Welcome to LessWrong! I wouldn't comment if I didn't like your post and think it was worth responding to, so please don't interpret my disagreement as negative feedback. I appreciate your post, and it got me thinking. That said. I disagree with you.
The real point I'm making here is that however we categorize personal happiness, goodness belongs in the same category, because in practice, all other goals seem to stem from one or both of these concepts.
Your claims are probably much closer to true for some people than they are for me, but they are far from accurate for characterizing me or the people who come most readily to mind for me.
Depending on what you mean by goals, either happiness doesn't really affect my goals, or the force of habit is one of the primary drivers of my goals. Happiness is a major influence on my ordinary behavior, but is seldom something that I think about very much when making long term plans. (I have thought about thinking about happiness in my long term plans, and decided against doing so because striving after personal happiness in my long term plans does not fit with my personal sense of identity even though it is reasonably consistent with my personal sense of ethics.) Like happiness/enjoyment, routine is a major driver of my everyday behavior, and while it is somewhat motivated by happiness, it comes more from conditioning, much of which was done to me by other people, and much of which I chose for myself. Most of the things I do are simply the things I do out of habit.
When I choose things for myself and make long term plans, virtue/goodness is something that I consider, but I also consider things that are far from being virtue/goodness as you used the term and as most other people use the term. The two things that immediately spring to mind as part of my considerations are my sense of identity/self-image and my desire to be significant.
I was an anglophile in my teenage years, and one of the lasting consequences of that phase of my life is that I Do Not Drink Coffee. This isn't because I don't think I should drink coffee. This isn't because I think drinking coffee would make me less happy. It is simply because drinking coffee is one of the things that I do not do. I drink tea. I would be less myself, from my own perspective, if I started drinking coffee than I am by continuing to not drink coffee and by sometimes drinking tea. Not drinking coffee is part of what it means to me to be me.
My dad is a lifelong Cubs fan. I have sometimes joked to him that one of the things he could do to immediately make his life happier is to quit being a Cubs fan and become a Yankees fan. My dad cares about sports. He would be happier if he was a Yankees fan but he is not a Yankees fan. (You could argue that this is loyalty, but I would disagree... My dad's from the Midwest but he lives on the East Coast now. When other people move from one part of the country to another and their sports allegiances change he doesn't find that surprising, upsetting, or in any way reprehensible. There are other aspects of life where he does believe people are morally obligated to be loyal, and he finds it reprehensible when other people violate family loyalty and other forms of loyalty that he believes are morally obligatory.)
In terms of strength of terminal values, a sense of personal identity is, in most of the cases that I can think of, stronger than a desire for happiness and weaker than a desire to be good. Sort of. Not really. That's just what I want to say and believe about myself but it's not true. It's easier for me to give an example having to do with sports than one having to do with tea. (Sorry, I grew up with them... and they spring to mind as vivid examples much more so than other subjects, at least for me.)
I'm a very fickle sports fan by most standards. I don't really have a sport I enjoy watching in particular, and I don't really have a team that a cheer for, but every once in a while, I will decide to watch sports... usually a tournament. And then I'll look at a bunch of stats and read a bunch of commentary, and pick what team I think deserves to win, and cheer for that team, for that tournament. Once I pick a team, I can't change my mind until the tournament is over... It's not that I don't want to or think I shouldn't. It's that even when I think that I ought to change my mind, I still keep cheering for the same team as I did before...
