Wait, whose philosophy are you calling “personal utilitarianism” anyway?
My old one. Though reasoning of utility as happiness is common within ordinary utilitarianism as well.
Going back to an earlier post.
It would seem contradictory to say that you want something that you don’t want, but only until you add time to the analysis. In the cases where you have some desires that you feel that you shouldn’t have, what’s going on? What’s it mean to say that you have those desires, but don’t think that you should? Let’s take the example of the video games. Even though you like them, and wouldn’t want to write it out of you even if you could, I’m sure that at least sometimes you end up playing them when you “should” be doing something else. So what’s that mean? It’s where you indulge at the time (play some even though your present self might even anticipate that your self of a few hours later would regret it), but then regret it later. It’s where one of your selves does something that a later one would wish otherwise.
The fact of the matter is, I have desires that I feel I shouldn’t have, and desires I feel I should have but don’t. If what is right is merely what we want, then why would we ever want to change what we want? Whether these feelings are justifiable, or even sensible, I still want to understand them and how they work.
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But why would you ever do that? How would it happen that you would discount the utility function of your future selves? It’s one thing if you make the wrong prediction (think that your future selves would approve), but it’s a whole other thing if you make the right one (know that your future selves wouldn’t approve), and still go through with it. If we’re simply striving to achieve the most pleasure or something, why would we subject our future self to pain? If we don’t care about the prospect of being happy in the future, what’s left of the pleasure/pain idea? and as you said, why would we think of the consequences at all? Well, I’m being pretty loose with the terms here. It’s not that you might discount the utility function of your future selves in general; it’s that you might discount it for some of your future selves in particular. This is where our time preference comes into play.
In the original example (the one about the video game), what’s going on is that your present self is more interested in pleasing some of your closer future selves than some of your further ones. Your present self might be sure that your future self of a few hours later would disapprove, but for some reason you’re more interested in the fact that you know that your future selves of the next hour or something wouldn’t disapprove. We often use the word “indulge” to refer to giving a much higher consideration to your short term well-being (the pain/pleasure for your future selves in the near future) than to your long term well-being (the pain/pleasure for your future selves in the far future). If you say that you feel as if you have desires that you shouldn’t have, it’s only because the word “desires” is referring to one category of your future selves, and the phrase “feel as if you should” is referring to another category of your future selves. As your present self, it’s possible to predict those things.
And if what’s right is simply what we want, why would we ever want to change what we want? First of all, that’s a bit misleading. To make it clearer, let’s change it to, “If what’s ultimately right for me is simply what I ultimately want, why would I ever want to change what I proximately want?” Well, now it’s pretty damn obvious. If I ultimately want A, I could easily think that X would lead to it, but then change my mind to thinking that it would actually be Y that would lead to it. In that case, I would change from proximately wanting X to proximately wanting Y. Perfectly unremarkable, right? But what do you ultimately want, how could we figure that out, and could it shift over time? Really I have no idea. I’m not sure how to reduce the proximate/ultimate distinction to my perceptions or anything. For now, they’re just convincing words. But I think that the whole thing has to do with the time structure of how our different selves interact with each other (time preference and whatever).