Joseph,
What an interesting topic, and well-written, as well. I have a few comments.
First, you noted that balancing acts between multiple choices with separate outcomes necessarily involved “two standards” and that such a decision-making methodology necessarily prevents one from adhering to an integrated value system, since it’s a competing system. I would argue, on the other hand, that the majority of people adhere both to a unified value system and to a principle of moderation as a way of engaging their unified system with brevity, and that people break down seemingly opposing results (based on multiple options, and what you refer to as two standards) into a single unified standard—the present value of happiness—and that they do so intuitively.
Put simply, decisions can’t be made outside the context of a unified moral vision and a view of one’s entire life situation, encompassing both a sense of right and wrong, and of how one’s actions will benefit or hurt one in the short- and long-run. To forget one’s moral values while making a decision and to do so outside of the context of one’s life situation would require either insanity (as a temporary or permanent state, or a chemically-induced one) or amnesia. Even degenerates have a unified system of morality- intuitively speaking- the problem is that their value judgments are off—not that they lack them. What you deride as a person’s emotions is just a person’s intuitive value system speaking to them in terms that they may not think of when not decomposing values on a time-consuming, deconstructive level. Emotions are a person’s short-cut to a decision when thinking through unimportant details that may not be worth-while based on time constraints or when the judgments leading to a decision are complex, have already been undertaken, and therefore require no further intellectual reach to arrive at a conclusion. Unfortunately, some people take the emotional short-cut without recognizing the difference between the situation of the present state, and the details regarding previously thought-out states for which today’s emotions were derived from previous experiences, leading to a paradigm shift in their unified ethical system.
The reason why the principal of moderation comes in handy is to help guide people to the optimal state of happiness as options filter through a person’s integrated value system. A seemingly minute action with a large array of options may lead to hundreds or thousands of separate chains of events as results, all too complicated and seemingly unimportant to contemplate individually, so people design systems or “rules of thumb” such as the moderation or balancing concepts, to help guide them through such decision-making processes without losing inordinate amounts of time or mental resources, while viewing that decision through the lens of their unified value systems- since the rule of thumb is based on their value system and will usually lead to the right outcome. Of course, when people simply label concepts as moderate or extreme (you used the Muslim in your example), this argument doesn’t hold, but then we’re just talking about linguistic conventions- the misuse, and therefore the mild disintegration of language. Also, rules of thumb are just that- a convention that typically works but not in all circumstances.
The process that drives every sane person’s decision-making (whether thinking long-term/short-term, physical pleasure/health risks, etc.) is the present value of their happiness. So, the same amount of happiness 10 years down the line is not equivalent to the same amount today, for example, because there’s a discount rate (if we could quantify it, and it related at all to finance, we could say it may be in the area of 4-10%). We have to apply a discount rate because of the risk that we may not be around in 10 years, or because we may not have the capacity to enjoy the same thing 10 years out as much as we could today. However, to over-do it for today, while gaining minimal marginal happiness in the present, to the great detriment of 10 years from today wouldn’t make sense in the unified system of discounted happiness, so a person would be unlikely to spend his life savings on a 1-year trip around the world, to the great detriment of his retirement down the line, as an example. In your world, this person has two standards- retire well 10 years from now, or vacation in the present, and the two standards are completely incompatible. But intuitively, that person decomposes the options and determines what will bring him the greatest discounted value of happiness- so most people would probably pick the secure retirement over the grand trip. Or maybe they’d go for a five-day cruise instead. Your professional business requires maximizing net profits today and tomorrow, and discounting tomorrow's profits to the present value. That's what people do intuitively with their happiness.
While people don’t think about such things as discount rates (which would be intuitively higher for less risk-averse people) and discounting their future happiness to a present, and therefore comparable, value or range of values, they can intuitively grasp the concept of trade-offs, and diminishing marginal happiness with vastly increasing trade-offs near the margins. And that’s where the “trade-off” and “balancing acts” comes into play. Rather than being an alternative system to a unified system of ethics, it’s a filter through which decisions can be made more easily in the context of their unified system of ethics in a time-compressed manner. I see nothing contradictory in that.
|
