JerL on Good Thoughts

[JerL]

Thanks for the responses!

I agree with that concern, although I think your example of the depressed teenager has some features that I think muddle the issue a bit. In particular, the fact that their depression is temporary, and can be regarded as a sort of impairment of their thinking and judgement, strike me as important features in shaping my intuition.

Basically, I think the problem is in deciding what counts as a preference, and how to prioritize or decide which preferences to give weight to: we don't want to just count our moment-to-moment preferences, and let them override any other considerations, precisely because my preference at a particular moment may be a poor representation of my preferences overall, or may find me in a moment of poor judgement.

If you show me someone for whom the prospect of a happy future has _never_ motivated them to want to live beyond a certain point, even when they are not depressed, I am less convinced that it is bad for them to stop living at that point.

Same goes for the elderly person meeting their future grandchild: if an elderly person tells me that yes, they know they will be able to form a valuable and meaningful bond with their grandkids, and yes, they know this will give them joy and make their life feel worth living; but still, they don't want to go on living, I find this _strange_ and I would definitely want to make sure we're understanding each other properly and all that, but if they stick to their guns, I'm not sure I feel the intuition that it's _bad_ for them to do this, just really weird.

re: Utopia vs. Barren Rock

"otherwise none of us would get to exist, and that's not a matter of indifference!"

I guess this is where we disagree; it's not a matter of indifference _to us, because we happen to now exist and have interests and preferences_; but 2000 years ago, when we didn't exist and have preferences, I am really not sure I have the same intuition as you--it does feel to me like a matter of indifference.

"Seems bad to me. I think we should appreciate good lives as something that's genuinely good, not just kinda-pretend-good-while-those-people-are-around-to-complain-about-our-saying-otherwise."

I guess maybe I am a little sympathetic to nihilism on this front, though I'm not sure it commits to me to the view that good lives aren't good: I think good lives are good to the people who have them, and to the people who can imagine them in the future; but if there's no one around to have good lives, and no one around to anticipate future good lives, there's no one for whom those lives are good.

This sounds a little close to a person-affecting view, and I know there are problems with those, but at least as a matter of intuition, it really does feel right to me: in a world with no people, it is a matter of indifference whether there will be people in the future.

Anyway, I appreciate the responses, and I really enjoy the blog in general, so thanks!