Maybe we should just allow some slack/flexibility 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 “never giving up on the relationship.” If one’s significant other is 99.99% likely to have died in a plane crash, a life goal about the relationship doesn’t necessarily imply spending the rest of one’s life searching islands for castaways. Instead, we can think of life-goal objectives in nuanced and pragmatic ways, with fallback goals like “living the rest of one’s life to make one’s memory of the other person proud.” See also the notion of “trajectory-based life goals,” which I’ll introduce further below.
You might want life goals to implicitly have conditions for when it’s 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. “Pursue X until I don’t feel like it anymore”. 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, it’s the definition of life goal that needs to be a bit more flexible? When can we say that we still value something “terminally”, if we’re allowing whether we value it at all to change under some circumstances?
I’m 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 “being the bravest warrior” for Achilles is trajectory-based and indirectly specified, but what if Achilles decided it was no longer a worthy goal, either because it was “misguided”, or because he found something else far more important?
Maybe we should just allow some slack/flexibility in life goals. From a footnote:
You might want life goals to implicitly have conditions for when it’s 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. “Pursue X until I don’t feel like it anymore”. 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, it’s the definition of life goal that needs to be a bit more flexible? When can we say that we still value something “terminally”, if we’re allowing whether we value it at all to change under some circumstances?
I’m 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 “being the bravest warrior” for Achilles is trajectory-based and indirectly specified, but what if Achilles decided it was no longer a worthy goal, either because it was “misguided”, or because he found something else far more important?