Against Subjectivism
My second piece on summarizing Chappell’s summary of his summary of Parfit.
Another distillation of Richard Chappel’s summary of Parfit.1
Against Subjectivism
Normative subjectivists say that whatever your deepest desires (that is your ultimate, terminal, non-instrumental desire), fulfilling your desires is always rational. Even if you prefer extinction to an itch on your back, you’re not irrational. In principle, your deepest desires could be anything.
Parfit says this is wrong: just like beliefs, desires can be irrational. This is because:
Imagine someone with Future-Tuesday Indifference, who would choose a painful surgery next Tuesday, over a much less painful one next Wednesday. He might even know he will regret it, but simply doesn’t care about his future pain or the associated regret. That’s crazy (or irrational).
And so, to be rational you have to be more than just effective at getting to your ends (getting to your deepest desires). To find out if someone is rational or not, we have evaluate their desires themselves—and those can be rational or irrational. At the very least, to be rational, you need to treat like cases alike and you can’t be arbitrary. If pain is worth avoiding on other days, and pain feels no different on days we arbitrarily call ‘Tuesday’, then Tuesday-pain is just as bad and worth avoiding as other pain.
Further, if you avoid being arbitrary by saying ‘Well, maybe I don’t care about future pain at all’, then you simply dig yourself deeper into the Future-Tuesday-Indifference error. To be rational, it’s not enough to be consistent. If you’re wrong-headed enough, that might just make you more consistently irrational. To do better, you must respond to evaluatively significant features of the world in the ways that they actually merit. (And we need to avoid pain if it has no instrumental use). Normative subjectivists are wrong because we all have reason to want to avoid future pain. On some level, the normative subjectivist never really has reason to want anything, because our wants are simply taken as given, and the subjectivist instead focuses on what we have reason to do: effectively try to get whatever it is that we wanted before.
But why would you have to try to get something that you have no reason to want? ‘If you want X, you should do Y’. These hypothetical imperatives are relations of normative inheritance: given that X is worth trying to get, Y is too. But if you think only hypothetical imperatives count, you’re a normative nihilist. You might as well set up irrigation with no water flowing through.
Thus, if both egoism AND subjectivism are wrong, the opposite must be true: Altruistic objectivism says you ought to improve others well-being, not just yours—and this is objectively true and if you don’t help others, you’re not merely not nice, you make an error. You’re irrational as you fail to respond to real reasons. This is also called normative objectivism.
Two things stick out to me here:
It’s also interesting how both subjectivism and also egoism are not really a strawmen… in my experience they are fairly common pretheoretical sophomoric positions (think: a nihilist subjectivist frat boy saying ‘Whatever you like, is just like… that’s just my opinion man, that can’t be irrational, I just like it. Nobody ever really does anything for really altruistic reasons man - Bill Gates just donates to charity to save taxes’).
Perhaps more interestingly, with these relatively simple thought experiments, Parfit’s altruistic objectivism motivates something that gets quite close to Effective Altruism, which he endorsed later in life.
Indeed, Richard Chappell ends the summaries I’m summarizing here with the following quote by Parfit, on what he took to matter most:
One thing that greatly matters is the failure of we rich people to prevent, as we so easily could, much of the suffering and many of the early deaths of the poorest people in the world. The money that we spend on an evening’s entertainment might instead save some poor person from death, blindness, or chronic and severe pain. If we believe that, in our treatment of these poorest people, we are not acting wrongly, we are like those who believed that they were justified in having slaves.
[…]
What now matters most is how we respond to various risks to the survival of humanity. We are creating some of these risks, and we are discovering how we could respond to these and other risks. If we reduce these risks, and humanity survives the next few centuries, our descendants or successors could end these risks by spreading through the galaxy.
You can read the rest of Chappel’s blogs here:
