"Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away." James 4:14
Over on that thread at Luke's (the one where I got accused of being a racist), Justin Martyr had said to faithlessgod,..if desirism is going to meaningfully talk about “tends to be desire fulfilling” or “tends to be desire thwarting” then it needs to score this. For a concrete case, suppose we apply the turn the knobs technique and find that a desire tends to fulfill what we intuitively take to be one big desire, but thwards two relatively trivial desires. How do we know whether this desires tends to be desire fulfilling or thwarting? I agree and think the question is valid, and I had been thinking the same thing for some time now. Here's my initial attempt: Proposed Method For Meaningful Evaluations In Desire Utilitarianism. I'd be curious to hear your feedback. I believe there are several advantages to the hierarchy-of-desires concept, among them the abilities to proportionately quantify desire strength and generate empirical, mathematical results. My hypothesis is testable and predicts that if desirism's definition of good is even fairly reliable, then our moral intuitions should agree with the numbers in the overwhelming majority of evaluations.
Formerly on the web as "Thomas Reid", now I go by "Reidish". I'm a fan of the Scottish philosopher, but using his name eventually struck me as too presumptuous. My previous blogging address was merelymist.blogspot.com.
Over on that thread at Luke's (the one where I got accused of being a racist), Justin Martyr had said to faithlessgod,..if desirism is going to meaningfully talk about “tends to be desire fulfilling” or “tends to be desire thwarting” then it needs to score this. For a concrete case, suppose we apply the turn the knobs technique and find that a desire tends to fulfill what we intuitively take to be one big desire, but thwards two relatively trivial desires. How do we know whether this desires tends to be desire fulfilling or thwarting? I agree and think the question is valid, and I had been thinking the same thing for some time now. Here's my initial attempt: Proposed Method For Meaningful Evaluations In Desire Utilitarianism. I'd be curious to hear your feedback. I believe there are several advantages to the hierarchy-of-desires concept, among them the abilities to proportionately quantify desire strength and generate empirical, mathematical results. My hypothesis is testable and predicts that if desirism's definition of good is even fairly reliable, then our moral intuitions should agree with the numbers in the overwhelming majority of evaluations.