My five-year-old daughter is really invested in the question of what my favorite color is. She asks like once a day. Every time I tell her the most unsatisfying of answers: “I like all the colors.” The entire concept of a favorite color never made any sense to me. I like different colors in different contexts! I might like to wear green, but like when others wear blue, my walls to be painted hot pink, tree leaves to turn bright red, and cars to be purple. But it’s worse than that. Today I might find blue most appealing, but maybe tomorrow it’s red, and the next day it’s black. And that doesn’t even get into patterns.
I feel no need to reconcile these preferences. It would be an absurd waste of time to introspect or do some kind of philosophy to try to distill my “true preference” or reach some kind of reflective equilibrium. It’s actually fine and normal to have difference preferences in different contexts.
This brings me to Scott Alexander. His latest post is all about how some people say they don’t care about foreign children, but then when Pakistani grooming gangs abuse a bunch of British children, suddenly they do care, so this means they should do moral philosophy. Let’s leave aside the fact that these people don’t actually care about abused children and are just using them as weapons for their arguments as soldiers and assume they do care. Scott gives five options for what to do, with number five being heavily implied to be the correct choice:
Admit, kicking and screaming, that you might be a good person. Do some moral philosophy to see if this implies anything. If you find that it implies things you don’t want to do, or don’t have enough willpower to do, admit that you might be a sort of good person who is vaguely in favor of good things, but doesn’t have infinite willpower, and realistically will not be carrying them out most days (this is approximately everyone). Keep doing moral philosophy and testing it against your values and motivations until you reach reflective equillibrium (haha, as if).
This reminds me of nothing more than my five-year-old demanding to know my favorite color. Surely if you care about Pakistani immigrants abusing British kids, then you must care about poor starving African children! Well, no. In the same way that buying a blue shirt doesn’t mean I want to paint my house blue, caring about people in one context doesn’t imply caring about them in a different context. Maybe someone doesn’t care about foreign kids one day, but then when circumstances align in just the right way, it triggers their empathy response. Big deal! That doesn’t actually mean you have to go back and revise your previous apathetic attitude. It’s actually fine to care about some things and not others, even if they are similar. Everyone does it. It doesn’t imply a need to “do some moral philosophy,” whatever that means.
Ironically, Scott hit on the correct answer in his first option:
Give up on ever being more than a bundle of incoherent preferences. Treat an issue as the world’s worst atrocity one day, and a nothingburger the next, depending on the level of media coverage, the exact wording of the story, and whose politics are getting flattered.
He, of course, gets the implication very wrong. We are all bundles of incoherent preferences, and that’s fine. That doesn’t mean we need to yo-yo back and forth between yawning and freaking out, though that’s fine too if that’s how a person actually feels.
The suggestion that our reactions will depend on “the level of media coverage, the exact wording of the story, and whose politics are getting flattered” is, frankly, offensive, and is clearly only there to poison the well against this option. It’s quite possible to practice the virtue of equanimity without spontaneously developing a belief in normative ethics. The way you feel about any given story will probably depend on a lot of choices made by the storyteller, but you don’t need moral philosophy to tell you that the media are very often dishonest and misleading, and to react with that in mind.
Accept that you are a bundle of incoherent preferences, and that whatever emotional reaction you have to a give situation is fine. But also recognize that your emotional reaction does not say anything about facts or objective morality.