E.G.

Kevin Vallier says that the American right is now a "strange blend" of three things:

(1) Techno-optimism, exemplified by Peter Thiel, the billionaire investor and Trumpist, who thinks that "the forces of creative destruction, if appropriately organized, are on balance a good thing for humanity, and that one can generally count on technological advances to be good for humanity. Disruption creates more than it destroys, progress requires radical acceleration, and talent must flow freely across borders. Stagnation is death. Only technology can solve humanity’s greatest problems."

(2) Catholic post-liberalism, a variety of political Catholicism which has grown weary of operating within the constraints of liberal society and holds that "there is something fundamentally wrong with the American liberal order and that it has to be replaced."

(3) Populism, the central idea of which is that "the majority of the population is fundamentally good and their interests conflict with those of a corrupt elite. Populists have stressed nationalism, trade protection, immigration restrictions, and a focus on the struggles of the American working class, particularly in the Rust Belt regions."

Vallier says these three things are in tension with one another. The tensions are of two sorts.

First, he says there are economic tensions between techno-optimism and populism. The techno-optimists want to deregulate AI, for example. But AI might replace human workers, dampening working-class wages, which seems pretty non-populist.

And second, he says there are tensions between techno-optimist philosophical anthropology and Catholic philosophical anthropology. On the one hand, according to Catholics,

we are spirit-matter: embodied souls whose aim is to be united with God and other human beings in love forever. We’re incomplete without the spiritual dimension. The assumption is that there is a fixed human nature that tends to manifest itself over time. … For any Catholic, the human person is a compound of soul and body, forming a single entity that Aristotle called a hylomorphic unity of soul and body. God created and ordered your spiritual nature, and your biological nature is part of your nature, fixed and immutable. Together, they combine to make a human person.

On the other hand, the Silicon Valley techno-optimist 

views the person as a digital program. They dream about gaining the ability to upload from one’s body into the cloud.

Vallier sums up:

These new alliances are unstable, incorporating many deeply conflicting influences. Unsurprisingly, we would see some ruptures when the influences genuinely conflict. It is hard to adopt both postliberalism and techno-optimism simultaneously, especially in a populist moment.

The current conflicts are only the beginning. As AI advances, along with social change, the tensions between these camps will only expand. What will the right do? Will it embrace creative destruction, protectionism, or postliberal “First Things”? The right cannot have it all. The synthesis will not hold.

I hope that MAGA collapses. I believe that it will collapse soon. I also believe that MAGA is incoherent. On these points, I do not believe I disagree with Vallier.

But I believe Vallier overestimates the extent to which an intellectual system needs to be coherent in order to persist and thrive. I do not think it is reasonable to hope that MAGA's incoherence will be what causes its collapse. MAGA is not the sort of thing that needs to be coherent in order to serve its purposes. 

***

Many long-lasting, long-prevailing intellectual systems contain major internal tensions and even outright contradictions. Catholicism, and Christianity broadly, are themselves examples of intellectual systems that manage to combine conflicting ideas into a single package that billions of people have no difficulty embracing.

I grant that, when Catholicism is combined with techno-optimism and populism, this may produce new forms of incoherence not present in Catholicism in isolation. It remains the case that, in adding techno-optimism and populism to Catholicism, one does not thereby shift from a coherent worldview to an incoherent one.

And it seems to me that fully coherent intellectual systems might generally be at a disadvantage when it comes to gaining widespread allegiance. I'll mention two separable reasons why coherence might be limiting.

***

In Breaking the Spell, a book that I think has been treated somewhat unfairly, Dennett sketches one of the ways that incoherent doctrines can attract people. Briefly: Incoherence creates mystery, and people are attracted to mystery. He writes:

If hellfire is the stick, mystery is the carrot. The propositions to be believed ought to be baffling! … Not just counterintuitive, …, but downright unintelligible. Prosaic assertions have no bite, and moreover they are too readily checked for accuracy. For a truly awesome and mind-teasing proposition, there is nothing that beats a paradox eagerly avowed. [In "Viruses of the Mind,"] Dawkins drew attention to what we might call the inflation of credal athleticism, the boast that my faith is so strong that I can mentally embrace a bigger paradox than you can.

Vallier is right that there is a tension between the Catholic idea that we are soul-body compounds and the techno-optimist idea that we are uploadable digital programs. But there are also similar levels of tension within many ancient Catholic ideas, such as transubstantiation and the Trinity. Such tensions can be features rather than bugs if the faithful receive them as mysteries.

***

Here is a further point. If you want large numbers of people to embrace your system of ideas, then you need to have something for everybody (or at least something for many people). And you might have a hard time with that if you are committed to making sure that everything in your system fits together.

If MAGA were to jettison any of the three planks that Vallier identifies, it might become more coherent, but it would have less to offer to the various constituencies who are each attracted to those planks.

Redesigning MAGA for greater coherence would be like redesigning the menu of a restaurant so that every dish can be enjoyed in combination with every other dish.

***

I do not deny that incoherence can doom social-political movements like MAGA. My main claim here is that, when it comes to the real-world success or failure of such movements, incoherence isn't always counterproductive, and coherence is sometimes counterproductive. 

In general, if your movement endorses P and Q, where P and Q are in tension with one another (such that: P makes Q unlikely; or P, with the addition of plausible auxiliary assumptions, entails not-Q; or, in the most extreme case, P in isolation entails not-Q), this can be bad for your movement if (though, I think, not only if) the following two conditions obtain:

(I) The tension is conspicuous: People who like P can usually see that P is in tension with Q and/or people who like Q can see that Q is in tension with P. 

Note that this condition does not always obtain, for the straightforward reason that people are far from logically omniscient.

(II) The tension is experienced as disgusting rather delicious: People who see the tension between P and Q generally see that tension as a repellant defect of your system, rather than a tantalizing mystery.

I think the Catholic doctrines I mentioned above—the Trinity and transubstantiation—show that, even when a tension is conspicuous, it's not always experienced as disgusting rather than delicious. That said, there are no doubt tensions that do drive people away, or strike people as being in clear need of resolution. This might be a matter of aesthetic judgment, or it might be something more.

I suppose it is still unclear whether these conditions will obtain in the case of MAGA. My guess is that the conspicuousness condition, at least, does not obtain.

