Hello Felicifia,

Thank you for existing. That was a good idea on your part.

I'm a personal injury lawyer living near San Francisco with an interest in thinking clearly about life paths, morality, and the near future (5 - 30 years out). Back in high school, I came across Sartre's insight that (a) we have to choose our own purposes in life, because there's no other source a purpose could come-- so I'm pretty OK with that by now. Much more recently, I learned from Less Wrong that (b) we have to have good reasons for the choices we make, because otherwise we are probably deceiving ourselves about what we're doing and are unlikely to accomplish any goals. A + B together are driving me nuts, because I'm not sure what it would mean to have good reasons for choosing a purpose in life.

Many of the people here seem to be committed to shaping themselves into pleasure- or preference-based egalitarians, i.e., they want to act so as to value every entity's pleasure (or preferences) equally. I'm not convinced that pleasure or preference-satisfaction are the most important consequence, and (as I explain in my first post) I'm also not sure that I want to value all entities equally.

Nevertheless, I find people who do hold those opinions fascinating, so feel free to say hello and tell me what's on your mind! Also, I have a sense that the people here are at least asking all the right questions and answering them in a useful way, so even where I start from different principles than others, I'm likely to enjoy swapping stories about our respective chains of reasoning.

That's it for now -- be well!

Hey Argothair!

Welcome to a one-of-a-kind place, many of us are very fond of it.

In some sense Camus is surely right - you have to decide to do something, any indecision will lead to some outcome, an outcome you allowed to happen due to your indecision. But I am unsure how to understand his claim. Is his claim that we are morally permitted to choose whatever we'd like and thus it will be right? Surely that doesn't sound reasonable.

I think experiences are all that matter in the realm of morality - besides subjective experiences, what else is there to the world that could matter? Pleasure and preference-satisfaction both fall under the category of "preferred subjective experiences" - would this category be enough to include all you care about?

I think most people here are of the opinion that we should not value "all entities equally" - surely the life of a 20 year old vegetarian who helps many people is of greater value (all things considered) compared to a rabid dog that bites other animals, spreading the virus.

Cheers! I'd love to hear your response

Welcome Argothair. Will converse more when I have less of a headache

Boris, where are you paraphrasing Camus from? That might be a handy quote for an essay I'd like to write...

Arepo wrote:...Boris, where are you paraphrasing Camus from? That might be a handy quote for an essay I'd like to write...

I'm going on memory from years ago; possibly paraphrasing what a professor said. If you're referring to the "you have to decide" he probably said that, though unsure if he elaborated the "an outcome you allowed to happen due to your indecision" (or even shared the sentiment). I was never into Camus.

Hi Argothair!

In my opinion, personal-injury lawyers don't get enough love (but who does?). They advertise on billboards and in phone books, but do they make much money on average? I imagine that the career requires excellent communication skills as well as book smarts, so I'm not sure it's something I could do. But if I'm in the Bay Area and am personally injured, I'll know whom to call.

Thank you, everyone, for the warm welcome!

yboris, I agree with you that subjective experiences are probably the only items of value in the observable Universe; my main objection to the "experience machine" where you get hooked up to a Matrix-like dreamworld where everything is awesome all the time (including whatever degree of challenge and suffering you turn out to enjoy) is that it wouldn't work in practice. If you assume away that objection, and credibly assure me that it really would work, and that everyone who wants to plug in can do so, for as long as they like, at zero risk, then I would plug in without hesitation, even if it meant that, e.g., my "objective body" would wither away or send out pain signals that would never reach my awareness.

That said, I don't think that your formula "preferred subjective experience" gets around my concerns about preferences and pleasures. Maximizing pleasure is unwise because there are things we want (and ought to have) that go beyond pleasure, such as authentic connections, challenge/struggle, the freedom to make decisions that affect our futures, etc. Even if we find aspects of these things pleasurable, I think it is pretty clear that one could imagine a scenario in which eliminating them would be necessary to truly maximize pleasure. For example, a cocaine high with no side effects that could be sustained indefinitely, or a mind that was reduced to orgasmium, would not allow much room for complex phenomena like relationships, struggles, or freedom. But if we really want to maximize pleasure, we shouldn't care about that, and we should just all become wireheads.

