tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3891434218564545511.post6227108880071094419..comments2024-03-28T19:56:42.305-05:00Comments on Alexander Pruss's Blog: Humean views of rationality and the pursuit of moneyAlexander R Prusshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05989277655934827117noreply@blogger.comBlogger10125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3891434218564545511.post-74268366198826464422017-01-08T01:40:55.680-06:002017-01-08T01:40:55.680-06:00In the days of empire, colonists liked to complain...In the days of empire, colonists liked to complain that the “natives” were “lazy”. By this they meant that the natives worked until they had enough money to buy what they immediately wanted, then stopped. So maybe Heath White’s “odd line” is not so odd. The natives may have been short-sighted, but they acted rationally to satisfy their desires as far as they could see.<br /><br /><i>...especially if you received the further information that it is only one of your desires that is furthered by the action.</i> How could you or anyone else could know this, except in contrived cases? I suspect that if you demand consistency with tricky conditions like this, you will be driven, von Neumann – Morgenstern style, to expected utility maximization. Desires would be reduced to utilities on states of the world. This no doubt counts as Humean. The problem is that it is not credible as a model of human action.<br /><br />A naive approach to the Christmas present: You believe that your friend’s gift will be a pleasant surprise. You like pleasant surprises. So you unwrap it. This may seem to beg the question, but it need not. Maybe your friend’s past gifts were pleasant surprises, so you make the induction “Whenever I have unwrapped his gifts, I received a pleasant surprise. So it’s probably worth unwrapping this gift.” Note that you don’t have to care, or even remember, what his past gifts were, just that they were pleasant surprises. The induction is essentially “unwrap gift, feel good”. Of course, this does not fit an “x desires that p” format, if p is required to be a proposition about the world – the “pleasant surprise” involves a mental state. Maybe this is an argument against a particular formalisation of Humeanism, not against Humeanism itself. <br /> <br />IanShttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00111583711680190175noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3891434218564545511.post-11623963642108387372017-01-05T11:40:54.338-06:002017-01-05T11:40:54.338-06:00If for each desire I have, I desire that it be sat...If for each desire I have, I desire that it be satisfied, then when I start with n desires, this creates another n desires (the desire that desire 1 be satisfied, the desire that desire 2 be satisfied, etc.) But this just gets back to the original problem: I don't know which two of the 2n desires is satisfied by the desire.<br /><br />Partial fulfillment could work, but it's pretty complicated, because we have to measure the degree of fulfillment. I desire that my children flourish and I desire to eat cake. Having the former satisfied counts for more in respect of partial fulfillment than having the latter satisfied. Yet formally with respect to the desire that all my desires be fulfilled, the two are on par.Alexander R Prusshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05989277655934827117noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3891434218564545511.post-91275785789751767622017-01-05T07:57:27.141-06:002017-01-05T07:57:27.141-06:00Maybe the technical problem can be overcome by mov...Maybe the technical problem can be overcome by moving the quantifiers around. Not: I have a desire that all my desires be satisfied; but: For each desire that I have, I desire that it be satisfied. I'm not sure about this since I'm not sure you can want the fulfillment of a desire of whose existence you are unaware or not thinking of particularly. <br /><br />If that will not work, then maybe we can appeal to "partial fulfillment" of a desire. For some desires, partial fulfillment is better than nothing; e.g. if I want a million dollars then half a million is still pretty good. (Other desires won't work this way: if I want a heart transplant, half a transplant is no good.) The desire that all my desires be fulfilled would be along this line: something is better than nothing, at least in the case of the fulfillment of non-derived desires. Heath Whitehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13535886546816778688noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3891434218564545511.post-4511547018055114892017-01-04T23:40:49.157-06:002017-01-04T23:40:49.157-06:00There is also a technical problem with formulating...There is also a technical problem with formulating the higher-level desire. One can't put it in the standard "x desires that p" format. For how would it look? "x desires that all of x's desires are satisfied"? But a normal person knows that in the life all her desires won't be satisfied no matter what she does. (She *might* think there is an afterlife in which they might be satisfied, but in any case money is unlikely to help one get there.) <br /><br />This technical problem can be overcome by allowing for non-propositional desires, but it is a cost of the theory that one needs to do that.