A few years late, but this was an interesting read.
I have a few related thoughts:
I’ve tried to characterize types of subjective welfare that seem important to me here. The tl;dr is that they’re subjective appearances of good, bad, better, worse, reasons, mattering. Effectively conscious evaluations of some kind, or particular dispositions for those. That includes the types of preferences we would normally want to worry about, but not merely behavioural preferences in entirely unconscious beings or even conscious beings who would make no such conscious evaluations. But consciousness, conscious evaluation, pleasure, suffering, etc. could be vague and apparently merely behavioural preferences could be borderline cases.
On preferences referring to preferences, you can also get similar issues like two people caring more about the other’s preferences than their own “personal” preferences, both positively like people who love each other, or negatively, like people who hate each other. You can get a system of equations, but the solution can go off to infinity or not make any sense at all. There’s some other writing on this in Bergstrom, 1989, Bergstrom, 1999, Vadasz, 2005, Yann, 2005 and Dave and Dodds, 2012.
Still, I wonder if we can get around issues from preferences referring to preferences by considering what preferences can actually be about in a way that actually makes sense physically. Preferences have to be realized physically themselves, too, after all. If the result isn’t logically coherent, then maybe the preference is actually just impossible to hold? But maybe you still have problems when you idealize? And maybe indeterminacy or vagueness is okay. And since a preference is realized in a finite system with finitely many possible states (unless you idealize, or consider unbounded or infinite time), then the degrees of satisfaction they can take are also bounded.
A few years late, but this was an interesting read.
I have a few related thoughts:
I’ve tried to characterize types of subjective welfare that seem important to me here. The tl;dr is that they’re subjective appearances of good, bad, better, worse, reasons, mattering. Effectively conscious evaluations of some kind, or particular dispositions for those. That includes the types of preferences we would normally want to worry about, but not merely behavioural preferences in entirely unconscious beings or even conscious beings who would make no such conscious evaluations. But consciousness, conscious evaluation, pleasure, suffering, etc. could be vague and apparently merely behavioural preferences could be borderline cases.
On preferences referring to preferences, you can also get similar issues like two people caring more about the other’s preferences than their own “personal” preferences, both positively like people who love each other, or negatively, like people who hate each other. You can get a system of equations, but the solution can go off to infinity or not make any sense at all. There’s some other writing on this in Bergstrom, 1989, Bergstrom, 1999, Vadasz, 2005, Yann, 2005 and Dave and Dodds, 2012.
Still, I wonder if we can get around issues from preferences referring to preferences by considering what preferences can actually be about in a way that actually makes sense physically. Preferences have to be realized physically themselves, too, after all. If the result isn’t logically coherent, then maybe the preference is actually just impossible to hold? But maybe you still have problems when you idealize? And maybe indeterminacy or vagueness is okay. And since a preference is realized in a finite system with finitely many possible states (unless you idealize, or consider unbounded or infinite time), then the degrees of satisfaction they can take are also bounded.