Re: Why believe the truth?

From: Mark Walker (mark@permanentend.org)
Date: Wed Jun 18 2003 - 11:34:32 MDT

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    ----- Original Message -----
    From: "Robin Hanson" <rhanson@gmu.edu>
    > I'm not sure whether the short-term experience of living each way tells
    you
    > enough to decide which is the good life.

    Agreed. But I said "a while" not a "short while". I think if such future
    lives our like ours then a "while" would have to be long enough to
    experience the life as having a certain "narrative". When someone says "I
    tried it but that life was not for me" we generally understand this to mean
    that they had sufficient experience in that life. Someone who renounces a
    "life of sex, drugs and rock and roll" after their first wild high school
    party has just not given it the good old college try.

    >But I grant that self-deception
    > may be what some, or even most people, really want in reflective
    equilibrium.
    > In my paper proposing betting markets as as the factual input to a form of
    > government (http://hanson.gmu.edu/futarchy.pdf), I suggest that people who
    > do not want to face uncomfortable truths can probably successfully avoid
    > paying much attention to such markets, just as people today who want to
    > believe in the virtue of politics manage to avoid seeing how the sausage
    > is made. Bet in the markets the few minutes a day you are rational, and
    then
    > go back to your blissful ignorance.
    >
    Do you think choosing this life would be a moral failing? I think this is
    where we entered into the debate. I thought you felt the same pull as me
    that abandoning the truth is a moral failing of some sort. (And if so, what
    is the basis for this claim?) This is not to say that if we think there is a
    moral failing here that we would coerce people into not living the life of
    blissful ignorance, this is only a question of how we are to judge them.

    Mark

    Mark Walker, PhD
    Research Associate, Philosophy, Trinity College
    University of Toronto
    Room 214 Gerald Larkin Building
    15 Devonshire Place
    Toronto
    M5S 1H8
    www.permanentend.org

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