[lo_zamoyski]

It is absurd because it places subjective opinions over objective goods. This is the vice of “human respect”. Human beings do not have a final say about others. They can opine, but opinions are like buttholes, everyone has one.

Sure, it is nice to be remembered well, if you deserve it, but I do not live for the opinions of others. This is slave mentality and pathetic. I care about being good, and if I am hated for that, then so be it. Sad, but better to be hated for being a good person than loved for being a mediocrity or a knave.

And to off yourself out of concern with how people remember you is a condemnation of our society, our lack of charity, our lack of magnanimity, and our selfish prioritization of convenience. Full throttle consumerism.

[tirant]

The definition of good is probably the closest to doing the opposite of inflicting pain on others. There’s very little chance that you will be hated by being good. So definitely behaving or being good is not so different than behaving in a way that other people don’t hate you.

[hkpack]

Or sometimes people love you for inflicting pain on others. Look at current political figures beloved by their cult.

Or there are others trying to do good things and being hated for taking a courage to challenge things.

[beedeebeedee]

> There’s very little chance that you will be hated by being good

Jesus, Socrates, anyone who stands up against an immoral hierarchy. Rethink your thought

[dkural]

To go down this rabbit hole, presumably someone is hating somebody in this immoral hierarchy though? If everyone is happy with everyone, where's the immoral part? I do think the OP is right that in many circumstances of everyday life, being good usually correlates with being appreciated by people you actually have relationships with. Of course, this being real life, there are exceptions. However, while a child may complain and claim they hate you for not letting them have too much candy, they do love and appreciate you in a deeper way for taking care of them.

[beedeebeedee]

Jesus, Socrates, et al, are extreme examples that clearly debunk the comment made above. There are much more mild versions of that everywhere and everyday. Being ‘good’ in no way guarantees you will be loved. In fact, if you have integrity you will probably end up butting heads with people who are ‘not good’, and those folks will likely not hesitate to do underhanded and manipulative things to make you hated by others and not just them. Thankfully that is not everyone, but it is childish to believe that somehow being ‘good’ will make you beloved. If that were the case, being ‘good’ would be the easy choice that everyone makes. It is not.

[perching_aix]

> It is absurd because it places subjective opinions over objective goods.

Care to name even a single objective good, and explain how exactly it is objectively good?

[lo_zamoyski]

Instead of naming something concrete, it makes more sense to define what the only legitimate basis for morality and the human good is, which is human nature. If you deny that, then there is indeed no possible objective basis for the good. You could not differentiate between any two human action. Decisions would be entirely arbitrary. It would make no difference what you did, except factually in the sense that you did one thing and not another.

If you observe any animal or living thing, you will generally see it behaving in ways that seek to actualize it as the kind of thing it is. The nature of a thing bounds the potentials it has, and so circumscribes the limits of what can be actualized; this is a basic feature of all things, living or not, that they are "causally composed", as it were. In any case, this activity is not necessarily conscious. No squirrel is thinking "Gee, I need to collect nuts to grow and nourish my body and avoid predators so that I can produce offspring and actualize X, Y, and Z." In such cases, the squirrel is moved by various inclinations and appetites whose proper satisfaction actualizes certain ends of "squirrelness". A good squirrel (not in the moral sense, but in the sense of it exemplifying squirrel nature) is one that is able to actualize these potentials and does so to realize its squirrel nature. A bad specimen is one that cannot or does not. So, if you get a squirrel addicted to meth, and all it does is do things that get it more hits of meth while neglecting or impeding the realization of its squirrel nature, then you have a failure or deviance opposed to the good of the squirrel. The same could be said of a squirrel that is lethargic or one that lacks limbs.

Human beings are no different in this general sense, save that human beings are able to a) comprehend their circumstances, at least somewhat, and b) choose between apprehended alternatives. This means human beings are moral agents. So, here, a human being bears a certain responsibility for his choices and actions. If he chooses to act against his nature, especially as a rational, moral, and social agent, then he is acting against his nature and thus against his good. And if he is acting in such a way while understanding that he is doing so, then he now also has moral culpability for his defective actions.

In short, to be the kind of thing you are by nature is what is good. The act in accord with your nature is what makes good actions. Death is not good per se, and to act to destroy yourself is opposed to your being human and thus to your good. To intentionally do so is morally evil. (This must distinguished from self-sacrifice for another, which can be in accord with human nature under certain circumstances, but it is not the case here with Kahneman.)

[perching_aix]

> Instead of naming something concrete, it makes more sense to define what the only legitimate basis for morality and the human good is, which is human nature. If you deny that, then there is indeed no possible objective basis for the good.

Quite the opposite - I agree with that, and that's why I think goodness is not an objectively evaluable property. At the risk of making you feel I'm twisting your words, you pretty much said it yourself: what the human good is, is at the very least subject to human nature. Therefore, your evaluation of goodness cannot be objective. You're at best speaking from the subjective perspective of a human being.

But if you now say this doesn't get to the heart of your overall reasoning, I agree.

Consider then if goodness is even more subjective than just being a human value - for example, imagine that individuals might have (if even just slightly but) differing natures and so differing values. This would mean that your evaluation of what's good and what the human nature is like is not going to be durable across people. Worse still, you may even consider scenarios where the nature of a person changes over time, or they may value different things given a specific context. This would mean that your evaluation of what's good and what's bad is no longer durable not just across people, but across contexts, situations, and even time itself.