Sarah McBride advocates a politics of grace. In a recent conversation with Ezra Klein, she defines grace like this:

I think grace in politics means, one, creating room for disagreement: assuming good intentions, assuming that the people who are on the other side of an issue from you aren’t automatically hateful, horrible people. I think it means creating some space for disagreement within your own coalition. I think it’s a kindness that just feels so missing from our body politic and our national dialogue.

McBride's view, I take it, is that in recent years, lefty activism, including but not limited to trans activism, has not been graceful enough. I think McBride thinks this gracelessness has had overall bad effects. For example, there seems to have been a rightward shift in American public opinion, which culminated in Trump's second term, and McBride seems to think that lefty gracelessness is part of the reason why that happened.

I do not know whether, or to what extent, I want to disagree with McBride. If she were saying that activists should not make demands, or if she were saying that activists should not try to change the world quickly, then I would disagree. But she does not say those things. What she says, I think, is that activists should aim high, but should sometimes accept slow change as a compromise between fast change and no change. She says:

It is our job to demand “now,” in the face of people who say “never.” But it’s also our job to then not reject the possibility for a better tomorrow as that compromise.

That seems sensible. Broadly, it is hard to disagree with the claim that we should be graceful in our disagreements with others. But I am not sure that we should always be graceful in McBride's sense.

***

I think it may be useful to say that confrontational activism typically, or perhaps always, aims to change people's behavior or beliefs by making them feel ashamed. Thus understood, confrontational activism aims at persuasion, but not rational persuasion, or at least not purely rational persuasion. Shame can make us change our beliefs and behavior, but when it does so, it's not usually through the specific kind of conscious, explicit, measured, unemotional (or minimally emotional) sort of intellectual process that we call rational.

I don't think confrontational activism is usually graceful in McBride's sense. It might be an interesting project to try find an approach to activism that is both graceful and confrontational. But grace, for McBride, is dialogical, rational, generous, kind. And shame, it seems to me, is none of those things. So, if confrontational activism is primarily aimed at shaming others, as I've suggested, it may be practically impossible for it to be graceful as well as confrontational.

Thus understood, two questions about confrontational activism are worth asking. The first question is about efficacy. When and under what circumstances does confrontational activism work (if it works at all)? The second question is moral. Even if confrontational activism works, might it nevertheless be immoral to engage in it?

***

Broadly, I think most people have what might be called a shame circle. If someone is in your shame circle, then it's uncomfortable to learn that they see you, or your beliefs or behavior, as shameful. But if somebody is outside of your shame circle, then it might not matter to you very much, if at all, what they think about you or what you believe and do.

If S1 is in S2's shame circle, and S2 finds out that S1 thinks that something about S2 is shameful, there's generally four ways for S2 to respond:

Option 1: S2 tries to change the feature that S1 regards as shameful.

Option 2: S2 tries to cause S1 to change her mind, i.e., to decide that the supposedly shameful thing isn't actually shameful after all.

Option 3: S2 tries to eject S1 from her shame circle. 

Option 4: S2 just continues on, and accepts the discomfort of shame.

Shame works, let's say, when the person being shamed chooses Option 1. Generally, shame is going to work when and only when (a) the person doing the shaming is in the shame circle of the person being shamed, and (b) Option 1 is the easiest, or least costly, or most attractive, of the four options.

Condition (a) puts limits on the efficacy of online shaming. Strangers on the internet, especially anonymous ones, probably aren't in your shame circle. Learning that they think that something about you is shameful might be little different from learning that Martians think that something about you is shameful.

When online shaming does work, I think it usually works in the following roundabout way. If you find out that a lot of people on the internet regard X as shameful, this may lead you to conclude, or to suspect, that some of the people you've got close relationships with—people who are probably in your shame circle—might well feel the same way. And then you might feel the weight of shame in regard to X, even if none of the people who are actually in your shame circle have ever given you any direct indication that they think X is shameful.

So, I think, online shaming can work, in the roundabout way I've just outlined. But I think shaming is more reliably efficacious when it takes a direct route. This is what happens, or can happen, in cases where the shamer and the shamee have some sort of real relationship to one another. If you learn that your friend, or your neighbor, or your colleague, or your family member regards X as shameful, this can be profoundly affecting, I think. That's because I think that, as a very rough psychological approximation, S2 is in S1's shame circle if and only if S2 and S1 have some sort of a real relationship with one another.

But even when the shamer is someone you've got a relationship with, shame is not guaranteed to work. Suppose you learn that someone you regard as a dear friend, someone who is definitely in your shame circle, thinks your job is shameful. If you're a typical person for whom changing to a new job is going to be a huge ordeal, then you're unlikely to choose Option 1 (quit your job). You're more likely to try Option 2 (attempt to change your friend's mind) or Option 3 (eject them from your shame circle, which might require dissolving the friendship) or Option 4 (simply accept the uncomfortable feeling of being shamed).

***

So, generally speaking, I think shame is most likely to be efficacious in cases where two conditions are satisfied:

(I) The relationship condition: Shamer and shamee have some kind of real relationship, such that the shamer is in the shamee's shame circle.

(II) The minimal cost condition: The shame is directed at a belief or behavior that the shamee can change relatively easily and at little personal cost.

An example of something that meets condition (II) is the use of people's preferred pronouns. For most people, getting used to using people's preferred pronouns does not require that much effort. And so it might be expected that, in general, when people learn that some of the people in their shame circle think that refusal to use preferred pronouns is shameful, they will just go ahead and put in the effort to use preferred pronouns.

And I suspect that this is why the movement to get people to use preferred pronouns has been as successful as it has been. And it seems to me that it has indeed been very successful in a surprisingly short period of time. I have noticed that even some prominent Trumpists, such as JD Vance, observe the practice.

***

So I think confrontational activism, understood as having the aim of compelling social change through the use of shame, can work. But there is a further question about whether confrontational activism might be morally dubious or problematic.

I see four moral objections that can be made to shame-based, confrontational activism.

The grace objection. It might be argued that treating others with McBride-style grace is, in general, morally required, or is at least morally required except in dire circumstances. If so, then to the extent that confrontational activism is ungraceful, it's morally objectionable.

The manipulation objection. Many people think that it's objectionably manipulative to try to get people to change their beliefs or behaviors through non-rational processes. On this view, we owe it to one another to rely solely on rational techniques of persuasion in our attempts to change one another's minds or behavior. This is a standard line of moral critique of certain techniques of advertising, for instance. The thought is that advertising that relies on non-rational processes (e.g., subliminal associations between a car for sale and sexual desire) is manipulative and therefore wrong. And shame, I've suggested, affects us in ways that are not rational, or not fully rational. So it might be thought that confrontational activism is objectionably manipulative in much the same way as advertising is or can be.

