“You need to rock selfishness well just to do charity well (that’s my hunch).”
Selfishness, so designated, is not a public health issue nor a private mental health issue, but does stand in contrast to altruism. To the extent that society allows your actualization of something you could call selfishness, that seems to be your option to manifest, and by modern standards, without judgement of your selfishness. Your altruism might be judged, but not your selfishness, like, “Oh, that’s some effective selfishness” vs “Oh, that’s a poser’s selfishness right there” or “That selfishness there is a waste of money”.
Everyone thinks they understand selfishness, but there don’t seem to be many theories of selfishness, not competing theories, nor ones tested for coherence, nor puzzles of selfishness. You spend a great deal of time on debates about ethics, quantifying altruism, etc, but somehow selfishness is too well-understood to bother?
The only argument over selfishness that has come up here is over self-care with money. Should you spend your money on a restaurant meal, or on charity? There was plenty of “Oh, take care of yourself, you deserve it” stuff going around, “Don’t be guilty, that’s not helpful” but no theory of how self-interest works. It all seems relegated to an ethereal realm of psychological forces, that anyone wanting to help you with must acknowledge.
Your feelings of guilt, and so on, are all tentatively taken as subjectively impactful and necessarily relevant just by the fact of your having them. If they’re there, they matter. There’s pop psychology, methods of various therapy schools, and different kinds of talk, really, or maybe drugs, if you’re into psychiatric cures, but nothing too academic or well thought out as far as what self-interest is, how to perform it effectively, how or whether to measure it, and its proper role in your life. I can’t just look at the problem, so described, and say, “Oh, well, you’re not using a helpful selfishness theory to make your decisions there, you need to...” and be sure I’m accomplishing anything positive for you. I might come up with some clever reframe or shift your attention successfully, but that says nothing about a normative standard of selfishness that I could advocate.
I understand rationalization and being self-serving, but only in well-defined domains where I’ve seen it before, in what some people call “patterns of behavior.” Vices do create pathological patterns of behavior, and ending them is clarifying and helpful to many self-interested efforts. A 100-hundred year effort to study selfishness is about more than vices. Or, well, at least on the surface, depending on what researchers discover. I have my own suspicions.
Anyway, we don’t have the shared vocabulary to discuss vices well. What do you think I mean by them? Is adderall a vice? Lite beer? Using pornography? The occasional cigarette? Donuts? Let’s say I have a vice or two, and indulge them regularly, and other people support me in doing that, but we end doing stuff together that I don’t really like, aside from the vice. Is it correct then to say that I’m not serving myself by keeping my vice going? Or do we just call that a reframe because somebody’s trying to manipulate me into giving up my habits? What if the vice gets me through a workday?
Well, there’s no theories of self-interest that people study in school to help us understand those contexts, or if there are, they don’t get much attention. I don’t mean theories from psychology that tend to fail in practice. It’s a century’s effort to develop and distribute the knowledge to fill that need for good theories.
Galef took steps to understand selfish behavior. She decided that epistemic rationality served humanity and individuals, and decided to argue for it. That took some evaluation of behavior in an environment. It motivated pursuit of rationality in a particular way.
Interestingly, her tests, such as the selective critic test, or the double standard test, reveal information that shifts subjective experience. Why do we need those tests(Not, do we need them, but, why do we need them)? What can we do about the contexts that seem to require them? Right now, your community’s culture encourages an appetite for risk, particularly financial risk, that looks like a vice. Vices seem to attract more vices.
You’re talking about epistemics. A lot of lessons in decision-making are culturally inherited. For various reasons, modern society could lose that inheritance. Part of that inheritance is a common-sense understanding of vices. Without that common-sense there is only a naivete that could mean our extinction. Or that’s how I see it.
For example, in 2020, one of the US’s most popular talk show hosts (Steven Colbert) encouraged viewers to drink, and my governor (Gavin Newsom) gave a speech about loosening rules for food deliveries so that we could all get our wine delivered to our doors while we were in lockdown. I’m not part of the Christian right, but I think they still have the culture to understand that kind of behavior as showing decadence and inappropriateness. I would hope so. Overall, though, my country, America, didn’t see it that way. Not when, at least in people’s minds, there was an existential threat present. A good time to drink, stuck at home, that’s apparently what people thought.
I’m really not interested in making people have a less fun time. That is not my point at all.
I’ve also been unsuccessful in persuading people to act in their own self-interest. I already know it doesn’t work.
If you don’t believe in “vices”, you don’t believe in them. That’s fine. My point here was that it’s not safe to ignore them, and I would like to add, there’s nothing stronger than a vice to make sure you practice self-serving rationalization.
If, for the next 40-60 years, humanity faces a drawn out, painful coping with increasing harms from climate change, as I believe, and our hope for policy and recommendations is communities like yours, and what we get is depressed panicky people indulging whatever vices they can and becoming corrupt as f**k? Well, things will go badly.
