Fantastic post. A few scattered thoughts inspired by it:
If you aren’t trying to conform to some standard, than how can you truly, and non-arbitrarily, choose?
Why does our choice need to be non-arbitrary? If we take certain intuitions/desires/instincts as primitives, they may be fundamentally arbitrary, but that’s because we are unavoidably arbitrary. Yet this arbitrary initial state is all we have to work from.
What’s needed, here, is a type of choice that is creating, rather than trying to conform — and which hence, in a sense, is “infallible.”
It feels like infallible is the wrong type of description here, for the same reason that it would be odd to say that my taste in food is infallible. At a certain level the predicate “correct” will stop making sense. (Maybe that level isn’t the level of choices, though; maybe it’s instincts, or desires, or intuitions, or tastes—things that we don’t see ourselves as having control over.)
Thanks, Richard :). Re: arbitrariness, in a sense the relevant choices might well end up arbitrary (and as you say, subjectivists need to get used to some level of unavoidable arbitrariness), but I do think that it at least seems worth trying to capture/understand some sort of felt difference between e.g. picking between Buridan’s bales of hay, and choosing e.g. what career to pursue, even if you don’t think there’s a “right answer” in either case.
I agree that “infallible” maybe has the wrong implications, here, though I do think that part of the puzzle is the sense in which these choices feel like candidates for mistake or success; e.g., if I choose the puppies, or the crazy galaxy Joe world, I have some feeling like “man, I hope this isn’t a giant mistake.” That said, things we don’t have control over, like desires, do feel like they have less of this flavor.
Fantastic post. A few scattered thoughts inspired by it:
Why does our choice need to be non-arbitrary? If we take certain intuitions/desires/instincts as primitives, they may be fundamentally arbitrary, but that’s because we are unavoidably arbitrary. Yet this arbitrary initial state is all we have to work from.
It feels like infallible is the wrong type of description here, for the same reason that it would be odd to say that my taste in food is infallible. At a certain level the predicate “correct” will stop making sense. (Maybe that level isn’t the level of choices, though; maybe it’s instincts, or desires, or intuitions, or tastes—things that we don’t see ourselves as having control over.)
Thanks, Richard :). Re: arbitrariness, in a sense the relevant choices might well end up arbitrary (and as you say, subjectivists need to get used to some level of unavoidable arbitrariness), but I do think that it at least seems worth trying to capture/understand some sort of felt difference between e.g. picking between Buridan’s bales of hay, and choosing e.g. what career to pursue, even if you don’t think there’s a “right answer” in either case.
I agree that “infallible” maybe has the wrong implications, here, though I do think that part of the puzzle is the sense in which these choices feel like candidates for mistake or success; e.g., if I choose the puppies, or the crazy galaxy Joe world, I have some feeling like “man, I hope this isn’t a giant mistake.” That said, things we don’t have control over, like desires, do feel like they have less of this flavor.