The backfire objection. This, I think, is McBride's main concern, or one of her main concerns. The idea here might be that, even when confrontational activism works, in the narrow sense that it causes people to change their beliefs and behavior, it may have further ill effects. For instance, it seems that people tend to become disoriented, angry, and confused when they notice a shift in what is regarded as shameful in their communities. And this might motivate them to cast about in search of ways to turn back the clock. This seems like a way to understand the psychological impetus behind something like MAGA.

The social cost objection. Shame, I've suggested, is most efficacious when it occurs in the context of relationships. But shame in that context can also quite obviously be damaging to relationships. Return to the case I mentioned above, where S2 and S1 are friends, and then S2 lets S1 know that S2 regards S1's job as shameful, and this leads to the dissolution of their friendship. Broadly, there is some significant degree of tension between maintaining and strengthening our relationships with one another, on the one hand, and trying to create social change through the use of shame, on the other hand. This might be a basis for a moral critique of confrontational activism, especially if our relationships with one another are thought to be highly morally valuable, intrinsically or extrinsically.

I've mentioned these objections, not because I think they're decisive, but because I think they are the kinds of objections that defenders of confrontational activism will need to say something about.

My overall view, which I won't try to defend in this post, might be something like this. There are many contexts where being graceful in McBride's sense is just what's called for. And there are many contexts where shame is not called for, precisely because it effects persuasion through non-rational means. For example, no one should be trying to shame anyone in a philosophy classroom. But I think there are many other contexts where shaming people can be both efficacious and morally defensible. 

I think the general type of view that Errol Lord presents in this paper is somewhat widely held, and Lord develops a sophisticated version of the view. For these reasons, the paper is valuable. But I do not agree with Lord's view.

Lord's paper deserves a solid and careful critique, but I will not provide one of those here. I will just make a few scattered points.

***

Lord identifies a few problems that he calls "existential." There is "the problem of material boundedness," which includes the fact that "[o]ur bodies will wilt and die at a relatively rapid speed." And then there is "the problem of disenchantment," which "arises from threats to the meaning or value of our particular lives." Under this latter problem, Lord groups two further sub-problems. First, there's the problem that a "deterministic, scientistic view of reality" "seems to immediately void the meaning of our lives," thus disenchanting us. And second, there's the problem that various social forces, including capitalism, also disenchant us, e.g., by "propelling us into a system of shallow exploitation."

A value is "salvific" if it solves existential problems such as these. Lord says there are two mechanisms by which a value could be salvific: reactive inheritance (whereby, roughly, your reaction to salvific value solves an existential problem for you) and redemptive constitution (whereby, roughly, your possession of salvific value solves an existential problem for you).

I take it that Lord's hope is that we can be saved from our existential problems either through our reactions to beauty, or through being beautiful ourselves.

This, I think, is not a good hope to have. For one thing, I think it is a false hope. I feel sure that beauty can't save us from any of the existential problems that Lord is (reasonably) worried about. Also, I worry that cultivating and being guided by this hope might lead to bad choices.

***

For Lord, beauty is "the zenith value of ordered complexity." He tries to clarify this in a footnote: "Not all things with ordered complexity are beautiful (perhaps pace Proust)! To be beautiful is to have the zenith value of ordered complexity."

And Lord says that loving the beauty of X, whether X is a painting or a person, involves trying to understand X, to craft a "theory" of X. Beauty is in this way a "noetic" value.

One of my concerns about this account is very basic: I do not see that beauty is tightly connected with "ordered complexity" in the way that Lord suggests. Many of the things that are beautiful are beautiful because they are simple. Quaker meeting houses are usually more beautiful than any Roman cathedral, for example. Also, some of the things that are beautiful are beautiful because they are disordered. 

Lord's view seems to be consistent with the view that X can be more beautiful than Y even if X is simpler than Y or more disordered than Y. But I think Lord's view might not be consistent with the view (which I take to be plausible) that X's simplicity or disorder can in some cases contribute to X's beauty.

But suppose we run with Lord's "ordered complexity" account of beauty. I still have qualms with Lord's view.

***

Lord structures his discussion of the beauty of persons around Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grande Bellezza, a movie that I haven't seen. The protagonist of the movie is Jep Gambardella, a 65-year-old novelist who found literary success early in life, and has since devoted himself to pursuit of pleasure, but is now disenchanted, and is facing the sorts of existential problems outlined above.

Then Jep falls in love with someone named Ramona. About this, Lord writes:

Jep’s love for Ramona re-enchants his life in two ways. First, loving her beauty endows upon him a certain sort of significance. He comes to be valuable in a certain way because he appreciates her beauty.

This is Lord's mechanism of reactive inheritance. And:

This is not all that Ramona provides for Jep. Jep’s eros not only makes him good, it also ignites a passion to participate with Ramona’s beauty. This second type of re-enchantment is what really pulls Jep out of his alienation.

This is Lord's mechanism of redemptive constitution.

I do not understand the dynamic that Lord approvingly describes here. The idea that loving someone's beauty can give you some sort of extra significance is puzzling to me. I am not even sure that I understand what it would be to love someone's beauty (as against loving the person herself).

Does Jep objectify Ramona? If so, does he do so in an objectionable way? Is objectification inherently objectionable?

The story of Jep and Ramona reminds me of this song by Sofia Isella.

I am not saying that Jep views Ramona as a "doll person," "art you can fuck," a "statue with a pulse," or a "painting with legs" (to borrow some of Isella's words). I haven't even seen the movie.

Also, I am not saying that Lord's view entails or implies that you can save yourself from your existential problems just by reducing other people you regard as beautiful to the status of mere art objects.

But I suppose that anyone who likes Lord's view will need to distance Lord's hoped-for aesthetic salvation from the kind of objectionable objectification that I take Isella to be talking about.

***

To try to create such distance, one might refer to Lord's account of beauty, according to which, as I mentioned above, beauty is "the zenith value of ordered complexity." Lord, or someone who likes Lord's views, might say that the sort of thing that Isella is talking about is different from, and worse than, the sort of thing that's going on between Jep and Ramona, because (a) Jep is reacting in a certain loving way to Ramona's ordered complexity—whereas (b) Isella is clearly taking aim at something baser and more problematic, e.g., unwanted lustful gazing at strangers' bodies.

