Great post, thank you for writing it! I had never heard of this approach before and I think itâs very interesting. Strong upvote. While I donât agree itâs better than maximizing happiness or preference satisfaction, I do think itâs a valuable way of looking at things and could perhaps be used instrumentally in some cases.
My biggest disagreement is that I donât see how capabilities can be an intrinsic value. When I talk about maximizing utility or happiness, I mean maximizing mental states people prefer to be in (this is not the same as preference satisfaction). I got this from Derek Parfit, though I might have misunderstood him.
Under this definition, watching a sad movie can be great as itâs a mental state you want to be in. I do think âwomen being happier despite having less optionsâ is an interesting case, but women would still likely prefer to be in a mental state where they have more options.
In both the case of the children and the walking safe at night: Imagine we lived in a world where every child coincidentally liked to follow the path their parents push them to or imagine we live in a world where women donât mind staying at home at all rather than walk at night. Would it really matter then if the options arenât there? Itâs because most people want to have those options in our world that itâs important to have them.
Thank you for the kind words. Iâm a little confused by this sentence:
I do think âwomen being happier despite having less optionsâ is an interesting case, but women would still likely prefer to be in a mental state where they have more options.
Iâll try to respond to what I see as the overall question of the comment (feel free to correct me if I didnât get it): If we assume someone has the thing they like in their choice set, why is having more choices good?
I think there are two answers to this, theoretical and pragmatic. I struggle sometimes to explain the theoretical one because it just seems blindingly obvious to me. That isnât an argument, but itâs just to say that my intuitions lean heavily this way so I sometimes struggle to explain it. I think that a full human life is one where we are able to make important choices for ourselves. That, by definition, means that we need more than 1 choice, even if the 1 choice in the set is the one you will pick regardless. I think that this also scales up to more choices. Perhaps one way to frame this is to say that the journey to the choice is valuable. A world where you never got choices but always were forced to select the thing that you would pick anyways is a bad world to me.
The pragmatic answer applies even if you donât buy the intrinsic value of options in theory. All that you need to value the pragmatic part is to be anti-paternalistic and to think that people are quite heterogeneous in what theyâre trying to do in life. If you buy those two things, then youâre going to want to strive to give people options rather than to max some index of the one key functioning, because if you give people more choices then these quite different people can all go off and do quite different things.
I will also say, this is not at all my area of research so if you find this interesting then consider the readings at the end of my post.
Yeah I get that itâs difficult to explain these intuitions, I was struggling in my original comment a lot too.
I meant to say that the study saying women were happier than men despite having fewer options perhaps doesnât capture what I value. They might be happier in the narrow, convential way happiness is defined but not in the broad way I define happiness (mental states you prefer being in). But I could be wrong about this.
I donât have much to say about the rest of your comment other than that I think itâs interesting.
Great post, thank you for writing it! I had never heard of this approach before and I think itâs very interesting. Strong upvote. While I donât agree itâs better than maximizing happiness or preference satisfaction, I do think itâs a valuable way of looking at things and could perhaps be used instrumentally in some cases.
My biggest disagreement is that I donât see how capabilities can be an intrinsic value. When I talk about maximizing utility or happiness, I mean maximizing mental states people prefer to be in (this is not the same as preference satisfaction). I got this from Derek Parfit, though I might have misunderstood him. Under this definition, watching a sad movie can be great as itâs a mental state you want to be in. I do think âwomen being happier despite having less optionsâ is an interesting case, but women would still likely prefer to be in a mental state where they have more options.
In both the case of the children and the walking safe at night: Imagine we lived in a world where every child coincidentally liked to follow the path their parents push them to or imagine we live in a world where women donât mind staying at home at all rather than walk at night. Would it really matter then if the options arenât there? Itâs because most people want to have those options in our world that itâs important to have them.
Thank you for the kind words. Iâm a little confused by this sentence:
Iâll try to respond to what I see as the overall question of the comment (feel free to correct me if I didnât get it): If we assume someone has the thing they like in their choice set, why is having more choices good?
I think there are two answers to this, theoretical and pragmatic. I struggle sometimes to explain the theoretical one because it just seems blindingly obvious to me. That isnât an argument, but itâs just to say that my intuitions lean heavily this way so I sometimes struggle to explain it. I think that a full human life is one where we are able to make important choices for ourselves. That, by definition, means that we need more than 1 choice, even if the 1 choice in the set is the one you will pick regardless. I think that this also scales up to more choices. Perhaps one way to frame this is to say that the journey to the choice is valuable. A world where you never got choices but always were forced to select the thing that you would pick anyways is a bad world to me.
The pragmatic answer applies even if you donât buy the intrinsic value of options in theory. All that you need to value the pragmatic part is to be anti-paternalistic and to think that people are quite heterogeneous in what theyâre trying to do in life. If you buy those two things, then youâre going to want to strive to give people options rather than to max some index of the one key functioning, because if you give people more choices then these quite different people can all go off and do quite different things.
I will also say, this is not at all my area of research so if you find this interesting then consider the readings at the end of my post.
Yeah I get that itâs difficult to explain these intuitions, I was struggling in my original comment a lot too.
I meant to say that the study saying women were happier than men despite having fewer options perhaps doesnât capture what I value. They might be happier in the narrow, convential way happiness is defined but not in the broad way I define happiness (mental states you prefer being in). But I could be wrong about this.
I donât have much to say about the rest of your comment other than that I think itâs interesting.