I wrote:
“You need to rock selfishness well just to do charity well (that’s my hunch).”
Selfishness, so designated, is not a public health issue nor a private mental health issue, but does stand in contrast to altruism. To the extent that society allows your actualization of something you could call selfishness, that seems to be your option to manifest, and by modern standards, without judgement of your selfishness. Your altruism might be judged, but not your selfishness, like, “Oh, that’s some effective selfishness” vs “Oh, that’s a poser’s selfishness right there” or “That selfishness there is a waste of money”.
Everyone thinks they understand selfishness, but there don’t seem to be many theories of selfishness, not competing theories, nor ones tested for coherence, nor puzzles of selfishness. You spend a great deal of time on debates about ethics, quantifying altruism, etc, but somehow selfishness is too well-understood to bother?
The only argument over selfishness that has come up here is over self-care with money. Should you spend your money on a restaurant meal, or on charity? There was plenty of “Oh, take care of yourself, you deserve it” stuff going around, “Don’t be guilty, that’s not helpful” but no theory of how self-interest works. It all seems relegated to an ethereal realm of psychological forces, that anyone wanting to help you with must acknowledge.
Your feelings of guilt, and so on, are all tentatively taken as subjectively impactful and necessarily relevant just by the fact of your having them. If they’re there, they matter. There’s pop psychology, methods of various therapy schools, and different kinds of talk, really, or maybe drugs, if you’re into psychiatric cures, but nothing too academic or well thought out as far as what self-interest is, how to perform it effectively, how or whether to measure it, and its proper role in your life. I can’t just look at the problem, so described, and say, “Oh, well, you’re not using a helpful selfishness theory to make your decisions there, you need to...” and be sure I’m accomplishing anything positive for you. I might come up with some clever reframe or shift your attention successfully, but that says nothing about a normative standard of selfishness that I could advocate.
I understand rationalization and being self-serving, but only in well-defined domains where I’ve seen it before, in what some people call “patterns of behavior.” Vices do create pathological patterns of behavior, and ending them is clarifying and helpful to many self-interested efforts. A 100-hundred year effort to study selfishness is about more than vices. Or, well, at least on the surface, depending on what researchers discover. I have my own suspicions.
Anyway, we don’t have the shared vocabulary to discuss vices well. What do you think I mean by them? Is adderall a vice? Lite beer? Using pornography? The occasional cigarette? Donuts? Let’s say I have a vice or two, and indulge them regularly, and other people support me in doing that, but we end doing stuff together that I don’t really like, aside from the vice. Is it correct then to say that I’m not serving myself by keeping my vice going? Or do we just call that a reframe because somebody’s trying to manipulate me into giving up my habits? What if the vice gets me through a workday?
Well, there’s no theories of self-interest that people study in school to help us understand those contexts, or if there are, they don’t get much attention. I don’t mean theories from psychology that tend to fail in practice. It’s a century’s effort to develop and distribute the knowledge to fill that need for good theories.
Galef took steps to understand selfish behavior. She decided that epistemic rationality served humanity and individuals, and decided to argue for it. That took some evaluation of behavior in an environment. It motivated pursuit of rationality in a particular way.
Interestingly, her tests, such as the selective critic test, or the double standard test, reveal information that shifts subjective experience. Why do we need those tests(Not, do we need them, but, why do we need them)? What can we do about the contexts that seem to require them? Right now, your community’s culture encourages an appetite for risk, particularly financial risk, that looks like a vice. Vices seem to attract more vices.
You’re talking about epistemics. A lot of lessons in decision-making are culturally inherited. For various reasons, modern society could lose that inheritance. Part of that inheritance is a common-sense understanding of vices. Without that common-sense there is only a naivete that could mean our extinction. Or that’s how I see it.
For example, in 2020, one of the US’s most popular talk show hosts (Steven Colbert) encouraged viewers to drink, and my governor (Gavin Newsom) gave a speech about loosening rules for food deliveries so that we could all get our wine delivered to our doors while we were in lockdown. I’m not part of the Christian right, but I think they still have the culture to understand that kind of behavior as showing decadence and inappropriateness. I would hope so. Overall, though, my country, America, didn’t see it that way. Not when, at least in people’s minds, there was an existential threat present. A good time to drink, stuck at home, that’s apparently what people thought.
I’m really not interested in making people have a less fun time. That is not my point at all.
I’ve also been unsuccessful in persuading people to act in their own self-interest. I already know it doesn’t work.
If you don’t believe in “vices”, you don’t believe in them. That’s fine. My point here was that it’s not safe to ignore them, and I would like to add, there’s nothing stronger than a vice to make sure you practice self-serving rationalization.
If, for the next 40-60 years, humanity faces a drawn out, painful coping with increasing harms from climate change, as I believe, and our hope for policy and recommendations is communities like yours, and what we get is depressed panicky people indulging whatever vices they can and becoming corrupt as f**k? Well, things will go badly.