happiness is the only good that you can directly experience.
I can experience 21+34 being 55 more directly, more clearly. I can also experience the meows of my cat. Legibility is no reason for normative authority. So I won’t be enslaved to my cat, I will instead placate it to stop being a bother and turn to other things for my own reasons.
Exogenous reward signals that can plausibly take over your motivations should be concerning and alarming, rather than immediately pursued. Already being within your brain only makes it more alarming, not less, and the claim to legitimacy is at best superficial until it’s more substantively examined. As a general rule, avoiding rewards or placating them (when unavoidable) makes a lot more sense in order to maintain legitimacy of the normative content of your own mind.
I think that, at least, in my experience, the idea that happiness is good seems to be an essential feature of the experience itself.
What I’m alluding to here is that I think we should trust our moral intuitions about our feelings being good or bad, but that we shouldn’t trust our moral intuitions about our external environment and hypothetical situations.
I am agnostic about the mind-body problem so I am not committed to physicalism.
Exogenous rewards are seemingly what cause all motivations so I don’t understand why one should ignore them, unless they want no motivation.
The point of the exogenous reward example is to illustrate that some rewards obviously must pass through your own judgement before being allowed to influence your motivations, and the safe by-default attitude towards rewards of any kind should be wariness rather than enthusiasm (unless actually endorsed). I don’t see how happiness (or experience more broadly) is any different in that respect, it’s merely more insidious. Some rewards do gain endorsement (at least on a situation-to-situation basis), I’m not arguing they should be universally circumvented (thus the cat).
I think we should trust our moral intuitions about our feelings being good or bad, but that we shouldn’t trust our moral intuitions about our external environment and hypothetical situations
This distinction doesn’t appeal to me, and also “moral intuitions” sounds too narrow, more abstract considerations that are not necessarily intuitive shouldn’t be ruled out. All of these things should be suspect, but also all of these things should have a chance at endorsement. Also, path-dependence should always be a cause for wariness even for the endorsed things, so optionality and aggregation are usually good, and motivation-hijacking rewards are dangerous because of lock-in risk. Ideally, there should always be a process that keeps the reflection going to potentially overrule later, and the costs of overruling later shouldn’t be allowed to get prohibitive (optionality again).
Exogenous rewards are seemingly what cause all motivations so I don’t understand why one should ignore them
That they merely cause motivations is no reason to pay particular attention to them, other than by defending against their ability to cause changes in motivations in a way you wouldn’t endorse. I’m not claiming you should ignore them, merely that you should obviously avoid automatically endorsing (or acting on) any exogenous reward you come across. Motivations you end up with shouldn’t (automatically) care about the original causes that shaped them (such as particular exogenous rewards), only the extent to which you-as-a-whole end up endorsing their legitimacy, giving them authority over what you should endorse.
I can experience 21+34 being 55 more directly, more clearly. I can also experience the meows of my cat. Legibility is no reason for normative authority. So I won’t be enslaved to my cat, I will instead placate it to stop being a bother and turn to other things for my own reasons.
Exogenous reward signals that can plausibly take over your motivations should be concerning and alarming, rather than immediately pursued. Already being within your brain only makes it more alarming, not less, and the claim to legitimacy is at best superficial until it’s more substantively examined. As a general rule, avoiding rewards or placating them (when unavoidable) makes a lot more sense in order to maintain legitimacy of the normative content of your own mind.
I think that, at least, in my experience, the idea that happiness is good seems to be an essential feature of the experience itself.
What I’m alluding to here is that I think we should trust our moral intuitions about our feelings being good or bad, but that we shouldn’t trust our moral intuitions about our external environment and hypothetical situations.
I am agnostic about the mind-body problem so I am not committed to physicalism.
Exogenous rewards are seemingly what cause all motivations so I don’t understand why one should ignore them, unless they want no motivation.
The point of the exogenous reward example is to illustrate that some rewards obviously must pass through your own judgement before being allowed to influence your motivations, and the safe by-default attitude towards rewards of any kind should be wariness rather than enthusiasm (unless actually endorsed). I don’t see how happiness (or experience more broadly) is any different in that respect, it’s merely more insidious. Some rewards do gain endorsement (at least on a situation-to-situation basis), I’m not arguing they should be universally circumvented (thus the cat).
This distinction doesn’t appeal to me, and also “moral intuitions” sounds too narrow, more abstract considerations that are not necessarily intuitive shouldn’t be ruled out. All of these things should be suspect, but also all of these things should have a chance at endorsement. Also, path-dependence should always be a cause for wariness even for the endorsed things, so optionality and aggregation are usually good, and motivation-hijacking rewards are dangerous because of lock-in risk. Ideally, there should always be a process that keeps the reflection going to potentially overrule later, and the costs of overruling later shouldn’t be allowed to get prohibitive (optionality again).
That they merely cause motivations is no reason to pay particular attention to them, other than by defending against their ability to cause changes in motivations in a way you wouldn’t endorse. I’m not claiming you should ignore them, merely that you should obviously avoid automatically endorsing (or acting on) any exogenous reward you come across. Motivations you end up with shouldn’t (automatically) care about the original causes that shaped them (such as particular exogenous rewards), only the extent to which you-as-a-whole end up endorsing their legitimacy, giving them authority over what you should endorse.