Notably of course, this is logically indistinguishable from other people simply making a measurement error of the same supposedly objective property. So this all hinges on whether you (can) believe that instead of there being an ontic, fundamental property of goodness, one that you're properly accessing and others disagreeing aren't, your access is the same as anyone else's. And that regardless of whether such a property objectively exists, it may either not hold an observer invariant value, or you may never be able to tell to have learned that value.

[sokoloff]

I would posit that caring for helpless infants is an objective good. It’s not clear to me how I’d explain that to someone who doesn’t inherently understand it.

[tsimionescu]

What does "care for" mean, precisely? Is circumcising or baptizing them objectively good, so that they don't burn in hell for all eternity? What about shaping their skull in a more pleasing form? If they have ambiguous but otherwise working genitals, should you do surgery to assign them a clear sex? Or unto more mundane affairs, is it objectively good to give them baby formula instead of mother's milk, or maybe the other way around? Is it objectively good to take them from their parents and care for them yourself if the parents are not caring for them? How do you objectively determine if the parents are caring for them?

[perching_aix]

That's a bit contradictory, isn't it? If caring for helpless infants is an objective good only for those who inherently understand why that is, then that's a dependence on the observer's understanding and so it is subjective.

There's a world of difference between something being objectively a certain way, and between feeling really strongly some way about something and thinking that everyone else reasonable would feel the same way too. There are things that are encoded into (most of) our very instincts, things we (for the most part) find absolutely common sense, but this doesn't make them objective. I wish language was able to succinctly express these different levels of "being on the same page", but alas I don't believe it does at the moment, and abusing the word "objective" I can't say I love as an alternative.

[sokoloff]

Everyone to whom I’d explain that was cared for as a helpless infant.

If at any point we’d have stopped doing that, we wouldn’t be here to be arguing about it.

[perching_aix]

And how does that assign goodness to it all?

[dpark]

I agree with you that it is good to care for helpless infants. The fact that this cannot be clearly explained to someone who doesn’t inherently agree indicates that this is not an objective good, though.

The devil’s advocate would probably also ask how it would be objectively good to protect baby Hilter, knowing that protecting his innocent infant life would lead directly to the deaths of millions.

[mfru]

The answer to that would be that if you have the ability to kill baby Hitler you would also have the ability to allow him into art school, it is an impossible absurd thought experiment after all.

[idiotsecant]

Is caring for a helpless infant objectively good if it is infected with an extremely virulent plague that will undoubtedly kill any human who comes in contact with it, or a human who comes into contact with them, or them, many layers deep? What if that infant has 2 days to live no matter what, but millions of people will die if it's cared for?

Objective good does not exist, context is king.

[LocalH]

There is no such thing as objectivity in human experience. Every single thing, even attempts to be objective, are all filtered through the subjective experience of life. Our brains interpret objective reality and provide us a subjective translation.

[lo_zamoyski]

Then if your claim also a mere subjective emanation, and an arguably mysterious one?

The subject receives the object in the mode of the subject, yes, but this does not mean that knowledge of the objective is impossible.

[Der_Einzige]

You were so close to genuine self-ownership in this post, especially with decrying slave morality - than you ended by getting spooked all over again.

You might enjoy “the unique and its property” by Max Stirner. An excellent philosophical book and especially relevant given that Alzheimer’s takes away the self…

[flextheruler]

The point is he deserved to be remembered well but due to recency bias and the severity of whatever he did during the end stages of his disease he will not be. I personally suffered immense trauma in my early 20s when I moved to a really cheap place. My parents refused to believe me that there was a black mold and general mold problem in the place I was living and that it was causing me psychological distress and flaring up my eczema. Despite all evidence that I had they dismissed it because I had told them I was depressed beforehand. They are not very in touch with empathy or compassion or mental health. Very old-fashioned view that these things are character flaws which are not to be spoken of. Anyways they dismissed my concerns did not read my messages or view my pictures of personal property being destroyed and the landlord not responding to me, the whole rental was illegitimate and I had identified that early on they even ignored that I got a scalp infection which I had to take oral anti-fungal medication to get rid of. The preponderance of evidence was so overwhelming, but for whatever reason they could not admit I had been right and that they were wrong and refused to help me and actively discouraged me from taking legal action or even to move home for months. Eventually I was blessed with an extended relative who gave me shelter. During one of the worst parts of this period my parents even went so far as to assert that what was actually happening to me was the onset of paranoid schizophrenia. I was close to the right age and sex for it to happen. I knew that paranoid schizophrenics often become homeless and violent and the general awfulness of the condition. If it was not for my own investigation that there was no family history of it and a friend who believed what I was saying and told me that I needed to leave the house and then finally extended family I had a plan to no longer exist. This was partially out of not wanting to be remembered badly, but also so many other things like; not wanting to hurt my loved ones, not wanting to hurt strangers, not wanting to slowly degrade into an unstable and potentially dangerous person and of course the median life expectancy for that condition is so low. I lacked the constitution to allow myself to become someone who would likely damage the world and severely damage those close to me so my logical conclusion based on a false premise during those couple days was to nip it in the bud so to speak as it's a progressive condition. My relationship with my parents has not been the same since, but how could it be. I am forever indebted to a friend and extended family... they quite literally saved my life.

The end point being that with the parents I have there was nearly a guaranteed outcome of only objectively bad things happening for me, for them, for people around me. During that state I saw my plan as honorable and wrote it down in what I was to leave to explain my actions.

[ares623]

A god need not concern himself with the opinions of men