Topics Ethics

Question Should you do what you want? Consider the following argument. Either you do what you want or you don't do what you want. If you do what you want, you feel good. If you don't do what you want, you feel bad. You should feel good (this is the goal doctor's try to attain for you, for example). Therefore, you should do what you want. Is this right? If not, what is wrong with the above reasoning?

Accepted:
July 3, 2011

Comments

Let's have a look 1) Either you do what you want or you don't. No argument there. It's a tautology. 2) If you do what you want, you feel good. If you don't do what you want, you feel bad.Putting these together, we get that you feel good if and only if you do what you want. Is that true? I'd have thought not. Most of us have sometimes done things we wanted to do and been unhappy with what happened. Maybe you wanted that extra beer. And maybe you weren't so happy about the massive headache it left you with. Of course someone might say that we only really wanted to do what we did if doing it made us feel good. That's not very plausible, but it also may not matter. Suppose that one way or another, it's really true that we feel good exactly when we do what we want. That brings us to the crucial bit: 3) You should feel good.Really? No matter what the larger result? And in what sense of "should"? Suppose I'm the sort of person who feels good when I kick small children. How does the fact that it makes me feel good add up to a reason for saying that I should do it? So here's where we are: if we insist on a really narrow sense of "should" - pretty much "should" in a sense so narrow that it ignores any other considerations except feeling good - and if we accept the implausible premise that doing what we want always makes us feel good, then the argument "works." But it "works" without giving us any advice that a serious person would take seriously in deciding what to do all things considered.