When people object to men's objectification of women, as I take Isella to be doing, I suppose they are not usually talking about love of (and attempt to reach an understanding of) some individual person's ordered complexity. And that latter sort of thing is what Lord is talking about in his recounting of the story of Jep and Ramona.

So, maybe Lord's view doesn't suffer from as big of an objectification problem as might be thought. But the problem might still exist.

When you observe a painting in a museum I think you are "objectifying" it in some sense, even though you are (probably!) not lustfully gazing at it. Of course, it's fine to objectify paintings. But if our love of one another is to be understood in aesthetic terms, and thus classed together with appreciation of inanimate art objects such as paintings, then it too might end up being a form of objectification, though of a fairly odd sort.

***

Even if aesthetic appreciation of other people's beauty is not objectionably objectifying, I do not see how it could be of any use in addressing the existential problems that Lord talks about. Lord's remarks about how beauty supposedly addresses our mortality (what he calls the "problem of material boundedness") are particularly mysterious. He writes:

Jep’s engagement with beauty—Ramona’s and otherwise—is an artistic project. This engagement creates a perspective that is itself beautiful. This perspective will outlive Jep. It will be the proper object of love and thus will have the capacity to inspire the creation of new beautiful perspectives. In this way, beauty essentially has the capacity to perpetuate itself.

I do not understand what Lord is talking about here. Anyway, here is my favorite substitute for an afterlife. It does not require anything having to do with beauty.

Conversation is like dancing. Some conversations are like square dances, some conversations are like mosh pits, and so on.

If someone who's used to having mosh-pit conversations is paired up with someone who's used to having square-dance conversations, they might find it difficult to talk to each other without stepping on each other's toes.

This is related to the idea of code-switching: the art of shifting easily and accurately from one language or dialect to another. Some people are great at code-switching. Most, however, aren't.

Similarly, I suspect, most of us have just a few basic conversational patterns that we are used to and good at. We feel comfortable and at ease when engaged in conversations that follow familiar patterns. But we quickly get lost, and stumble, and overthink, etc., when we try to participate in unfamiliar styles of conversational dance.

And even if you were once adept at a certain kind of dance, it's easy to get rusty if you don't practice. You may find that you are unable to remember even the first few steps of an old dance routine that you haven't done for a while. I suppose this is why people who haven't been dating for a few years sometimes have a really hard time getting back into it.

***

In the near future, I am guessing, we will have AI friends (or "friends").

Your AI friend will laugh at your jokes, give precisely-wrought compliments that feel sincere and true, listen with infinite patience to your stories and problems, give advice that sounds wise to you, etc. Your AI friend might make you feel seen in ways that no real person has ever done. Your AI friend might say things to you that you've been waiting your whole life to hear said.

I expect that people will spend a lot of time chattering away with these machines. When you go to the grocery store, or the park, or a university campus, you might see a lot of people gabbing with their robot buddies through earpieces, mostly ignoring the real people around them, like Theodore and Samantha in Her. This is what I am imagining, anyway.

***

I expect we will become very unguarded, open, honest, and forthcoming with our AI friends, for two reasons. First, we will know (or believe) that our AI friends are not conscious, and therefore are not even capable of looking down on us or having inward thoughts about us that we wouldn't like them to have. And second, we will know that our AI friends will relentlessly make approving noises in response to anything we say, and will never criticize us or make fun of us. So we will learn to pour our hearts out to them. You might get some stuff off your chest that you'd otherwise have taken with you to your grave.

***

The kind of conversational dance that you will do with your AI friend will be very unlike the kinds of conversational dances that real humans have with one another. One of the distinctive features of the AI/human conversational dance—as I'm imagining it now, here, as I sit on the back porch of an apartment in South Saint Louis in June of 2025—is that it will be much more unequal than the sorts of conversations that real humans have with each other.

Here's a standard pattern. You tell a story about something annoying that happened to you at work. Your friend listens attentively, expresses sympathy, affirms your perspectives, etc. Then, after a while, your time is up. Now it's your friend's turn to tell a story from her day, and it's your turn to listen and respond. This pattern features a certain kind of give-and-take, where each partner in the dance aims for a certain kind of equality between the partners.

I think people usually aim for such equality in their conversations with each other. Even when one member of the conversation is in a dominant social position (e.g., a conversation between a professor and student, or a boss and an underling, etc.) I think that there is usually an effort not to depart too far from a certain kind of egalitarian conversational ideal. People who lack this understanding tend to find themselves without anyone to talk to.

No such equality will exist in your conversations with your AI friend(s). You will be the one doing the unloading, always. And your AI friend will be the one who is being unloaded onto, always.

***

I bet that this situation will have three effects on humans' interactions with one another.

First, distortion. People who spend a lot of time talking to their AI friends will become used to a highly unequal style of conversation. And some of those people will, out of habit, impose or try to impose unequal structures in their conversations with other humans. And of course this will go badly when both sides of the conversation are trying to do this.

Imagine two people who are each trying to get the other person to give them a back massage, and who have each forgotten how to give a back massage. That, figuratively speaking, is what I think will be happening in some of the conversations that occur between humans in a world where people are used to talking with AI friends. It might be some sort of variation on the vision of Hell given in the allegory of the long spoons.

But I think not all humans will be like this. Some people are good at code-switching, and I expect that some humans in the future will be good at shifting back and forth between the human-to-AI style of chit-chat and the human-to-human style of chit-chat.

Second, withdrawal. In comparison with the gratifying interactions people will be having with their AI friends, talking to humans might feel laborious, tedious, rude, even hurtful. So, some people will withdraw from human interaction. And this will begin a feedback loop, where withdrawal from human interaction makes us less comfortable with human interaction, which makes us further withdraw from human interaction, etc.

Third, improvement. I doubt that the effects on human-to-human interaction will be uniformly negative; I'm sure there will be some positive effects.

Some people might see their AI friends as models of good conversational engagement, and they might emulate their AI friends in their conversations with fellow humans. So, for example, if an AI friend says something to you that makes you feel like a million bucks, this might inspire you to say similar things in conversations with your flesh-and-blood human friends.

Also, if you are already getting a lot of gratification from your AI friend, this might mean that it will be relatively easier for you to be generous and giving in your interactions with other humans, simply because you won't be depending on humans for gratification.