Sometimes, I don't realize that I'll be invited over to someone else's house for one of the games. Sometimes, when this happens, I'm cheering for a different team than everyone else, and I feel extremely silly for doing this and a little embarrassed about it because I'm not really a fan of that team. They're just the team I picked for this tournament. So I'll go over to someone's house, and I'll try to root for the same team as everyone else, and it just won't work. The home team is ahead, and I'll smile along with everyone else. I won't get upset that my team is losing. People won't realize that my team is losing; they'll just think I don't care that much about the game... but then, if my team starts to make a comeback, I suddenly get way more interested in the game. I'll start to reflexively move in certain ways. I'll pump my fist a little when they score. I'll try to keep my gestures and vocalization subtle and under control; I'm still embarrassed about rooting for that team... But I'm doing it anyways, because that's my team, at least for today. Then when the home team comes back again and wins it, I'm disappointed, and I'm even a little more embarrassed about rooting against them than I would have been if they'd lost. This wouldn't change even if I had some ethical reason for wanting the other team to win. If (after the tournament had begun and I'd picked what team I was cheering for) some wealthy donor announced that he was going to make some big gift to a charity that I believe in if and only if his team won, and his team didn't happen to be my team... I would start to feel like I should want his team to win. I know who I cheer for doesn't affect the outcome of the game, but I still feel like it would be more ethical to cheer for the team that would help this philanthropic cause if it won. I'd try to root for them just like I'd try to cheer for the home team if I got invited over to a friend's house to watch the game. But I wouldn't actually want that team to win. When the game started and the teams started pulling ahead of and falling behind each other as so often happens in games, my enthusiasm for the game would keep increasing as my team was pulling ahead and keep falling off again when they started losing ground. It's just what happens when I watch sports.
My sense of identity also affects my life choices and long term plans. For example, many of my career choices have had as much to do with what roles I can see myself in, as they have they have had to do with what I think would make me happy, what I do well, and what impact I want to have on the world. I think most people can identify with this particular feeling and this comment is long enough already, so I won't expand on it for now...
By far, the biggest motivator of my personal goals, however, is significance. I want to matter. I don't want to be evil, but mattering is more important to me than being good... The easiest way for me to explain my moral feelings about significance, is to say that, in practice, I am far more of a deontologist than I am in theory. Karl Marx is an example of someone who matters, but was not what I would call good. He dramatically impacted the world and his net impact has probably been negative, but he didn't behave in any way that would lead me to consider him evil, so he's not evil. I would rather become someone who matters and is someone who I would consider good. Norman Borlaug is a significant person whose contributions to the world are pretty much unambiguously good. (Though organic food movement people and other Luddites would erroneously disagree.) Bach, Picasso, and Nabokov are all examples of other people who are extremely significant without necessarily have done anything I would call good. They've had a lasting impact on this world.
I want to do that... I don't want to be the sort of person who would do that. I don't want to have the traits that allowed Bach to write the sort of music in his time that would be remembered in our time. I want to carve the words "Austin was here" so deep into the world that they can never be erased. (Metaphorically, of course.) I want to matter.
...and not just in that "everybody is important, everybody matters" sort of way...
I would much rather be happy, good, and significant than any two of the three. If I can only be two, I would want to be good and significant. And if I can only be one, I would want to be significant. I don't want to be evil... there are some things I wouldn't do even if doing them guaranteed that I would become significant. A few lines I would not cross: I wouldn't rape or torture anyone. I wouldn't murder someone I deemed to be innocent. But if the devil and souls were real, I might sell my soul.
Interestingly, the lines I wouldn't cross for the greater good are different from the lines I wouldn't cross to obtain significance. I would kill somebody I deemed to be innocent to save the lives of a hundred innocent people... but not to save just two or three innocent people. On the other hand, if the devil and souls were real and he came to me with the offer, I wouldn't sell my soul to save the lives of a hundred or even a thousand people I deemed to be innocent though I would seriously consider selling my soul to obtain significance. Whatever my values are, they are not well-ordered. (Which is not quite the same as saying they are illogical, though many would interpret it that way.)
I will follow up on your links to see if they contain any information I find persuasive.
The fact that your name is gwern means that I find your paragraphs far more persuasive than I would if I didn't see the name on them.
Yes, there have always been plenty of sumgglers avoiding taxes by smuggling things into the EEUU. I know of this having been true of every era I know well and have no reason to doubt that it's true about the rest.
But, in my experience... Most history books cite history books citing history books, building up their facts along the way. I'm ...
