(Though regarding your offhand mention of satisficing - I think the concept of satisficing has often been crudely adopted by philosophers as the idea that there is some threshold such that everything above that threshold is “good enough” and everything below that threshold isn’t, while I think Herb Simon intended it as a decision procedure where one evaluates options one by one in the order they come to mind and then does the first one that passes the threshold. It could well be that this decision procedure with a particular threshold actually optimizes the tradeoff of time considering vs goodness of act done.)
Thanks! And yeah, my interest in satisficing has more to do with demandingness-moderating prerogatives than with the search costs and such that originally motivated the economic concept (which, as you say, is plausibly tied to all-things-considered optimizing!).
I wholeheartedly agree with your analysis and hope it reaches a wider audience. In my view, ethics is a field where many different questions are often mixed together. If you're interested, I’ve written a paper on this issue (specifically in the context of teaching ethics).
I find it strange that you are taking such an approach. Philosophers are explicitly telling you they are talking about the ideal and you seem to be just saying "you mean non-ideal". What else can they do other than communicate to you that they are talking about the ideal?
Your intuitions may be about the ideal or the non-ideal. Looks like you think they are always on the non-ideal? But this means they are just reflections of society. Which predicts that your intuitions should almost never contradict societal norms. Is this the case?
“Non-ideal” is not the same as society. It is rather the status of being a finite physical being. Non-ideal intuitions are going to be cultivated by biology and physics as much as by society.
I didn’t mention evolution in particular. What I did mention is being a finite physical being, which has many, many aspects, only one subset of which come from evolution.
I think it's not a coincidence that the putative "counterexamples" to consequentialism that people tend to find most compelling are cases in which it would plausibly *have bad results* for people to attempt to follow the supposedly "consequentialist" verdict (which raises the question of why we should consider that the "consequentialist" verdict to begin with).
But to make further dialectical progress, I'd encourage critics of consequentialism to engage more explicitly with what I call the "telic" question. Do you think it would be *undesirable* for the better outcome to occur? If so, that suggests that you really do reject consequentialism! But do you think it is *intuitively obvious* that the better outcome is undesirable, such that your intuitive response here counts as some kind of dialectical *datum* that any adequate theory must accommodate? Surely not. So stop treating superficial verdicts about cases as decisive, and start doing some deeper theorizing.
"which it would plausibly *have bad results* for people to attempt to follow the supposedly "consequentialist" verdict"
I think one of their objections is more along the lines that consequentialists are unable to recognize these as bad things, because of their (Gradgrindian) commitments.
This all sounds exactly right to me!
(Though regarding your offhand mention of satisficing - I think the concept of satisficing has often been crudely adopted by philosophers as the idea that there is some threshold such that everything above that threshold is “good enough” and everything below that threshold isn’t, while I think Herb Simon intended it as a decision procedure where one evaluates options one by one in the order they come to mind and then does the first one that passes the threshold. It could well be that this decision procedure with a particular threshold actually optimizes the tradeoff of time considering vs goodness of act done.)
Thanks! And yeah, my interest in satisficing has more to do with demandingness-moderating prerogatives than with the search costs and such that originally motivated the economic concept (which, as you say, is plausibly tied to all-things-considered optimizing!).
I wholeheartedly agree with your analysis and hope it reaches a wider audience. In my view, ethics is a field where many different questions are often mixed together. If you're interested, I’ve written a paper on this issue (specifically in the context of teaching ethics).
https://ojs.ub.rub.de/index.php/JDPh/article/view/10811/10995
Section 2 may be particularly relevant to your work, especially my analysis of the notion of "rightness" in the context of ethics.
I am now more confused.
I find it strange that you are taking such an approach. Philosophers are explicitly telling you they are talking about the ideal and you seem to be just saying "you mean non-ideal". What else can they do other than communicate to you that they are talking about the ideal?
Your intuitions may be about the ideal or the non-ideal. Looks like you think they are always on the non-ideal? But this means they are just reflections of society. Which predicts that your intuitions should almost never contradict societal norms. Is this the case?
“Non-ideal” is not the same as society. It is rather the status of being a finite physical being. Non-ideal intuitions are going to be cultivated by biology and physics as much as by society.
So then if you contradict society it must come from evolution? Also a weird inference.
I didn’t mention evolution in particular. What I did mention is being a finite physical being, which has many, many aspects, only one subset of which come from evolution.
I think it's not a coincidence that the putative "counterexamples" to consequentialism that people tend to find most compelling are cases in which it would plausibly *have bad results* for people to attempt to follow the supposedly "consequentialist" verdict (which raises the question of why we should consider that the "consequentialist" verdict to begin with).
But to make further dialectical progress, I'd encourage critics of consequentialism to engage more explicitly with what I call the "telic" question. Do you think it would be *undesirable* for the better outcome to occur? If so, that suggests that you really do reject consequentialism! But do you think it is *intuitively obvious* that the better outcome is undesirable, such that your intuitive response here counts as some kind of dialectical *datum* that any adequate theory must accommodate? Surely not. So stop treating superficial verdicts about cases as decisive, and start doing some deeper theorizing.
"which it would plausibly *have bad results* for people to attempt to follow the supposedly "consequentialist" verdict"
I think one of their objections is more along the lines that consequentialists are unable to recognize these as bad things, because of their (Gradgrindian) commitments.