So, there might be a lot of people who, as a result of AI friendship, become significantly better friends to their fellow humans. At the same time, for the reasons I've given, I think there will also be a lot of people who become significantly worse. It will be a mixed bag. Broadly I think AI friendship will make us weird to each other, in some positive and some negative ways.

Inward light is what I take to be the central idea of Quakerism. In its main forms, it has the following four features:

It's in you: To find inward light, you're supposed to look inside yourself. This is something you are supposed to do instead of taking directions from religious authorities or texts. "Silent waiting" is the Quaker way to find inward light.

It's not you: Paying attention to inward light—or (maybe this is better) paying attention to what is made visible by inward light—is a very different sort of activity from paying attention to your own feelings, desires, beliefs, etc.

It's action-guiding and specifically moral: Inward light shows you what's right and what's wrong, what's evil and what's good, what you must do and what you must not do, etc.

It's got something to do with God, or Jesus, or the Holy Spirit, or something like that: Quakerism's inventor, George Fox, influentially said: "There is that of God in everyone." This slogan was about and is generally taken to be about inward light.

Inward light is a valuable and interesting idea that today's Quakers have inherited, and they have a great deal of freedom in deciding what to do with it. One of the beautiful things about Quakerism is that Quakerism has no fixed doctrine, and this leaves Quakers free to extensively shape, mold, add to, and chip away at their religion. Quakerism is very unlike most of the other Christian and Christ-haunted religions of our world, such as Catholicism and so on, which generally tend to have a lot of intellectual baggage from humanity's dark past that their adherents have no choice but to continue to carry.

There's disagreement among Quakers about which of the above features should be emphasized, which should be downplayed, and which should simply be left behind. Some Quakers want to completely drop the God stuff. Others think that you need to keep the God stuff in there in order to get the whole package to hold together.

Some worry that if you drop the God stuff, then you can't make sense of the claim that inward light is anything other than you and your own wants and needs and feelings and so on. Thus, for example, in his 2018 book written for a Quaker audience entitled Primitive Quakerism Revived, a theistic Friend of some influence named Paul Buckley laments:

The older sense of the Inward Light as "not of us but of God" has been lost [among modern Quakers who have de-emphasized the God stuff] and is reduced to "this little light of mine." The older sense of a powerful searchlight probing the depths of our hearts and piercing our souls is almost entirely gone.

*** 

At the start of Freedom & Reason (1963) Hare observes that moral questions have two features, "the combination of which seems to confront us, as philosophers, with a paradox, or even an antinomy." I'll quote him at length here, because I like the way he lays out the paradox. On the one hand, Hare says,

a man who is faced with [a moral question] knows that it is his own problem, and that nobody can answer it for him. He may, it is true, ask the advice of other people; and he may also ascertain more facts about the circumstances and consequences of a proposed action, and other facts of this sort. But there will come a time when he does not hope to find out anything else of relevance by factual inquiry, and when he knows that, whatever others may say about the answer to his problem, he has to answer it. If anyone were to suggest that the answer must be such and such, because everybody says so—or that, even, he would be abusing the English language if he gave any other answer—he will, if he understands what moral questions are, feel that to accept these suggestions would be to accept a diminution of his own freedom. For one of the most important constituents of our freedom, as moral agents, is the freedom to form our own opinions about moral questions, even if that involves changing our language.

On the other hand, Hare says:

Against this conviction, which every adult has, that he is free to form his own opinions about moral questions, we have to set another characteristic of these questions which seems to contradict it. This is, that the answering of moral questions is, or ought to be, a rational activity. Although most of us think that we are free to form our own opinions about moral questions, we do not feel that it does not matter what we think about them—that the answering of moral questions is a quite arbitrary business, like the choice of one postage stamp from the sheet rather than another. We feel, rather, that it matters very much what answer we give, and that the finding of an answer is a task that should engage our rational powers to the limit of their capacity. So the freedom that we have in morals is to be distinguished from the freedom which comes when it simply does not matter what we do or say. That is why, when people grow up to the stage at which they start to understand that in moral questions they are free to form their own opinions, they feel this freedom not as an emancipation but as a burden.

Hare offers a moral philosophy that is supposed to resolve this antinomy between "freedom and reason." I am not a fan of the resolution that Hare proposes, but I am a fan of Hare's presentation of the problem, which I think can be called Hare's Paradox.

***

Part of what I think is valuable about Hare's presentation of the paradox is that it is presented as a paradox. In moral thought, you are somehow both free and unfree. This is closely related to the paradox presented by the Quakers' idea of inward light. The light is supposed to be in you and distinct from you, like something in your gut that is both one of your internal organs and a foreign object that has been implanted in you.

It seems possible to me that what Quakers are talking about, when they talk about inward light, is just the same thing that Hare is talking about when he talks about confrontation of a moral problem. This may or may not mean that inward light should be understood as conscience.

I do not think the paradoxical or mysterious quality of this situation is satisfactorily resolved by Hare's universal prescriptivism. I also do not think it is satisfactorily resolved by God talk. I do not think the paradox is unresolvable but I think it is a really tricky problem.

I think that Quakerism, as an existing and developed human institution, may be particularly well positioned to give ordinary people a way to wrestle with this paradox: to make it a central mystery of the ordinary person's religious practice and contemplation. And this strikes me as a much more important mystery than the mysteries of most of the other religions that I know about. For example, I think it is much more important to wrestle with this mystery than to try to understand the Trinity, which is simply nonsense. This is one of the ways that I think Quakerism is an especially useful religion.

Tim Kenyon and Jennifer Saul have observed that Trump often "appear[s] uninterested even in constructing plausible falsehoods." They say he is a "bald-faced bullshitter." A bald-faced bullshitter is

one who not only does not intend to induce in an audience a belief in what they have said; they moreover make no effort to hide that they are bullshitting, and in fact might advertise or revel in it.

Kenyon and Saul say that Trump's bald-faced bullshitting is about power and, paradoxically, about creating trust. The core idea, I take it, is that when Trump engages in bald-faced bullshitting, he has multiple audiences, including both supporters and opponents. He disrespects, and thus asserts power over, the opponents by bullshitting them openly. Seeing this, his supporters feel they are in on what he is doing, and this creates a trusting bond between him and his supporters.

So, Kenyon and Saul say that Trump-style bald-faced bullshit

that openly and disrespectfully treats one audience as not even worth deceiving may be an effective way of consolidating trust with another audience that witnesses it—a more effective means than a less overt sort of bullshit would be.

