Why is it obvious/taken for granted in the automaximisation argument that people can choose their global desires? You say in another comment thread that “it’s clear we don’t get to decide on many of our desires,” so why wouldn’t global desires be in that category?
My assumption is that it is unlikely that people have much control over their global desires, and therefore I don’t believe you when you write that you “have decided to judge that [your] life is going maximally well.” I don’t doubt your ability to choose to tell me this, but I do doubt your ability to choose to actually believe it. (The fact that someone can lie on a survey question is an issue for empirical life satisfaction research, but it is equally an issue for all research that depends on reports of mental state, including research on happiness.)
This objection doesn’t remove the possibility of wireheading global desires; even if the part of your brain that decides on global desires isn’t in your conscious control, it would still be possible to physically/biologically alter it to achieve maximum life satisfaction with any life circumstance. However, this issue exists in hedonism as well, so I don’t see it as a comparative advantage for hedonism. (Objective list theories don’t have this problem, but they do have many others and I find them implausible.)
Great question, thanks for this! Part of the motivation for global desire theories is something like Parfit’s addiction case, which I mention in section 3 of the paper and will now quote at length
Parfit illustrates this with his famous case of Addiction:
I shall inject you with an addictive drug. From now on, you will wake each morning with an extremely strong desire to have another injection of this drug. Having this desire will be in itself neither pleasant nor painful, but if the desire is not fulfilled within an hour it will then become very painful. This is no cause for concern, since I shall give you ample supplies of this drug. Every morning, you will be able at once to fulfil this desire. The injection, and its after‐effects, would also be neither pleasant nor painful. You will spend the rest of your days as you do now.31
Parfit points out that on a summative desire theory—on which all your desires count and how your life goes overall is the product of the extent to which each desire is fulfilled and intensity of each desire—your life goes better in Addiction.32 But it is hard to believe one’s life would go better in the Addiction case.
Parfit draws a distinction between local and global desires where a desire is “global if it is about some part of one’s life considered as a whole, or is about one’s whole life”. A global desire theory (GDT), counts only global desires. On this theory, we can say being addicted is worse for us; when we think about how our lives go overall, we do not want to become addicted.
The appeal of a global theory is that, in some sense, you get to make a cognitive choice about which desires count. If you weren’t able to choose which desires count, then Addiction would be better for you (once you were actually addicted, anyway).
You might think that getting addicted really is good for me, in which you’ve presumably abandoned the global account in favour of the summative one. Which is fine, but doesn’t take away from the fact that automaximisation is still a problem for the global view.
Why is it obvious/taken for granted in the automaximisation argument that people can choose their global desires? You say in another comment thread that “it’s clear we don’t get to decide on many of our desires,” so why wouldn’t global desires be in that category?
My assumption is that it is unlikely that people have much control over their global desires, and therefore I don’t believe you when you write that you “have decided to judge that [your] life is going maximally well.” I don’t doubt your ability to choose to tell me this, but I do doubt your ability to choose to actually believe it. (The fact that someone can lie on a survey question is an issue for empirical life satisfaction research, but it is equally an issue for all research that depends on reports of mental state, including research on happiness.)
This objection doesn’t remove the possibility of wireheading global desires; even if the part of your brain that decides on global desires isn’t in your conscious control, it would still be possible to physically/biologically alter it to achieve maximum life satisfaction with any life circumstance. However, this issue exists in hedonism as well, so I don’t see it as a comparative advantage for hedonism. (Objective list theories don’t have this problem, but they do have many others and I find them implausible.)
Great question, thanks for this! Part of the motivation for global desire theories is something like Parfit’s addiction case, which I mention in section 3 of the paper and will now quote at length
The appeal of a global theory is that, in some sense, you get to make a cognitive choice about which desires count. If you weren’t able to choose which desires count, then Addiction would be better for you (once you were actually addicted, anyway).
You might think that getting addicted really is good for me, in which you’ve presumably abandoned the global account in favour of the summative one. Which is fine, but doesn’t take away from the fact that automaximisation is still a problem for the global view.