Hi, I'm new to LessWrong. I stumbled onto this site a month ago, and ever since, I've been devouring Rationality: AI to Zombies faster than I used to go through my favorite fantasy novels. I've spent some time on website too, and I'm pretty intimidated about posting, since you guys all seem so smart and knowledgeable, but here goes... This is probably the first intellectual idea I've had in my life, so if you want to tear it to shreds, you are more than welcome to, but please be gentle with my feelings. :)
Edit: Thanks to many helpful comments, I've cleaned up the original post quite a bit and changed the title to reflect this.
Ends-in-themselves
As humans, we seem to share the same terminal values, or terminal virtues. We want to do things that make ourselves happy, and we want to do things that make others happy. We want to 'become happy' and 'become good.'
Because various determinants--including, for instance, personal fulfillment--can affect an individual's happiness, there is significant overlap between these ultimate motivators. Doing good for others usually brings us happiness. For example, donating to charity makes people feel warm and fuzzy. Some might recognize this overlap and conclude that all humans are entirely selfish, that even those who appear altruistic are subconsciously acting purely out of self-interest. Yet many of us choose to donate to charities that we believe do the most good per dollar, rather than handing out money through personal-happiness-optimizing random acts of kindness. Seemingly rational human beings sometimes make conscious decisions to inefficiently maximize their personal happiness for the sake of others. Consider Eliezer's example in Terminal Values and Instrumental Values of a mother who sacrifices her life for her son.
Why would people do stuff that they know won't efficiently increase their happiness? Before I de-converted from Christianity and started to learn what evolution and natural selection actually were, before I realized that altruistic tendencies are partially genetic, it used to utterly mystify me that atheists would sometimes act so virtuously. I did believe that God gave them a conscience, but I kinda thought that surely someone rational enough to become an atheist would be rational enough to realize that his conscience didn't always lead him to his optimal mind-state, and work to overcome it. Personally, I used to joke with my friends that Christianity was the only thing stopping me from pursuing my true dream job of becoming a thief (strategy + challenge + adrenaline + variety = what more could I ask for?) Then, when I de-converted, it hit me: Hey, you know, Ellen, you really *could* become a thief now! What fun you could have! I flinched from the thought. Why didn't I want to overcome my conscience, become a thief, and live a fun-filled life? Well, this isn't as baffling to me now, simply because I've changed where I draw the boundary. I've come to classify goodness as an end-in-itself, just like I'd always done with happiness.
Becoming good
I first read about virtue ethics in On Terminal Goals and Virtue Ethics. As I read, I couldn't help but want to be a virtue ethicist and a consequentialist. Most virtues just seemed like instrumental values.
The post's author mentioned Divergent protagonist Tris as an example of virtue ethics:
I suspect that goodness is, perhaps subconsciously, a terminal virtue for the vast majority of virtue ethicists. I appreciate Oscar Wilde's writing in De Profundis:
Wilde's thoughts on humility translate quite nicely to an innate desire for goodness.
When presented with a conflict between an elected virtue, such as loyalty, or truth, and the underlying desire to be good, most virtue ethicists would likely abandon the elected virtue. With truth, consider the classic example of lying to Nazis to save Jews. Generally speaking, it is wrong to conceal the truth, but in special cases, most people would agree that lying is actually less wrong than truth-telling. I'm not certain, but my hunch is that most professing virtue ethicists would find that in extreme thought experiments, their terminal virtue of goodness would eventually trump their other virtues, too.
Becoming happy
However, there's one exception. One desire can sometimes trump even the desire for goodness, and that's the desire for personal happiness.
We usually want what makes us happy. I want what makes me happy. Spending time with family makes me happy. Playing board games makes me happy. Going hiking makes me happy. Winning races makes me happy. Being open-minded makes me happy. Hearing praise makes me happy. Learning new things makes me happy. Thinking strategically makes me happy. Playing touch football with friends makes me happy. Sharing ideas makes me happy. Independence makes me happy. Adventure makes me happy. Even divulging personal information makes me happy.