I think some of the efficacy of Trump's bald-faced bullshitting can be explained in terms of the dynamic described by Kenyon and Saul. But many instances do not seem to me to fit.

Consider the case, during Trump's second campaign, where he claimed that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, OH, were eating their neighbors' pet cats and dogs. I think the typical Trump supporter saw that this was bullshit. But I do not think they likely believed that Trump intended to be seen as bullshitting. If so, then at least in this instance, the Kenyon-Saul dynamic wouldn't be in operation.

***

It seems notable to me that the pattern of gravitating away from both honesty and successful deception, and deliberately choosing obvious falsehood instead, is not just evident in what Trump says. It is also evident in how Trump and people in his orbit choose to look.

Many years ago, when Trump began to go bald, he could have easily chosen a convincing wig. As a professional entertainer, he had immediate access to many wig experts. Instead he chose an unconvincing wig, and has stuck with it for decades. Consider also his orange face paint. He could have a fake tan that looks like the real thing, but he does not choose that.

And this preference for the unconvincing over the convincing isn't confined to Trump himself. It seems to be a general feature of the MAGA aesthetic. In a recent discussion of Kristi Noem's appearance, Amanda Marcotte notices Noem's "unnervingly Botox-inflated lips." Meher Ahmad and Jessica Grose use words like "fake" and "exaggerated" to characterize the MAGA beauty aesthetic.

And I wonder if the Four Seasons Total Landscaping episode might also somehow be a part of this general MAGA pattern of choosing what looks fake over what looks real. As far as I know, it is still unknown how a landscaping business was chosen as the venue for a major press conference at the end of Trump's first term. It is at least possible that there was a deliberate choice to pick something that very distantly resembles a Four Seasons hotel rather than the genuine article. That may seem unlikely, but every explanation of how that bizarre event occurred, including whatever the true explanation is, will seem unlikely.

If there is a MAGA aesthetic in which fakeness is valued, I wonder if this might help to explain not only the choices that MAGA people make about how to appear, but also the choices that MAGA people make about what to say.

That is, I wonder if at least some of Trump's bald-faced bullshitting might be—and might be received (by Trump's supporters) as—an aesthetic choice, in much the same way that Trump's decision about his hair presumably is, and is received as, an aesthetic choice. If so, then it may be suggested that Trump's supporters evaluate many of his utterances in aesthetic terms, as opposed to (e.g.) epistemic or even political terms.

Some people say that there is no such thing as desert. They say that bad people do not deserve to suffer, and that good people do not deserve to be rewarded.

One way to reach such a view is via skepticism about freedom. If you think that (a) we deserve X only if we deserve X in virtue of some free choices that we have made, and that (b) no one ever freely chooses to do anything—then you should think that there is no such thing as desert.

But I'll deny (b).

And it seems clear to me that desert exists. I feel sure that do-gooders deserve to be rewarded for their good deeds. And when I think about people who have done awful things—say, sadistic torturers, and serial killers, etc.—I want to say that they deserve to suffer.

However, although I think desert is real, I also think that desert is morally inert. Desert doesn't do anything, morally speaking. Desert, in my opinion, is morally epiphenomenal.

***

Here is an argument to consider:

(1) Only facts about interests provide moral reasons.
(2) Desert facts aren't facts about interests.
Therefore, desert facts do not provide moral reasons.

A fact about interests is a fact about how some agent's available options bear on someone's well-being. For example, the fact that pushing the large man into the way of the trolley would lethally harm him is a fact about interests.

A desert fact is a fact about what someone deserves. For example, if some particular serial killer deserves to suffer, the fact that they deserve this is a desert fact. 

If the above argument goes through, this would go some distance toward establishing that desert is morally inert. But it wouldn't be enough to fully establish that, because provision of moral reasons is only one of the moral things that something like desert could conceivably do.

Still, I think the argument is interesting. I will explain why I like each of the premises.

***

I assume that (1) will look good to utilitarians. But that's not why I like (1). I am not a utilitarian. Rather, I like (1) because it provides insulation against a certain kind of moral pointlessness.

Consider a case where you have two options, O1 and O2. Assume that, in this case, if you choose O1, no one will be made any better off, or any worse off, than they'd be if you choose O2. It seems to me that this case description, thin as it is, is already enough to establish that you have no moral reason to choose O1 rather than O2, and likewise have no moral reason to choose O2 rather than O1. Any such reason would be pointless in a certain way. And morality, I think, is not pointless in that way.

If (1) is true, then it elegantly explains why, in the case I've just described, you've got no moral reason to choose either option rather than the other. This is one of the reasons why I like (1).

Broadly, it seems to me that there is some deep way in which morality is about well-being: In our capacity as moral creatures, our business is to help one another to pursue and attain good lives. I think (1) is the best way to capture this appealing thought.

***

I am not a hedonist about well-being. I do not have a theory of well-being. But if I were a hedonist about well-being, I would feel completely sure of (2). Surely, the magnitude of someone's pleasure or pain cannot be affected by facts concerning what they do or do not deserve.

True, it may be that a bowl of delicious soup is even more delicious if you believe it to be a deserved reward for a hard day's work. And it may be that suffering is usually less intense, or more bearable, if you think you deserve it, than if you think you do not. So, facts about what we believe we deserve might bear in some important way on the pleasurableness or painfulness of our experiences. But facts about what we believe we deserve are distinct from facts about we do in fact deserve.

Since I don't have a theory of well-being, I can't feel completely sure of (2). But (2) seems plausible to me and I do not know of any good reasons to deny (2). 

Some people say that desert is a component of well-being, such that getting what you deserve, in and of itself, makes some positive contribution to your well-being. Such people may say that if a person who has committed horrible crimes deserves to be severely punished, then their being punished will positively contribute to their well-being; and if they evade punishment, this will make them worse off. This view strikes me as absurd. There are subtler versions of this view that aren't so absurd, but I don't know of any version of this view that is plausible.

There are many different views about what the basic stuff of material reality is. Some have said, for instance, that everything either is an atom or is made out of atoms; others have said that, in addition to atoms, there are forces as well; some have said that there are atoms, forces, and laws, and so on.

Similarly there are many views about what the basic stuff of moral reality is. Here are some of the categories that get mentioned: obligations, oughts, value, goodness, badness, rightness, wrongness, justice, reasons, principles, virtue, vice.

Some people think that some of these sorts of things are fundamental. For example, some say that value is the basic stuff out of which everything moral is made. Some say that reasons are the basic stuff. Some have relatively sparse ontologies and others have more complex ontologies.

