You could endorse changing your mind under certain circumstances only (subjectively chosen, not necessarily ahead of time) as a specific potentially overriding life goal. EDIT: Or otherwise indirectly specified and flexible life goals that allow for you to change your mind about some things, as discussed in the post, e.g. wanting to act according to the ethical views youâd endorse if more informed.
Sure. But I think my point/âquestion still stands. I think most people who have life goalsâor rather, what weâd intuitively think of as life goals, and indeed what weâd intuitively think of as having an optimizing mindset towardsâwouldnât mind if further reflection of various benign kinds caused them to change said goals, and while we COULD say that this is because there is an extremely widespread meta-life-goal of being the kind of person who deliberates and reflects and changes their goals sometimes⌠it seems like a clunky workaround, an unnatural way of describing the situation.
Maybe we should just allow some slack/âflexibility in life goals. From a footnote:
Note that the optimizing mindset behind life goals need not be applied fanatically to a crude objective such as ânever giving up on the relationship.â If oneâs significant other is 99.99% likely to have died in a plane crash, a life goal about the relationship doesnât necessarily imply spending the rest of oneâs life searching islands for castaways. Instead, we can think of life-goal objectives in nuanced and pragmatic ways, with fallback goals like âliving the rest of oneâs life to make oneâs memory of the other person proud.â See also the notion of âtrajectory-based life goals,â which Iâll introduce further below.
You might want life goals to implicitly have conditions for when itâs appropriate to abandon them, change them or replace them, e.g. reflection. Some conditions can turn life goals into unambitious whims and no longer really terminal objective at all, and hence not life goals, e.g. âPursue X until I donât feel like it anymoreâ. That being said, I expect it to be difficult to draw sharp lines.
Maybe adding these conditions in the specific life goals themselves is also clunky, and as you suggest, itâs the definition of life goal that needs to be a bit more flexible? When can we say that we still value something âterminallyâ, if weâre allowing whether we value it at all to change under some circumstances?
Iâm not sure only caring about indirectly specified life goals or trying to reformulate each directly specified life goal in indirect terms will do what you want. Even âbeing the bravest warriorâ for Achilles is trajectory-based and indirectly specified, but what if Achilles decided it was no longer a worthy goal, either because it was âmisguidedâ, or because he found something else far more important?
You could endorse changing your mind under certain circumstances only (subjectively chosen, not necessarily ahead of time) as a specific potentially overriding life goal. EDIT: Or otherwise indirectly specified and flexible life goals that allow for you to change your mind about some things, as discussed in the post, e.g. wanting to act according to the ethical views youâd endorse if more informed.
Sure. But I think my point/âquestion still stands. I think most people who have life goalsâor rather, what weâd intuitively think of as life goals, and indeed what weâd intuitively think of as having an optimizing mindset towardsâwouldnât mind if further reflection of various benign kinds caused them to change said goals, and while we COULD say that this is because there is an extremely widespread meta-life-goal of being the kind of person who deliberates and reflects and changes their goals sometimes⌠it seems like a clunky workaround, an unnatural way of describing the situation.
Maybe we should just allow some slack/âflexibility in life goals. From a footnote:
You might want life goals to implicitly have conditions for when itâs appropriate to abandon them, change them or replace them, e.g. reflection. Some conditions can turn life goals into unambitious whims and no longer really terminal objective at all, and hence not life goals, e.g. âPursue X until I donât feel like it anymoreâ. That being said, I expect it to be difficult to draw sharp lines.
Maybe adding these conditions in the specific life goals themselves is also clunky, and as you suggest, itâs the definition of life goal that needs to be a bit more flexible? When can we say that we still value something âterminallyâ, if weâre allowing whether we value it at all to change under some circumstances?
Iâm not sure only caring about indirectly specified life goals or trying to reformulate each directly specified life goal in indirect terms will do what you want. Even âbeing the bravest warriorâ for Achilles is trajectory-based and indirectly specified, but what if Achilles decided it was no longer a worthy goal, either because it was âmisguidedâ, or because he found something else far more important?