The Parable of the Dog
Consider the Happy Golden Retriever: what it loves the most is to retrieve things for its master. It finds this pleasurable. Anthropomorphizing a bit: the dog would be subject to a number of evaluative states. If it reflected on its life full of fetching, it would judge its life a good one. It would aspire to retrieve. It would probably become dissatisfied with things if there were a long hiatus in fetching. Etc. To coin an expression: it would value fetching.
There is, of course, an explanation for the dog's syndrome of evaluative states: the happy golden retriever is the end result of intense selective pressures to develop animals that will assist humans in hunting. One very good way of getting them to do so is to confer a reproductive advantage on dogs that find it pleasurable to serve their masters by retrieving. Creatures tend to do what they enjoy. Of course, the happy golden retriever could have belonged to a breed that serves another purpose -- maybe it could have been a happy hound. It could, had its ancestors lived among humans with different priorities (getting dogs to run animals to ground), have found running animals to ground intensely pleasurable. Or one can imagine a breed of dogs selected to chase their own tails. Such dogs would cherish tail chasing.
Now imagine (this is a little stretch, I admit) the golden retriever becomes aware of the explanation for its evaluative states. It might think to itself as follows: I value what I do because I have been bred to do so. I could have been the result of a different breeding history
in which case I would find other things pleasurable. Our happy retriever might then, one imagines, find itself alienated from its evaluations: they will appear arbitrary in a certain way.
"Why is this so great?" it will wonder. At this point the happy retriever should find itself in a pickle, emotionally and intellectually.
Thank goodness nothing in human life is like this. For then we should be subject to something like skepticism, which (instead of showing that our beliefs fail in their aspiration to knowledge) would show some range of our evaluative states to be defective in a way similar to unwarranted belief. Now I wonder what that defect is and what the normative upshot of such an upshot would be. In the grips of the thought that I don't know P, I do not believe P. In the grips of evaluative skepticism, should I take an analogous stance? And what would that be? Etc.
There is, of course, an explanation for the dog's syndrome of evaluative states: the happy golden retriever is the end result of intense selective pressures to develop animals that will assist humans in hunting. One very good way of getting them to do so is to confer a reproductive advantage on dogs that find it pleasurable to serve their masters by retrieving. Creatures tend to do what they enjoy. Of course, the happy golden retriever could have belonged to a breed that serves another purpose -- maybe it could have been a happy hound. It could, had its ancestors lived among humans with different priorities (getting dogs to run animals to ground), have found running animals to ground intensely pleasurable. Or one can imagine a breed of dogs selected to chase their own tails. Such dogs would cherish tail chasing.
Now imagine (this is a little stretch, I admit) the golden retriever becomes aware of the explanation for its evaluative states. It might think to itself as follows: I value what I do because I have been bred to do so. I could have been the result of a different breeding history
in which case I would find other things pleasurable. Our happy retriever might then, one imagines, find itself alienated from its evaluations: they will appear arbitrary in a certain way.
"Why is this so great?" it will wonder. At this point the happy retriever should find itself in a pickle, emotionally and intellectually.
Thank goodness nothing in human life is like this. For then we should be subject to something like skepticism, which (instead of showing that our beliefs fail in their aspiration to knowledge) would show some range of our evaluative states to be defective in a way similar to unwarranted belief. Now I wonder what that defect is and what the normative upshot of such an upshot would be. In the grips of the thought that I don't know P, I do not believe P. In the grips of evaluative skepticism, should I take an analogous stance? And what would that be? Etc.
posted by Idris at 6:35 PM
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