done anything I would call good. They’ve had a lasting impact on this world.
I want to do that… I don’t want to be the sort of person who would do that. I don’t want to have the traits that allowed Bach to write the sort of music in his time that would be remembered in our time. I want to carve the words “Austin was here” so deep into the world that they can never be erased. (Metaphorically, of course.) I want to matter.
...and not just in that “everybody is important, everybody matters” sort of way...
I would much rather be happy, good, and significant than any two of the three. If I can only be two, I would want to be good and significant. And if I can only be one, I would want to be significant. I don’t want to be evil… there are some things I wouldn’t do even if doing them guaranteed that I would become significant. A few lines I would not cross: I wouldn’t rape or torture anyone. I wouldn’t murder someone I deemed to be innocent. But if the devil and souls were real, I might sell my soul.
Interestingly, the lines I wouldn’t cross for the greater good are different from the lines I wouldn’t cross to obtain significance. I would kill somebody I deemed to be innocent to save the lives of a hundred innocent people… but not to save just two or three innocent people. On the other hand, if the devil and souls were real and he came to me with the offer, I wouldn’t sell my soul to save the lives of a hundred or even a thousand people I deemed to be innocent though I would seriously consider selling my soul to obtain significance. Whatever my values are, they are not well-ordered. (Which is not quite the same as saying they are illogical, though many would interpret it that way.)
Hi, thanks for your reply! I’m not yet sure that we actually disagree. What do you think of with the word happiness? If you’re thinking of happiness simply as “pleasure” then I would agree, that pleasure and goodness alone are not the only psychological motivators. I used happiness to describe someone’s preferred mind-state, the mind-state in which someone would feel the most content. So it’s different for everyone. Some people are happy just to follow their impulses and live in the moment, but other personality types are happier when they have a strong sense of identity, which seems to be what you’re describing.
You also say you want to matter. I think the belief that we will be remembered after our deaths is a one that would lead to happiness, too, so we want to act in such a way that would encourage this belief in ourselves.
I identify with a lot of what you’re saying. I’m less identity-driven than most people, but there are still certain things about myself (being frugal, for example) that, even if I knew changing them would bring me pleasure, I wouldn’t want to simply because I consider them part of my identity. Although it doesn’t make complete sense to me, I think that this small sense of identity contributes to my happy mind-state.
So I’m guessing that your idea of happiness was just a bit more narrow than mine was? But we probably still agree?
Do people actually believe that no one in England drinks coffee at all?
Well, they have something they claim is coffee here...