Desirism

People can always avoid your blame by avoiding you.

I have encountered a new philosophy called desirism on the internet.  I'm convinced that desirists have some good ideas, but haven't quite found the best way of improving the world.

First I will state the most radical departure between desirism and my own ethics.  Alonzo Fyfe has stated his theory of value here.  It is the maximum amount that a person would pay in an auction where people had equal wealth and true and complete beliefs.

Now it is impossible for people to have all the relevant knowledge regarding a transaction, but some may dispute this.  It is easier to argue that the assumption of equal wealth is something that would be impossible to implement in practice.  Presumably we will be selling consumption goods in this auction, and once we do this it will be impossible for us to maintain equality of wealth.  Some people will value consumption differently than others.  Another way of saying this is that some will value savings and investment more.  This will lead to a divergence of wealth over time.  Even if the people were to start out with equal wealth, it wouldn't stay that way.

Moreover, we cannot equalize the wealth between sales of different items.  Part of what we mean when we say that you value something is what you are willing to give up in order to get it.  If someone is willing to pay a million dollars for an item in an auction, this will be meaningless if they will get the million dollars back after the auction takes place.  The price loses its meaning.

So in spite of thinking that he has found a theory of value that is objective and based on reality, Mr. Fyre has not.  Here is a blog put out by another desirist, I will be examining this post in particular.  The author states that blame and credit are to operate as they would in an ideal world of equality.  Why this is seen as the best way of assigning blame and credit is not specified.  Perhaps most people would find such a world better, but that doesn't settle the issue.  It seems that we should find the best way that we can improve the world by using blame and credit, and that is likely to be something quite different.

In fact I suspect that the whole system suffers from the defect that Friedrick Nietzsche described of the ideal worlds of the philosophers in Twilight of the Idols.  That is that they have created an ideal world to contrast it with the one we see, the only one that exists.  They then use that world to denigrate our own.  It does seem to me as if the philosophy is all to eager to encourage what it sees, often quite rightly, as desired action by casting blame rather than assigning credit.  I should point out here that I am not advocating or defending Nietzsche's solution to this problem, amoralism.

But blame can have more than one effect.  People will do what they can to avoid having their reputations adversely effected.  This might involve avoiding harmful actions, which is good.  But if you attempt to use blame in order to encourage desired behaviors this will have an unfortunate side effect.  People can always avoid your blame by avoiding you.  Maybe I could do some good by posting that last, short statement as a comment on many blogs.  This is something that many people fail to appreciate, desirist or not.

The theory of value is based on what people would do under experimental conditions that are impossible to produce.  Hence the theory cannot be said to have a realistic view of value.  In contrast I use the term value to describe the preferences of people as they exist in the world we see.  I see it as nonsense to say we prefer this or that over the other thing.  Preferences are held by individuals.  This would contrast with the views of Mr. Fyfe, but not necessarily with the second blogger, who goes by the name of faithlessgod.

In order to improve the world, we need to come up with moral and ethical values that people will want to use in order to improve their own lives, and the lives that they care about.  That is, people use blame and credit to help them realize their values.