<br /><br />Here's a Christmasy way of putting the original problem. You get a wrapped gift from a friend and have no idea what desire of yours it will satisfy. You know that the friend is so thoughtful that the gift will be (a) great and (b) surprising. There is no point trying to figure out which desire of yours it will satisfy--it is very unlikely to be any that you think of. So why bother unwrapping?Alexander R Prusshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05989277655934827117noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3891434218564545511.post-51956753769618185882017-01-04T22:09:45.282-06:002017-01-04T22:09:45.282-06:00I am a little worried about "rational motivat...I am a little worried about "rational motivation." It is ambiguous between "reason / justification" and "causal oomph". In the latter case, it seems to me the Humean should agree that anything can cause anything. So I think we are asking about the structure of justifications that a Humean should acknowledge.<br /><br />Well, contrary to my last comment, maybe there is an out. The Humean *could* sort of bite the bullet and say, <br /><br />"Normal developed people have a higher-order desire to satisfy their desires. If that higher-order desire exists, then there is a desire-involving inference from that desire and 'I have some desire that money will satisfy, though I'm not thinking which right now' to 'I want money'. If for some strange reason a person does not have that higher-order desire, and isn't thinking of a particular desire money will satisfy, there is no reason to want money." <br /><br />This seems odd but maybe it is consistent. <br /><br />But if we think it is wrong, does it follow that moral beliefs could play the same function? Well, one way we might get the higher-order desire by deriving it from a principle of desire-satisfaction, which is what the Humean system embodies: I *know* I have various desires, and I have a principle (I guess) of satisfying them, so I *want* to have satisfied desires. But then it seems that whatever principles other principles we can believe, maybe we can derive desires from them, too. <br /><br />If the Humean doesn't want to admit this then I think they have to take the odd line I suggested above.<br /><br />This is good enough to write up.<br />Heath Whitehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13535886546816778688noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3891434218564545511.post-34248797144004453802017-01-04T20:52:04.224-06:002017-01-04T20:52:04.224-06:00So, if it's established that the Humean has to...So, if it's established that the Humean has to accept that some rational motivation is possible without being derived from desire, does she have a good reason to deny that this could happen in the case of moral beliefs?Alexander R Prusshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05989277655934827117noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3891434218564545511.post-59211589454819120612017-01-04T10:34:36.275-06:002017-01-04T10:34:36.275-06:00That's a good point. I think I'm persuade...That's a good point. I think I'm persuaded. The resulting picture is that desires can be rationally derived from non-desires. Heath Whitehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13535886546816778688noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3891434218564545511.post-59348778140940592492017-01-04T10:01:45.309-06:002017-01-04T10:01:45.309-06:00The hypothesis that you have no desires is really ...The hypothesis that you have no desires is really weird--maybe on Humean grounds you don't count as an agent then. But suppose this hypothesis. You have only two desires, for drink and food, but you are honestly mistaken and you think you have other desires. An expert then tells you that a costless action will fulfill a desire OTHER than for food or drink. You believe them, so you do the action. This is surely possible, but the resulting action is not motivated by any desire you have, since it's not motivated by the desire for food nor by the desire for drink and these are the only desires you have.Alexander R Prusshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05989277655934827117noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3891434218564545511.post-65212670167797012252017-01-02T18:59:56.042-06:002017-01-02T18:59:56.042-06:00But we don't want to have a premise that actua...But we don't want to have a premise that actually includes a disjunction of all our desires, since that's too long a premise for us to practically think.<br />And if instead we just quantify existentially, then the reasoning doesn't actually connect with any desire. Someone who has no desire but mistakenly thinks she does could still reason that way and so one could have practical reasoning in the absence of desires.Alexander R Prusshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05989277655934827117noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3891434218564545511.post-79125406151053286732017-01-02T18:09:27.824-06:002017-01-02T18:09:27.824-06:00On any Humean view, we get some desires by reasoni...On any Humean view, we get some desires by reasoning. E.g. I want X, I can only get X by getting Y, so I want Y. That is some kind of inference.<br /><br />There should be similar kinds of inference from “Money is good for many things I want” to “I want money”. Also from “I want X; I want Y; Z will help me achieve either X or Y, though I don’t know which; so I want Z”. <br /><br />Maybe not everyone goes through these inferences and so not everyone has the derived desire.<br /><br />As far as motivation, I think we could say that the rational motivation provided by the derived desires depends on (grounded in, etc.) the motivation provided by the original desires. That should handle the double-counting worry. <br /><br /><br />Heath Whitehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13535886546816778688noreply@blogger.com