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Oh, please. Proof by definition? ......Either you’re making a substantive claim or you’re not. If you are, you can’t claim to be right “by definition”.
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Yes, you're right. It's not an argument but it seemed to lend authority to my intuitive unease with the concept of "for it's own sake".
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This misses the point completely. (And it was really hard to miss, because I spelled it out very clearly.) In my case, as I made clear, I was saying that I thought the people in question were speaking a bit sloppily; their intended meaning could easily be determined by a little further questioning. But in your case you were saying that the people in question were simply wrong about what their real motives were; they’d say the same thing no matter how closely they were questioned.
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I don't think it does miss the point. Bearing in mind I was talking about altruistic mothers who claimed to "despise" or "hate" their children, I don't think my scepticism was unwarranted. You yourself seem to have doubts about the usefulness of personal testimony:
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People are often not aware of their real motives, and people often lie about their true motives even when they're aware of them. Oddly enough, when we're not aware of our real motives they are amost always less altruistic than the ones we think we have. The same goes for lying about motives.
Our motives are private: others do not have access to them, and often we ourselves do not have access to them. Thus any story about a person's motives is uncertifiable.
(Response to Mr. Sammi - Jan 13)
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I really don't think it was unreasonable of me to suggest that your comment was less than charitable.
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Whether a motivation is conscious or unconscious is beside the point. If it is a desire for a certain state of affairs combined with a belief that acting in a certain way will tend to bring this state of affairs about, it’s a motivation. It doesn’t matter whether we are consciously aware of the desire in question. But nothing else is a motivation, by definition. An emotion in itself is not a motivation.
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Yes, I now think you're right.
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The thought experiments are designed to test this claim – the claim that the desire for a subjective experience plays an essential role in the motivation of all acts – not the theory that people are solely motivated by desires (much less conscious desires) for subjective experiences. In each case the desire for a subjective experience - attaining happiness, satisfaction, peace of mind, or whatever - is separated from the attainment of the real-world state of affairs that it ordinarily goes with, so that we can see whether it is the desire for the real-world state of affairs or the desire for the subjective experience that is the dominant or essential motivation. And in each case we find that it is the desire for the real-world result which dominates; the person involved, when faced with a choice between them (rather than the usual “twofer”) chooses to satisfy the desire for real-world results rather than the desire for the subjective experience.
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On first reading it seemed that once again you'd missed my point until I realised what the problem may be. In retrospect, it's quite clear that I've been using the word motivation in a different sense to you. What I've been doing is using
motivation incorrectly and confused it with
explanation. The motivational "emotional payoffs" I've been unsuccessfully attempting describe are in fact the fundamental, evolved emotional responses which
explain our capacity for, rather than
motivate, genuine altruistic behaviour.
My apologies (I have admitted that I'm no philosopher) and thanks for your patience.
Chris
01-28-2003, 04:54 PM
