= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
thomblake comments on Being saner about gender and rationality - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (84)
No. While a notion of such rights is certainly something she's mentioned believing in, that's not central to the question of whether it's warranted to object to such language. I, for instance, do not hold any such notion of rights, and yet raise the same objection.
My first reaction is "no, it's not", which suggests to me that I'm misreading you.
I'm not sure I'd argue that "bad" feelings give "meaning" to life (I'd generally consider that a category mistake, as life isn't the sort of thing with a meaning). However, "bad" feelings are a part of what it is to be human. I'm not particularly interested in specifically accumulating "positive" feelings, so I don't think the rest of your comment applies.
That death is a part of being human is certainly not something to be discarded out of hand. There is indeed a tension in our nature between the need to preserve ourselves and the facticity of our deaths. Acknowledging this does not entail insisting on people dying, though.
I would be most illuminated if you would share a justification in favor of having ongoing bad feelings (as opposed to a momentary notification of a possible problem), that does not also work as a justification in favor of death.
If one is in a continuing bad situation, a persistent bad feeling encourages one to search for the persistent factor.
Really? Has it been your experience that persistent bad feelings actually motivate you to change something? In my experience, and in the experience of my clients, a persistent bad feeling is usually an alternative to actually doing something about a problem. You want to talk about anosognosiac self-deception? Try bad feelings. It's very easy to deceive yourself into thinking that, say, worrying about work somehow counts the same as working.
People who feel bad don't want to do anything except stop the bad feeling (or in some cases, wallow in it), and the most expedient ways to stop most bad feelings usually do nothing to resolve the problem that created the bad feeling in the first place.
In short, bad feelings do not prime constructive behaviors. Good feelings do.
It's very suspect on the surface that you say people "don't want to do anything except stop the bad feeling" followed by (paraphrasing) "except when it's the exact opposite."
While it seems that people in persistent bad situations often get nothing out of their stress and suffering but additional health problems, I think we'd have even worse failure modes if we really only reacted emotionally to changes in circumstance, and were unable to sustain persistent (dis)satisfaction with our present state. I mean this as a statement about our possible evolutionary "design", not about what's theoretically possible.
I feel oddly like you didn't read the rest of my comment. Are we talking past each other again?
The simplest justification is that they are 'uniquely human', a part of our nature and the human experience. All justifications must follow from what we are, or else what are they to rest on?
On the face of it, this serves as a justification for death. However, death is a one-off problem whose removal would hardly impact the nature and character of one's life. Removing 'bad' feelings would entail scraping out a decent-sized chunk of what it is to be a human.
And don't think the problem of death is so easily solved.
So, if I were to never become depressed again, I'm no longer a human? That doesn't make any sense to me.
Bear in mind, I'm not proposing Superhappy-ness. I'm simply saying that after the initial moment of pain or sorrow or frustration or grief or embarrassment or whatever, the utility of that feeling being continued drops off dramatically. And if something bothers you emotionally for, say, an hour (let alone frequently) the odds are good that you are wasting your time. (And yes, that does mean I've been doing a bit of time-wasting here recently.)
Unless I'm misunderstanding 'utility' as you're using it here, it seems like you're begging the question. To say that "bad feelings don't serve utility" doesn't really seem to be saying much at all; this is part of why I felt the need to put scare quotes around 'bad' above - bad feelings are by definition bad.
Pot, meet kettle. ;-)
If you're going to accuse me of committing a logical fallacy, please do me the service of doing so explicitly, and pointing out where it happened.
Here:
That isn't even remotely a justification for actually having bad feelings.
You didn't show where I was begging the question, or was that not what you meant to imply above?
While I'm not sure formalism is the right way to go, let's try it:
.1. 'Bad' feelings are part of what it is to be uniquely human.
.2. Our standards for what is good/acceptable flow from our nature.
.3. By 2, any standard of the good that runs counter to our nature is not a good standard.
.4. By 3 and 1, a standard of the good that considers 'bad' feelings to be bad is not a good standard.
Perhaps not the most helpful way of putting it, but hopefully that works. Any sign of a fallacy there? (note: 'the naturalistic fallacy' is not an acceptable answer)
Bad feelings are not unique to humans, so how are they "uniquely" human? And even if they were, why is being "uniquely human" all that's required for something to be good?
Why does that mean our standards are actually good?
Our nature includes violence, so by this argument, violence is a good standard.