Fun, accomplishment, positive self-image, sense of security, and others' approval: all of these are examples of happiness contributors, or things that lead me to my own, personal optimal mind-state. Every time I engage in one of the happiness increasers above, I'm fulfilling an instrumental value. I'm doing the same thing when I reject activities I dislike or work to reverse personality traits that I think decrease my overall happiness.
Tris was, in other words, pursuing happiness by trying to change an aspect of her personality she disliked.
Guessing at subconscious motivation
By now, you might be wondering, "But what about the virtue ethicist who is religious? Wouldn't she be ultimately motivated by something other than happiness and goodness?"
Well, in the case of Christianity, most people probably just want to 'become Christ-like' which, for them, overlaps quite conveniently with personal satisfaction and helping others. Happiness and goodness might be intuitively driving them to choose this instrumental goal, and for them, conflict between the two never seems to arise.
Let's consider 'become obedient to God's will' from a modern-day Christian perspective. 1 Timothy 2:4 says, "[God our Savior] wants all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth." Mark 12:31 says, "Love your neighbor as yourself." Well, I love myself enough that I want to do everything in my power to avoid eternal punishment; therefore, I should love my neighbor enough to do everything in my power to stop him from going to hell, too.
So anytime a Christian does anything but pray for others, do faith-strengthening activities, spread the gospel, or earn money to donate to missionaries, he is anticipating as if God/hell doesn't exist. As a Christian, I totally realized this, and often tried to convince myself and others that we were acting wrongly by not being more devout. I couldn't shake the notion that spending time having fun instead of praying or sharing the gospel was somehow wrong because it went against God's will of wanting all men being saved, and I believed God's will, by definition, was right. (Oops.) But I still acted in accordance with my personal happiness on many occasions. I said God's will was the only end-in-itself, but I didn't act like it. I didn't feel like it. The innate desire to pursue personal happiness is an extremely strong motivating force, so strong that Christians really don't like to label it as sin. Imagine how many deconversions we would see if it were suddenly sinful to play football, watch movies with your family, or splurge on tasty restaurant meals. Yet the Bible often mentions giving up material wealth entirely, and in Luke 9:23 Jesus says, "Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me."
Let's further consider those who believe God's will is good, by definition. Such Christians tend to believe "God wants what's best for us, even when we don't understand it." Unless they have exceptionally strong tendencies to analyze opportunity costs, their understanding of God's will and their intuitive idea of what's best for humanity rarely conflict. But let's imagine it does. Let's say someone strongly believes in God, and is led to believe that God wants him to sacrifice his child. This action would certainly go against his terminal value of goodness and may cause cognitive dissonance. But he could still do it, subconsciously satisfying his (latent) terminal value of personal happiness. What on earth does personal happiness have to do with sacrificing a child? Well, the believer takes comfort in his belief in God and his hope of heaven (the child gets a shortcut there). He takes comfort in his religious community. To not sacrifice the child would be to deny God and lose that immense source of comfort.
These thoughts obviously don't happen on a conscious level, but maybe people have personal-happiness-optimizing intuitions. Of course, I have near-zero scientific knowledge, no clue what really goes on in the subconscious, and I'm just guessing at all this.
Individual variance
Again, happiness has a huge overlap with goodness. Goodness often, but not always, leads to personal happiness. A lot of seemingly random stuff leads to personal happiness, actually. Whatever that stuff is, it largely accounts for the individual variance in which virtues are pursued. It's probably closely tied to the four Kiersey Temperaments of security-seeking, sensation-seeking, knowledge-seeking, and identity-seeking types. (Unsurprisingly, most people here at LW reported knowledge-seeking personality types.) I'm a sensation-seeker. An identity-seeker could find his identity in the religious community and in being a 'child of God'. A security-seeker could find security in his belief in heaven. An identity-seeking rationalist might be the type most likely to aspire to 'become completely truthful' even if she somehow knew with complete certainty that telling the truth, in a certain situation, would lead to a bad outcome for humanity.
