From: Robin Hanson (rhanson@gmu.edu)
Date: Sun Jul 13 2003 - 21:32:48 MDT
On 7/13/2003, Dan Fabulich wrote:
> > A happiness metric does not require that people be informed about the
> > consequences of their choice.
>
>Of course not. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your argument, but I thought
>the claim was: "We can think of two ways of identifying what you'd
>'really' want. First, we can see if you'd be happier if you got it.
>Second, we can see if you'd choose to get it when they are briefly and
>privately informed. In the case of betraying the tribe, the person would
>do this if briefly and privately informed. Therefore, this is what they
>really want."
>I'm claiming, against this: "But it wouldn't, in fact, make them happy.
The question was about the choice between power/status and doing good for
the tribe. We have been assuming that typically when faced with this choice
people fool themselves into thinking they are actually doing good for the
tribe. We have been asking if this is what they "really want", and I
proposed considering two standard ways to define what we "want." I claim
that people are happier in the situations where they get power/status,
relative to the situations where the tribe has been done good to, in part
because they can fool themselves into thinking they are doing good by
getting power/status.
>Your argument is that we're self-decieved: we are "really"
>untrustworthy, in the sense that we "really" want things that no one would
>trust us if they knew we wanted them (and that we would act to get them).
>You follow that up with the claim that if individuals become honest to and
>with themselves, they'll suffer serious consequences.
>
>Any plausible normative corollary to this claim would require that either:
>1 we should cast off our "self-deception" and be honest to ourselves, come
>what may, accepting that we all really want terrible things and that no
>one should be trusted in the ways that they've been pressured to claim, or
>2 we shouldn't believe the truth, as you argued in an earlier thread.
I have so far avoided making any moral claims; I have just been making claims
about what people "really want". It is not morally required to give people
what they really want, and there is no guarantee that what people really
want is to be moral. I do personally find it plausible that the moral
thing to do is to be honest, come what may. But I don't see much of a
basis to argue for that position.
>As you may recall, I argued that 2 was self-contradictory in the "Should
>we believe the truth" thread: the short version of that argument was that
>it was contrary to 2's own normative principles to believe that it was
>true. So, if it were true, we shouldn't believe it: it would be its own
>first casualty. I claimed further that 2 was in violation of normative
>logic: that, rather, the truth is what we should believe. (This is
>because I shouldn't believe that "there is some X such that X is true but
>I shouldn't believe X.")
You have generalized your 2 far more than need be. One might instead claim
that we shouldn't believe certain particular truths. That claim would not
be self-contradictory.
>... being anti-realistic about the set of desires D, those which
>the economist seems to find that we have, allows us to act correctly on
>the economic data without believing anything that would lead us to have to
>accept 1 or 2. We can say, without contradiction, that the economist has
>found a set of things that might be called desires but aren't "really"
>what we desire at all.
It seems to me you are going through these contortions for the mere purpose
of being able at the end to say that we really want to be moral. Sure, you
say, in the ordinary sense of want we don't want to be moral, but in this
new spiffy philosophical sense of want, that we just invented for this
purpose, we do want to be moral. Why not just accept that people don't want
to be moral?
>... the economist's input ends when he tells us which theory is the
>best economic theory; the philosopher's job begins precisely when we are
>deciding whether the best economic theory is "real" or just "useful".
I don't think I follow you here, but it seems irrelevant to me; if need
be I'll just put on my philosopher's hat and claim to be in both roles.
Robin Hanson rhanson@gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu
Assistant Professor of Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444
703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323
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