He should read some Kant and Hume.
Human reason, in one sphere of its cognition, is called upon to consider questions, which it cannot decline, as they are presented by its own nature, but which it cannot answer, as they transcend every faculty of the mind.
Reason is and ought only to be a slave to the passions
I don’t think they’d find that very insightful.
It’s plain hedonism. I’m sure they’re familiar with the idea.
Hedonism is obviously the best ethical theory. Bentham had the right idea
Bentham developed hedonistic calculus. The foundation is a multivariate ethical vector space. He rationalized hedonism to the extreme. The passions are explicitly tempered for a calculated greater good.
He may have read both - apparently he’s very well read. My guess is he would disagree with Hume on that point, but I don’t know the guy.
Well Hume was right. Reason can’t derive axioms. It can’t create purpose from nothing. It can’t solve the is-ought problem. Passion can. Passion can say “the world should be like this. Why? Because I want it to be”. Reason can’t do that. And thus, reason should exist only to serve passion.
IMO it should be cyclical. Passion provides ideals and goals, reason can help work towards those but also evaluate them and refine them.
Like once upon a time, I wanted a high end sports car. But over time, through reason, I realized that owning one would be more of a net negative than a positive in many ways and now I wouldn’t likely get one even if it would be trivial to afford. I’d like to not even need a car at all, but reason has me recognizing that that also wouldn’t be a positive given that I live in an area where mass transit infrastructure is poor.
This boils down to having conflicting passions/goals and using reason to resolve them (like wanting a sports car while also wanting to afford other things and to reduce my environmental impact and not driving a sports car is a very easy way, trivial even, to have less impact than driving one).
I feel like I’m learning a decent amount from this thread. I definitely consider myself a (overly) rational person. I haven’t really thought about it before, but obviously I’ve still got some passions driving things.
If I was to put it into words, I’d probably say I’m passionate about learning how things work and finding elegant simple solutions to problems. Which is generally tied to my selfish goal of having more free time to just experience the world without responsibilities.
Thanks for inspiring me to think about this, maybe I should go read some more philosophy…
OTOH reason has kept a roof over my head when my passion would have had me do Arduino projects or write D&D campaigns instead of working. Maybe Hume’s gf had a job.
