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knb comments on Open Thread, Apr. 13 - Apr. 19, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Suppose she gets hit by a bus and is now disabled. You calculate that she is no longer a good investment. Do you shrug and write her off as degraded capital? A healthy attitude to a relationship makes the other person an end in herself.
Perhaps it is worth noting that many people associated with the PUA/redpill/manosphere subculture are hostile to the notion that people can ever have a non-transactional relationship. But I put very little stock in their opinions.
If circumstances changed sufficiently such that she was no longer a good investment, of course I would end the relationship. Being hit by a bus wouldn't do it, but I can imagine other things that might.
I agree with Caue below; that seems to be the opposite of a healthy relationship.
And not just an unhealthy relationship, but a meaningless and unstable one too. If I really did view my fiancee as an "end in herself", that would mean I wanted to make my fiancee happy for no reason. Why isn't my terminal goal making some other girl happy? Indeed, why isn't my terminal goal making her sad? Or polishing rocks? No reason? This is absurd. And if making her happy is my goal for no reason, who's to say that goal won't switch tomorrow? Our relationship would be as fragile as my fatuous goals. Frankly, I am horrified at the thought of being in a relationship with someone so psychologically imbalanced as to want me to be happy for no reason.
I don't think people really do have "ends in themselves," we aren't like paperclip-maximisers. All our ends are explicable in terms of our other ends, in a complicated tangle. Yes, I want to make my fiancee happy. But I want to make her happy because it deepens our relationship, and makes her better disposed to me, and provides insurance against some time when I screw up in future, and so on.
What does it mean for a person to be an end? In the example, is the end the continuity of the relationship, her happiness, or what?
If the end is the continuity of the relationship regardless of quality, or her happiness regardless of his, it doesn't look very "healthy". But if it's conditional on quality or on his own satisfaction, it doesn't look like the "end".
It means that this person's happiness/wellbeing is your terminal goal.
I was wondering more about the happiness/wellbeing part than the my terminal goal part.
But about that: it would mean it's one of my terminal goals. I'm also not seeing how it would be incompatible with a "transactional relationship".
I feel there's an intended connotation that it should rank high among his terminal goals (in the example, high enough that he shouldn't end the relationship), but this doesn't necessarily follow from "seeing her as an end in herself".
(I think the "intended correct answer" in the scenario is that he shouldn't want to leave her in that situation. This is compatible with him wanting to stay for her sake, but also with him wanting to stay because he would still enjoy being with her. This latter possibility has a better claim to being a healthy relationship than the former, and it's also entirely compatible with a "transactional attitude" as described by Salemicus)