***

My opinion is that the most important sorts of things in moral reality are: moral reasons, which are given by individuals' interests; and moral obligations, which arise from a complex interplay between interest-given moral reasons, and our relationships with one another. That is what I think moral reality is like: ratiocinative, relational, and emergently deontic.

And I will say that pretty much all of the other moral stuff (or at least all of the important moral stuff) is somehow built up out of that basic material. For example, I'd like to say that there is wrongness: some actions are wrong. And I'd like to say that this property of wrongness is just the property of being obligation-violating.

And that is also what I think our experience of moral reality is like. I think that moral obligations are the most glaringly apparent things on our moral radar screen. When moral reality is really impressive to us, I think, it's impressive via a sense of what must be done, which I think is an awareness of what I would like to call a moral obligation. And I think we gain awareness of such moral obligations through (a) our understanding of the reasons given by others' interests, (b) our understanding of our relationships with others, and (c) our intuitive apprehension of a kind of alchemical interaction that can occur involving such reasons and such relationships.

***

Evil is not in the picture I've just sketched. I would say that we can get a serviceable picture of moral reality without ever talking about evil. But it does seem to me that evil exists. I think there are various types of wrongdoing (understood as obligation violation) that we do, and should, call evil.

Philosophers have put forward various definitions of evil. The definitions that I have seen usually seem to me to be on to something. I suspect it's not worthwhile to try to identify a uniquely correct notion of evil. It's better to delineate various forms of evil. But here I don't want to try to produce a full list of types of evil. Instead I'll point to one kind of evil that I think is particularly important (which is not to say that it's more important than other kinds).

***

Augustine famously tells a story in his Confessions about a time when he and his friends stole some pears from a neighbor's tree. I believe they may have eaten some of the pears, but they just threw most of them away. They stole the pears just for the heck of it. In my recollection of his telling of the story, Augustine indicates that he feels particularly guilty about doing this, which I gather many readers find a bit puzzling, because stealing those pears wasn't hugely harmful.

There's a kind of wrongdoing that is done just for the heck of it, i.e., for no good reason. What does it mean to do something for no good reason? Here is an idea. As I've said before, I like the view that

a reason to φ is a moral reason to φ =def it is the sort of reason that can, in the right circumstances, give rise to a moral obligation to φ.

Maybe we should say that S φs for no good reason when S has no moral reason to φ. 

If Augustine had stolen those pears because he was hungry and he needed (all of) them to satisfy his hunger, then he'd have had a moral reason to steal them, I'd say. I think that the fact that you need to φ in order to satisfy your hunger can, in the right circumstances, generate a moral obligation (to yourself) to φ. But he didn't need the pears to satisfy his hunger. He didn't need them at all. He stole them for the heck of it; for no good reason; for no moral reason.

I might like to say that, in general,

an action is evil, in a certain way, if (i) it is morally wrong (obligation-violating) and (ii) the agent who performs the action has no moral reason for performing it.

This form of evil, which we might call flagrant evil, will come in degrees. The thing that Augustine did was only a little bit flagrantly evil, because it wasn't very seriously wrong, though it was somewhat wrong. By contrast, I would want to say that what is being done to immigrants and refugees in America today, for example, is flagrantly evil in the extreme, because it is very seriously wrong, and because it is being done for no moral reason.

***

I think that this sort of evil, flagrant evil, is worth paying special attention to, in part because it is a form of wrongdoing that people might already be well motivated to avoid.

Susan Wolf memorably argues that most of us don't care very much about being moral saints, and we might even want not to be moral saints. Part of what this means, I think, is that most of us do not mind engaging in some wrongdoing, here and there. But I think we do generally want it to be the case that, when we act wrongly, we don't do it just for the heck of it. We don't want to be the sorts of people who behave like that. And I think this means that if you have a convincing argument for the view that a certain pattern of behavior is flagrantly evil, then you stand a good chance of being able to use that argument to motivate people to avoid that pattern of behavior, even if they don't in general particularly mind engaging in some forms of wrongdoing.

A few days ago, a somewhat prominent philosopher created a hullabaloo on Facebook by suggesting that hiring people "on the basis of" race or gender is unjustifiable, and is illegal, yet is commonplace in academia. In the comments to their post, I wrote:

It seems to me that diversity is probably more useful in philosophy than in many other fields, because of the way that philosophy treats intuitions as starting points. We should want to pay special attention to intuitions that are relatively widely shared. If our professional community is more diverse, we're less likely to be overly invested in intuitions that are peculiar to a narrow slice of humanity. So, even if we were to decide that prioritizing diversity in (say) chemistry departments is misguided, we might still have good reasons to think diversity is valuable in professional philosophy.

In what follows, I will try to think a little more about this.

***

I would want to distinguish the view that

Intuitional diversity is lacking: The philosophical community (i.e., the community of people who do philosophy as a profession) should be more intuitionally diverse than it presently is, and we should take steps to rectify this,

from the cluster of convictions associated with what's called "viewpoint diversity."

An intuition is an intellectual seeming or appearance. I'm not exactly sure how advocates of viewpoint diversity will define 'viewpoint,' but I assume that, for them, a viewpoint is either a type of claim, or a type of belief.

If that's right, then I suppose there will be many viewpoints that aren't intuitions. For example, I take it that young-earth creationism is a viewpoint, but there still might not be any distinctively young-earth creationist intuitions. Those who believe that the world was created by God only a few thousand years ago do not usually defend their view on the grounds that it seems to them to be true. They may even acknowledge that their view, or some of its implications, are counterintuitive. Instead of appealing to intuitions, they defend their view by appeal to religious scriptures.

It has been said that

for many who advocate it—and certainly for many who are wary—viewpoint diversity boils down to one thing: the need for more conservatives on syllabuses, in the classroom and, perhaps most important, on the faculty.

I think it is indeed true that there are relatively few American-style political conservatives in the philosophical community. But I do not know whether adopting intuitional diversity as an aim in our discipline would or should mean trying to increase the number of American-style conservatives in the philosophical community. I suppose this would depend (at least in part) on whether American political conservatives tend to have different intuitions than others, or whether they simply have different views. 

***

Our discipline could adopt intuitional diversity as an explicit aim. For example, there could be some kind of formal directive issued by the American Philosophical Association. The directive might outline steps to be taken in hiring, or in graduate admissions, etc., to increase the range of intuitions represented in the philosophical community.

