Exactly.
The 'value-centered thinking' which SolitaryWalker considers so irrational is often an attempt at solving the problems which arise when everyone acts hedonistically. When each pursues their own well-being (happiness, contendedness, goals, or whatever) interests come into conflict. Ethical theories propose rules of conduct which resolve these conflicts such as, for example, property rights.
There is no individual drive for survival, anything that looks that way can be reduced to the drive towards personal affirmation.
What is the difference between a drive for survival and a drive for personal affirmation?
There is no such thing as a drive for survival. All drives reduce to instinct (personal affirmation, whatever), which has no awareness of concepts like 'survival'.
The only mechanism at play is that animals that have instincts that cause them not to survive will be killed off. But maladaptive traits will never be fully weeded out because of mutation and variance. Additionally, some traits that are selected for may have maladaptive side effects.
Indeed, but why do animals have such instincts in the first place?
Be a hedonist if you choose, or not, whatever. Should an ethical theory dictate right and wrong in every given circumstance? It is as though you seek something like a rulebook for life.is such an ethical system complete? It is not complete, because then we still will have unanswered questions. Such as, what do I do with the rest of my life? Or how do I make decisions that are not directly relevant to my interaction with other people?
Sure, it is possible for people to adopt values which work against peaceable coexistence. Some may even do so on purpose because they have no desire to resolve disagreements and conflicts of interest peaceably, and in which case, have little use for pursuing a rational investigation of ethics.Or in other words, the ONLY purpose of ethics is to ensure that people get along with each other. The question to ask then is, why should people wish to get along with each other? The obvious answer is that because they wish to be happy. If the people have such a perspective in mind, they will see adequate justifications for establishing harmonious relationships with others. In other words, because they wish to be happy, they will seek out ways to get along with others. (Unless of course doing the latter does not conduce to their long-term happiness, which is almost never the case.) Yet, if they do not have such a perspective in mind, they will seek to establish harmonious relationships with others for reasons they do not understand. They will be merely driven by the aforementioned irrational value-cenetered thinking, or in other words, doing what they are 'supposed to do'. This is problematic because very often the endorsed values will not conduce to harmonious relationships between people as in that case people will do not what truly conduces to people getting along, but whatever they should do in order to stay true to their principles.
Indeed, but why do animals have such instincts in the first place?
There is no individual drive for survival, anything that looks that way can be reduced to the drive towards personal affirmation.
Be a hedonist if you choose, or not, whatever. Should an ethical theory dictate right and wrong in every given circumstance? It is as though you seek something like a rulebook for life..
Sure, it is possible for people to adopt values which work against peaceable coexistence. Some may even do so on purpose because they have no desire to resolve disagreements and conflicts of interest peaceably, and in which case, have little use for pursuing a rational investigation of ethics.
Just because one has values does not mean that one must accept such values uncritically (even the value that one ought not to accept ideas uncritically if possible).My point was, in order to avoid the problem you describe above, we need rational investigation of ethics, abandoning value centered thinking conduces to such investigation of ethics.
Natural selection? Determinist physical laws?
What answer are you looking for?
Just because one has values does not mean that one must accept such values uncritically (even the value that one ought not to accept ideas uncritically if possible).
I should also note that many values may have actually evolved in response to specific adaptive problems which arise in complex social groups.
But I don't see that it's working toward affirming ones self.
In other words, simply thinking through each situation to make sure that the decisions you make in such situations are those that you will be happy with.
The point is, when an animal strives for a good feeling, it inevitably has a tendency towards survival. Anything that does not conduce to survival cannot be affirmative of the being of the animal.
Based on the information that we actually do have, we may as well look at it as a maximization of happiness problem, I agree. But we need to be humble in our conclusions, and open to other people's views and premises. Because otherwise there's no way two people starting from different premises will ever come to a compromise..
I disagree. Haven't you heard of experiments where mice have had the option of heroin or food? They keep pressing the heroin button until they die (with food available the whole time).
Animals just do what feels good, it doesn't matter if it's good for their survival or not.
Faith is not required, or merely whimsical, uncritical acceptance of a certain proposition. When we do not have all the premises that we need, we can establish the proper premises with deductive or inductive arguments. We should be humble about the conclusions that we make, but we should demonstrate our humility not through faith, but by consistently re-evaluating our reasoning process and results as well as remaining open to further collection of information.
Evan, you are correct that most of us do not know what makes us happy. That is because most people do not know themselves well enough to know what makes them happy. I have argued in this thread that we can learn what makes us happy through careful introspection and analysis of external circumstances.
That's exactly what I'm saying.
What if it would make you happier to think through things less (which is certainly the case for most people, if not all)? Then what?
Thinking as much as you suggest is an activity in itself. There are opportunity costs.
Think about marginal utility -- thinking a certain amount is good, but after a while it becomes almost worthless -- checking and rechecking your answers, etc. The difference between 0 minutes of thinking per hour and 1 minute of thinking per hour might be huge. But the difference between 14 minutes an hour and 15 minutes an hour is definitely much much smaller. The more you think, the less bang for your buck (buck = time) you get.
So if you sit there and think for 30 minutes per hour, there are two important things to note:
a) you only have 30 minutes an hour to act, which puts you at a disadvantage for seeking pleasure.
b) you probably aren't even discovering much more than someone who spends 10-15 minutes an hour thinking, and THEY get 15-20 extra minutes to pursue happiness every hour!
Not to mention that careful pursuit of truth to this degree is certainly a coping mechanism for burying deeper emotional truths -- if you turn every problem into an intellectual one, you can't get hurt (I do this myself). But you end up ignoring a chunk of reality that affects life and happiness levels almost every second. Each day you intellectualize everything, you're NOT doing emotional processing AND even more emotional damage is being done. So it just sits there in the future, getting bigger and bigger everyday. Until one day your metaphorical dam breaks and intellectualizing stops being good enough.
What I'm suggesting is this:
1) Thinking is good
2) Physical activities are good
3) Relationships are good
4) Emotional processing is good
5) Gaining resources is good
6) Fun activities are good
You have some resources, like money, time, and brainpower. You have to distribute those resources over the above points in a way that maximizes happiness (for example, 4 takes time and brainpower, 2 takes time, etc.). Now, it's true that thinking is the only way to approach the maximization problem, but now we can see that each second spent thinking takes away from the potential seconds spent doing other things. The longer you spend thinking, the less helpful it gets, too (marginal utility). So, you should think -- you should think as much as you can as long as the opportunity cost is lower than the cost of thinking.
Thinking is NOT free.