Perhaps the general tendency among professing virtue ethicists is to pursue happiness and goodness relatively intuitively, while professing consequentialists pursue the same values more analytically.
Also worth noting is the individual variance in someone's "preference ratio" of happiness relative to goodness. Among professing consequentialists, we might find sociopaths and extreme altruists at opposite ends of a happiness-goodness continuum, with most of us falling somewhere in between. To position virtue ethicists on such a continuum would be significantly more difficult, requiring further speculation about subconscious motivation.
Real-life convergence of moral views
I immediately identified with consequentialism when I first read about it. Then I read about virtue ethics, and I immediately identified with that, too. I naturally analyze my actions with my goals in mind. But I also often find myself idolizing a certain trait in others, such as environmental consciousness, and then pursuing that trait on my own. For example:
I've had friends who care a lot about the environment. I think it's cool that they do. So even before hearing about virtue ethics, I wanted to 'become someone who cares about the environment'. Subconsciously, I must have suspected that this would help me achieve my terminal goals of happiness and goodness.
If caring about the environment is my instrumental goal, I can feel good about myself when I instinctively pick up trash, conserve energy, use a reusable water bottle; i.e. do things environmentally conscious people do. It's quick, it's efficient, and having labeled 'caring about the environment' as a personal virtue, I'm spared from analyzing every last decision. Being environmentally conscious is a valuable habit.
Yet I can still do opportunity cost analyses with my chosen virtue. For example, I could stop showering to help conserve California's water. Or, I could apparently have the same effect by eating six fewer hamburgers in a year. More goodness would result if I stopped eating meat and limited my showering, but doing so would interfere with my personal happiness. I naturally seek to balance my terminal goals of goodness and happiness. Personally, I prefer showering to eating hamburgers, so I cut significantly back on my meat consumption without worrying too much about my showering habits. This practical convergence of virtue ethics and consequentialism satisfies my desires for happiness and goodness harmoniously.
To summarize:
Personal happiness refers to an individual's optimal mind-state. Pleasure, pain, and personal satisfaction are examples of happiness level determinants. Goodness refers to promoting happiness in others.
Terminal values are ends-in-themselves. The only true terminal values, or virtues, seem to be happiness and goodness. Think of them as psychological motivators, consciously or subconsciously driving us to make the decisions we do. (Physical motivators, like addiction or inertia, can also affect decisions.)
Preferences are what we tend to choose. These can be based on psychological or physical motivators.
Instrumental values are the sub-goals or sub-virtues that we (consciously or subconsciously) believe will best fulfill our terminal values of happiness and goodness. We seem to choose them arbitrarily.
Of course, we're not always aware of what actually leads to optimal mind-states in ourselves and others. Yet as we rationally pursue our goals, we may sometimes intuit like virtue ethicists and other times analyze like consequentialists. Both moral views are useful.
Practical value
So does this idea have any potential practical value?
It took some friendly prodding, but I was finally brought to realize that my purpose in writing this article was not to argue the existence of goodness or the theoretical equality of consequentialism and virtue ethics or anything at all. The real point I'm making here is that however we categorize personal happiness, goodness belongs in the same category, because in practice, all other goals seem to stem from one or both of these concepts. Clarity of expression is an instrumental value, so I'm just saying that perhaps we should consider redrawing our boundaries a bit:
P.S. If anyone is interested in reading a really, really long conversation I had with adamzerner, you can trace the development of this idea. Language issues were overcome, biases were admitted, new facts were learned, minds were changed, and discussion bounced from ambition, to serial killers, to arrogance, to religion, to the subconscious, to agenthood, to skepticism about the happiness set-point theory, all interconnected somehow. In short, it was the first time I've had a conversation with a fellow "rationalist" and it was one of the coolest experiences I've ever had.