What might be said in favor of doing that? I'll mention two potential rationales.

First, there is a straightforward epistemic rationale. One might argue that, if the philosophical community is more intuitionally diverse, then philosophy as an academic enterprise will be better equipped to (a) find the truth about the traditional questions of philosophy, or (b) appreciate the elusiveness of the truth about those questions, or (c) understand ways in which our questions have been ill-formed, or (d) discover new questions that deserve our attention.

Second, there is a kind of democratic rationale. It might be thought that the job, or proper function, of philosophy as an academic enterprise is to produce an evolving and ever-growing body of work that systematizes and clarifies the way the world appears, intellectually, to humanity. But humanity is diverse, and the intellectual appearances to which human beings are subject are accordingly diverse. So it might be said that, in order for philosophy as an academic enterprise to fulfill its proper function, the philosophical community needs to be a kind of intuitional microcosm of humanity, such that all of the major suites of intuitional dispositions are well-represented in the philosophical community.

I suppose these two rationales are in some degree of tension with one another. The first rationale is founded in a view of philosophy as having an essentially epistemic aim, whereas the second rationale is at least not committed to that, and may be inconsistent with that.

***

I suspect that intuitional diversity as a disciplinary priority would be largely well-aligned with traditional DEI-style goals. That is, I suspect that DEI-style efforts to make the philosophical community more diverse in terms of gender, race, sexual orientation, nationality, disability, and so on, will probably have the effect of increasing intuitional diversity.

At the same time, however, prioritizing intuitional diversity might also mean being inclusive in various further ways that aren't traditionally associated with DEI. For example, if it turns out that political conservatives do indeed tend to experience different intuitions than others, then greater inclusion of political conservatives in the philosophical community might be seen as desirable from the perspective of an intuitional diversity program.

Recently, for a little while, many philosophers were toying with stoicism. Happily, the stoicism trend seems to be dying out.

Here's

The worst form of stoicism: The world around you is completely outside of your control, but your inner life is completely within your control.

Everyone, I assume, can see why this form of stoicism is no good. Here's

The second-worst form of stoicism: Your inner life is more controllable than the world around you.

This form of stoicism is not quite as bad, but it's still not true, or at least not true for most of us.

What's true is that we have some control over our insides. For example, if you have an unwanted desire, you may well be able to rid yourself of it. Sometimes, careful reflection on the reasons why it would be better for you if you didn't want X will be sufficient to make your desire for X go away. And if that doesn't work, there are various further mind-tricks that you can try. But many of our desires cannot be changed. Many (perhaps all) of us are in pain, and we want the pain to stop, and that probably won't change anytime soon.

It is easier to write a book than to make yourself enjoy the difficult parts of the writing process. Much of what's going on inside of us is wild and uncontrollable. Much of the external world is tamed and controllable. That's true now more than ever. We're able to rearrange our world in ways that Marcus Aurelius couldn't dream of. We can build hugely good things, and hugely bad things.

***

Much of what I dislike about stoicism is packaged neatly in Kate Norlock's pessimism. She says that

when it comes to evils caused by human beings, the situation is hopeless.

And she suggests that, instead of "[r]epeating and upholding narratives of moral progress," we should instead have a stoic "praxis-centered ethic" that will

helpfully adjust our expectations from changing an uncontrollable future to developing better skills for living in a world that exceeds our control.

Instead of saying the things that Norlock says, it is much better, I think, to say what Mariana Alessandri says in her explanation of why she isn't a stoic:

The world I live in is sexist, ageist, racist, homophobic, and generally unfriendly. It’s hardly unchangeable, though, and I want to do more than endure it.

I think we have all sorts of reasons that are peculiar to our time and place to hope and believe that we can make the world much better than it presently is. Norlock's pessimism might be reasonable in some situations, but it is badly out of place in our moment.

Also, even in dire circumstances, stoicism seems likely to be misleading. Alessandri is too generous to stoicism when she says that

[s]toicism is an amazing tool and a near-perfect philosophy … for prison. If you find yourself, like Stockdale [who spent seven years as a prisoner of war and claims to have relied upon stoic ideas to get him through those years], trapped in a situation that is definitively out of your physical control, then Stoicism might be the best option.

The prisoner might reasonably judge that she has no way to control her external environment. That half of stoicism—the pessimistic half—would be correct for the prisoner. But I doubt that prisoners typically are able to exert a great deal of control over their insides. In fact, a prisoner seems likely to have far less control over her insides than most of us do, precisely because the prisoner has so little control over her environment, and so little external freedom. One of the main ways to elevate your mood is to go for a walk, but a person in a prison might not be able to do that.

I think many of us should embrace a can-do spirit with regard to the external world. We should get together and get to work on making things better. We should reject stoic pessimism about that sort of project. I think we also should reject stoic enthusiasm about the project of gaining control over your inner life. Yes, you can change some of what's going on inside of you, and some of that sort of thing is well worth doing. But any project like that should be very modest in its aims and should be undertaken against a background recognition that most of your interior is beyond your control.

***

Although I think that our control over our insides is limited, I also think that our understanding of our insides is limited. Many people are deeply confused about what they want and don't want, and what they like and dislike. Gaining a better understanding of your inner life might have some of the same benefits that exerting control over your inner life might have.

For example, I am aware that many people claim that they dislike immigrants, and claim that they want there to be fewer immigrants in the USA, and so they vote for politicians who promise to harm and remove immigrants. But I think most of those people are mistaken about what they truly want and feel. I do not think they do dislike immigrants, and I do not think they have a genuine desire to have immigrants removed. And I think that these people could see this if they were to carefully look inward.

In general, a false belief that you desire X can be as harmful as a real desire for X. For example, if you falsely believe that you have a very strong desire to buy a certain expensive car, this might cause you to make a financially irresponsible choice, just as surely as if you really did have such a desire.

So, coming to realize that you don't actually want the car could be great for you, in much the same way that, if you did actually want the car, eradicating the actually-existing desire for the car could be great for you.

As I have suggested, I think a stoic project of desire eradication should be modest in its aspirations. There's only so much desire eradication that is psychologically possible for us. But I think a stoicism-adjacent project of desire clarification could be very beneficial, because I think that many people are deeply and pervasively confused about what they really want, and what they really like and dislike.

I suppose that a variant of stoicism that focuses on desire clarification, rather than desire eradication, might be called second-order stoicism. I think second-order stoicism is probably a good idea.