Comment on Morality is not about willpower

Sat, 22 Oct 2011 15:50:43 GMT

Mm.

So, OK, to establish some context first: one (ridiculously oversimplified) way of modeling situations like this is to say that in both cases I have two valuation functions, F1 and F2, which give different results when comparing the expected value of the two choices, because they weight the relevant factors differently (for example, the relative merits of being aligned with my better nature and giving in to temptation, or the relative merits of choosing friend A and friend B), but in the first (simple) case the two functions are well-integrated and I can therefore easily calculate the weighted average of them, and in the second (complicated) case the two functions are poorly integrated and averaging their results is therefore more difficult. So by the time the results become available to consciousness in the first case, I've already made the decision, so I feel like I can "just decide" whereas in the second case, I haven't yet, and therefore feel like I have a difficult decision to make, and the difference is really one of how aware I am of the decision. (There are a lot of situations like this, where when an operation can be performed without conscious monitoring it "feels easy.")

So. In both cases the decision is "asymmetrical," in that F1 and F2 are different functions, but in the torrenting case (and the complicated ticket case), the difference between F1 and F2 is associated with a moral judgment (leading to words like "better nature" and "temptation"). Which feels very significant, because we're wired to attribute significance to moral judgments.

I wonder how far one could get by treating it like any other decision procedure, though. For example, if I decide explicitly that I weight "giving into temptation" and "following my better nature" with a ratio of 1:3, and I flip coins accordingly to determine whether to torrent or not (and adjust my weighting over time if I'm not liking the overall results)... do I still need so much "willpower"?

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