Really interesting post. Your responses to the stock arguments seem pretty compelling. Looking forward to seeing your positive proposal.
I wonder what you think of the idea that consistency is an externally imposed constraint on preferences akin to every other moral requirement. So from a totally self involved standpoint there might be no way to reason yourself into really striving for consistency, in the same way that for someone who didn’t already care about suffering, there might be no way to reason themself into caring about it. Instead it’s just this constraint we impose on people so they can function in a society. If you don’t care about suffering, we do various things to punish you until you do—and specifically we do stuff until you actually care about suffering for its own sake, not just pretend you do when that stops you from being punished. Similarly we enforce consistency as a constraint on preferences/moral views because of broader societal benefits of existing in a group of people who are like that (eg we can actually reason together).
Related to this, I feel like the antirealist might reply to the point about not having a strong enough brute preference for consistency to outweigh real stakes in terms of pleasure and suffering in a basically deontological way. Well-socialized people don’t just have preferences of some particular strength for outcomes of various moral value; they internalize moral rules for action that just rule out certain behaviors even if they lead to better states (of course maybe this just means that aspect of socialization is bad). In the same way, it’s not like I have a preference of whatever strength for worlds where I’m consistent, and then I weigh that preference against the value of the stuff I have to trade it off against. I just internalize an epistemic rule governing my moral attitudes and I abide by it.
None of this is actually an argument that people who don’t currently care about consistency should start doing so. But I think you could spin a vindicatory story, from the point of view of someone who has internalized consistency as a norm, of the value of doing so. And that story would look a lot like the story you’d tell about the value of internalizing norms against lying, etc., even when doing so might maximize utility.
Really interesting post. Your responses to the stock arguments seem pretty compelling. Looking forward to seeing your positive proposal.
I wonder what you think of the idea that consistency is an externally imposed constraint on preferences akin to every other moral requirement. So from a totally self involved standpoint there might be no way to reason yourself into really striving for consistency, in the same way that for someone who didn’t already care about suffering, there might be no way to reason themself into caring about it. Instead it’s just this constraint we impose on people so they can function in a society. If you don’t care about suffering, we do various things to punish you until you do—and specifically we do stuff until you actually care about suffering for its own sake, not just pretend you do when that stops you from being punished. Similarly we enforce consistency as a constraint on preferences/moral views because of broader societal benefits of existing in a group of people who are like that (eg we can actually reason together).
Related to this, I feel like the antirealist might reply to the point about not having a strong enough brute preference for consistency to outweigh real stakes in terms of pleasure and suffering in a basically deontological way. Well-socialized people don’t just have preferences of some particular strength for outcomes of various moral value; they internalize moral rules for action that just rule out certain behaviors even if they lead to better states (of course maybe this just means that aspect of socialization is bad). In the same way, it’s not like I have a preference of whatever strength for worlds where I’m consistent, and then I weigh that preference against the value of the stuff I have to trade it off against. I just internalize an epistemic rule governing my moral attitudes and I abide by it.
None of this is actually an argument that people who don’t currently care about consistency should start doing so. But I think you could spin a vindicatory story, from the point of view of someone who has internalized consistency as a norm, of the value of doing so. And that story would look a lot like the story you’d tell about the value of internalizing norms against lying, etc., even when doing so might maximize utility.