Preference-satisfaction does a little better than pleasure, but people often have very unstable preferences, to say the least. Between hyperbolic discounting, priming/anchoring effects, loss aversion, framing biases, selective memory, motivated cognition, and plain old ignorance about what is like to have a given subjective experience, it is hard to say that humans even *have* preferences over the set of reasonably common lifestyles. Obviously we prefer a good square meal to torture, and prefer to save an apparently innocent child from drowning in front of us rather than to read the recipes column in the newspaper, but for any serious moral debate, the answer you arrive at will often depend on which equally plausible meaning of "prefer" you choose to deploy.

Arepo, hope your headache goes away soon.

Pat, you're very flattering, but I couldn't help noticing that you are posting from Alaska. If your defective boat injures you while accidentally drifting 4000 miles down the Pacific coastline, I will be honored to serve as your personal injury lawyer.

Hi Argothair,
In this day and age, hedonistic utilitarians agree with preference utilitarians that the experience of relationships, struggles and freedoms are extremely important to our overall wellbeing. Our conception of goodness is any conscious experience that we'd rather have. What it can't include is the relationship itself, apart from its impact on my inner life. Likewise, I can't say that struggle is intrinsically valuable. It's only valuable because of how struggling makes me feel.

I wonder where you might come down on this divide...

Ryan, that's the best formulation that I've heard yet, and I'm happy to set aside the value of a relationship "as such" independent of its effects on the people who participate in it, but I'm still not sure that "any conscious experience that we'd rather have" is a safe touchstone for choosing possible futures.

How does one cope with the changes caused by conscious experiences? E.g. if I currently prefer to try cocaine, and after trying cocaine I will indefinitely prefer using as much cocaine as possible, does that mean that it's good for me to use cocaine? Suppose if you were to lock me in your closet for half an hour, the urge to try cocaine would pass, never to return, and then afterward I would prefer not to have tried cocaine. Should you lock me in your closet? Why? How do you make a meaningful comparison of my preference satisfaction in one state of the world vs. the other state of the world? How do you decide whether the part of me that wants to try cocaine is the real me, or whether the part of me that doesn't want to try it is the real me?

Cocaine's a trivial example in that most thoughtful people are against it. Suppose we change the experience to "a PhD program," or "a one-year stay at a Zen monastery," or "opening up your marriage," or "telling your best friend of 10 years exactly what you think of his brother," or "quitting your job." Then what?

Finally, what about the young, the senile, the insane, the forgetful, and the reckless among us? Not to mention chimps, dolphins, dogs, and other creatures capable of explicit communication. Whose explicit preferences should be honored as a binding definition of their welfare, and whose explicit preferences should be overruled in favor of following some generic theory about what will make those creatures happy? Who gets to decide who falls in which category? Why?

None of this is to say that I have some foolproof alternative that can sidestep these questions. Any moral theory will have to wrestle with them. Still, to the extent that preference utilitarians or hedonic utilitarians think that they've got the big questions sewed up tight, and that the only questions remaining are border cases and matters of practical application, this post could be a useful reminder of how much we don't know. It could also be a sign that 'conservative' or 'burkean' or 'common sense' insights about how to run a society are more useful than utilitarians will usually admit. If we don't really have a firm understanding of what 'the good' is, then we might want to devote a large chunk of our energy to doing things that have satisfied us in the past, or that appear very, very likely to satisfy us. We might want to minimize the energy we put into projects that seem to have several necessary links or inferences, or that vary sharply from any projects that have gone before, unless the projects are intended simply as test cases or pilot studies to gather more data.

Argothair wrote:For example, a cocaine high with no side effects that could be sustained indefinitely, or a mind that was reduced to orgasmium, would not allow much room for complex phenomena like relationships, struggles, or freedom.

I'd gladly take the permanent cocaine high over an average contemporary human life. Of course, "with no side effects" and "sustained indefinitely" are unfortunately fiction.