Part 2

One ultimate psychological motivation can trump even goodness, and that's the second terminal virtue: personal happiness.

If goodness was a terminal virtue, then how could it ever be trumped by anything? Actually, I think there's an answer to this. To me, being a terminal virtue seems to mean that you value it regardless of whether it leads to anything else. Contrast this with "I value X only to the extent that it leads to Y". But if you have more than one terminal virtue, it seems to follow that you'd have to choose which one you value more, and thus one can trump another. I'd address these points.

Anyway, so are you saying that the drive for happiness trumps that of goodness? In most people? If so, to be clear, is it your opinion that happiness and goodness really are terminal goals/virtues of people, or are you just saying that "They are terminal virtues, but in cases where you have to choose, I think happiness trumps goodness"?

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. Feeling free makes me happy. Adventure makes me happy. Even divulging personal information makes me happy.

1) You are too cool!

2) From a literary perspective, that's a great job of illustrating with example.

Happiness and goodness might be subconsciously motivating them to choose this instrumental goal. Few people can introspect well enough to determine what's truly motivating them.

Indeed. I think belief in belief would be a great thing to bring up here. Furthermore, I think that explaining it, not just bringing it up, would be a good idea. Ie. a religious person might claim that he wants to become Christ-like even if it meant certain drops in happiness and goodness over the long term. But he may actually act differently, and if he does, then his actual drives oppose what he claims his drives are.

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.

Or perhaps willfully disobeying Him? Which actually seems rather likely to me, because most religious people seem to not follow the instructions with 100% comprehensiveness. As someone raised as a reform Jew, I'm all too aware of this, and always wondered how you could pick and choose what instructions you follow. Perhaps more religious people are different, but my impression was that they follow more like 80-90% of the instructions.

Imagine how many deconversions we would see if it were suddenly sinful to play football, watch TV with your family, or splurge on tasty restaurant meals.

Or maybe we'd just see some interesting new rationalizations! I get your point though.

Basically everyone who says this believes "God wants what's best for us, even when we don't understand it."

I'm not sure what you mean by "best for us" here. Ie. do people believe that God wants happiness for them, goodness for society, or both? (And a new question just came to me - what does God think of animal rights?)

Becoming happy [section]

Your claim in this section seems to be that the terminal virtue of happiness trumps that of goodness (usually?). To really argue this, I think you'd need a lot more evidence.

But given that this is just a section of a larger article, you have limited space. Perhaps a solid intuitive argument could be made in that space, but I didn't find your examples to be intuitively general enough. Ie. if you gave examples that made me think, "Oh yeah, we do things like that in sooooo many different situations", then I would have been more convinced by your claim.

Whatever that stuff is, is what accounts for individual variance in which virtues are pursued.

My strong consequentialist instincts may be giving me a particularly hard time here... but I would specify that you're referring to instrumental virtues. When I think "virtue", I just instinctively think "terminal", and thus I had to reread this a few times before understanding it.

Also worth noting is the individual variance in the extent to which an individual is consciously motivated by happiness vs. goodness. If you look at the preference ratios between the two values, sociopaths are found at one end of the spectrum; extreme altruists, the other. Most of us fall somewhere in the middle.

We talked for a while about preference ratios and altruism ratios, so I know what you mean, but I don't think you explained it thoroughly enough.

Preference ratio := how much I care about me : how much I care about person X

Altruism ratio := "I act altruistically because it will lead to goodness" : "I act altruistically because it will lead to my happiness"

I think that these are two fantastic terms, and that they should be introduced into the "vocabulary of morality".

For most people, the only true terminal values are happiness and goodness.

I think what you meant is that for most people, their only terminal values are happiness and goodness. Terminal values belong to a person. Using the word "the" makes it sound like it's some sort of inherent property of the universe (to me at least).

And I'm still not very satisfied with the idea of something being an end-in-itself: [section]

Nicely done!

Why should we be controlled by emotions that originated through random chance?

Wrong question. It's not a matter of whether they should control us. It's a fact that they do.

Exactly! Not many people seem to understand this.

Um... so my high school Calculus teacher, who is lots, lots smarter than I am, thinks "emotion" is evidence of intelligent design. I thought this was just a "god of the gaps" thing, but maybe it is really the simplest explanation. I think most people here have ruled out an omnipotent, omni-benevolent God... but maybe life on earth as we know it is really just an alien-child's abandoned science fair project or something.

The former two lines felt like such a great place to end :(

Why bring up the possibility of intelligent design here? You already mention the alien-god of evolution which implies that there is no intelligent design (I think; I just read the wiki article for the first time quickly). Regardless, the origin of the universe/emotions doesn't seem too relevant and felt like an awkward ending to me.

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 in my life.

Likewise!! On both counts.

For the record, I went really hard on you here. I would say "don't take it personally", but I know that you won't ;)