Skip to main content

A Certain Type of Choice

Image result for whisky shots

There's a certain type of choice that plays a big role in the thinking of a certain type of ethicist. Its a motivational conflict, in a "resistance to temptation" (R2T) context.

I really want to do X. Perhaps it has been my lifelong habit to do X every morning. I only recently gave up, or tried to give up, on X. Yet the temptation to X now and then still recurs and must be resisted.

At a given moment I either succumb, or I find some non-X diversion and my thoughts thankfully move elsewhere.

My question for today: just how important is R2T. Is it paradigmatic, or is it a side issue? Has it been overemphasized, or the reverse?


Labels:

Comments

  1. HenryFebruary 23, 2018 at 7:12 AM

    What does resistance to temptation have to do with ethics? Ethics applies to a person's conduct that affects the well-being of other sentience beings. Only in some cases does resistance to temptation affect others, and, when it does, it does so indirectly. For example, an alcoholic's resistance to alcohol may benefit the people with whom he lives.

    As for your question, the importance of R2T must be assessed relative to something else, or as part of a whole. As stated, the question has no meaning unless a something-else or a whole exists that you have not stated.

    ReplyDelete
  2. ChristopherFebruary 23, 2018 at 12:49 PM

    This is a further discussion of the kind of thing I had in mind, though as usual I was too lazy to explain: http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~jessegra/papers/MMDOMDG.Self-control%20and%20binding%20morality.JPSP.2017.pdf

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
4 comments
Read more