I think that consequentialism has to have primacy - we want the ultimate basis of our decision making to be maximization of expected utility. However, it's widely agreed that you can't actually use "naive calculation" every day to make every day decisions. So instead, we have the project of bending our every day decision making instincts in whatever way will bring about the best consequences, when those instincts are not consequentialist instincts. This seems to me that sort of exercise.
We experience a conflict because I think we're born deontologists. This is why we talk about a consequentialist "burdensomeness problem" - consequentialism offers us an infinitely long scale and tells us only that the higher up we go on it, the better, but we're wired to look for a moral system that sets a standard that we're to achieve and tell us when we've achieved it, in a way that we tie to our self-esteem. Thus we end up with warring factions in our minds on how high to set the bar for ourselves: too high and we risk failing to reach the bar, too low and we fail to achieve all that we could; in both instances our self-esteem suffers, causing not only direct suffering but also loss of future effectiveness. The spirit of "tsuyoku naritai" is that there is no bar - that there's always higher to aim - and that the Way is to grasp this with neither complacency nor despair.
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Date: 2010-05-28 09:09 am (UTC)I think that consequentialism has to have primacy - we want the ultimate basis of our decision making to be maximization of expected utility. However, it's widely agreed that you can't actually use "naive calculation" every day to make every day decisions. So instead, we have the project of bending our every day decision making instincts in whatever way will bring about the best consequences, when those instincts are not consequentialist instincts. This seems to me that sort of exercise.
We experience a conflict because I think we're born deontologists. This is why we talk about a consequentialist "burdensomeness problem" - consequentialism offers us an infinitely long scale and tells us only that the higher up we go on it, the better, but we're wired to look for a moral system that sets a standard that we're to achieve and tell us when we've achieved it, in a way that we tie to our self-esteem. Thus we end up with warring factions in our minds on how high to set the bar for ourselves: too high and we risk failing to reach the bar, too low and we fail to achieve all that we could; in both instances our self-esteem suffers, causing not only direct suffering but also loss of future effectiveness. The spirit of "tsuyoku naritai" is that there is no bar - that there's always higher to aim - and that the Way is to grasp this with neither complacency nor despair.