“I don’t consider it rational to let my moral sentiments run roughshod over my own self interest.”
To be clear, do you consider the choice to repair your dog’s knees an expression of what you’re labelling “moral sentiments” here, or what you’re labelling “self-interest”?
Spending $6200 to fix my 7 year old dog’s knees was primarily moral sentiments at work. I could get a healthy 1 year old dog for a fraction of that price. My 7 year old dog will die very likely within the next 3 or 4 years, larger dogs don’t tend to live that long. So I haven’t saved myself from experiencing the loss of her death, I’ve just put that off. The dog keeps me from doing all sorts of other things I’d like to do, I have to come home to check on her and feed her and so on, precluding just going on and doing social stuff after work when I want to.
Its important to keep in mind that we are not “homo economicus.” We do not have a single utility function with a crank that can be turned to determine the optimum thing to do, and even if in some formal sense we did have such a thing, our reaction to it would not be a deep acceptance of its results.
What we do have is a mess and a mass of competing impulses. I want to do stuff after work. I want to “take care” of those in my charge. My urge to take care of those in my charge presumably arises in me because my humans before me who had less of that urge got competed out of the gene pool.
100,000 years ago, some wolves started hacking humans and as part of that hack, got themselves triggering the stuff that humans have for taking care of their babies. Including the fact that these wolves were pretty good “kids,” able to help with a variety of things, we hacked them back and made them even more to our liking by selective killing of the ones we didn’t like, and then selective breeding of the ones we did like. At this point, we love our babies more than our dogs, but our babies grow into teenagers. But our dogs always stay baby like in their hacked relationship with us.
My wife took my human children and left me a few years ago, but she left the dogs she had bought. I’m not going to abandon them, the hack is strong in me. Don’t get me wrong, I love them. That doesn’t mean I am happy about it, or at least not consistently happy about it.
“I don’t consider it rational to let my moral sentiments run roughshod over my own self interest.”
To be clear, do you consider the choice to repair your dog’s knees an expression of what you’re labelling “moral sentiments” here, or what you’re labelling “self-interest”?
Spending $6200 to fix my 7 year old dog’s knees was primarily moral sentiments at work. I could get a healthy 1 year old dog for a fraction of that price. My 7 year old dog will die very likely within the next 3 or 4 years, larger dogs don’t tend to live that long. So I haven’t saved myself from experiencing the loss of her death, I’ve just put that off. The dog keeps me from doing all sorts of other things I’d like to do, I have to come home to check on her and feed her and so on, precluding just going on and doing social stuff after work when I want to.
Its important to keep in mind that we are not “homo economicus.” We do not have a single utility function with a crank that can be turned to determine the optimum thing to do, and even if in some formal sense we did have such a thing, our reaction to it would not be a deep acceptance of its results.
What we do have is a mess and a mass of competing impulses. I want to do stuff after work. I want to “take care” of those in my charge. My urge to take care of those in my charge presumably arises in me because my humans before me who had less of that urge got competed out of the gene pool.
100,000 years ago, some wolves started hacking humans and as part of that hack, got themselves triggering the stuff that humans have for taking care of their babies. Including the fact that these wolves were pretty good “kids,” able to help with a variety of things, we hacked them back and made them even more to our liking by selective killing of the ones we didn’t like, and then selective breeding of the ones we did like. At this point, we love our babies more than our dogs, but our babies grow into teenagers. But our dogs always stay baby like in their hacked relationship with us.
My wife took my human children and left me a few years ago, but she left the dogs she had bought. I’m not going to abandon them, the hack is strong in me. Don’t get me wrong, I love them. That doesn’t mean I am happy about it, or at least not consistently happy about it.
(nods)
Thanks for clarifying.