Comments Elsewhere

Joe Miller:

If you were told that you could have anything that you wanted without working for it, would you really insist that, no, you’d prefer to work for it?

Well, I don’t know; that depends on what the object of desire in question is, doesn’t it? If I could have cookies without working for it, sure, I’d like the free cookies. But it’s not clear that everything worth having in life is worth having without the correlate work. There are lots of places that will offer me a college degree without any work at all; but it’s precisely because they don’t require any work at all that I don’t think a college degree from those places is worth having. More broadly speaking, honors and fame are not worth having if you have not done the work to earn them. You might think they make your life easier, but so what? Who says ease is the only thing to go after in life?

I don’t want to live on the Big Rock Candy Mountain. I’d really insist that I don’t. And I’ll bet you wouldn’t either.

Micha:

I agree that there are no purely rational reasons to not be a prudent predator and lie, steal and cheat when you can get away with it. I don’t believe in cosmic karma.

You seem to be supposing that the only motivations which can count as “purely rational” are those that involve gaining natural goods or avoiding natural evils. I agree that it’s often possible to be a Friedmanian PP without losing any natural goods or gaining any natural evils—hell, just go into politics and you’ll be set for life. But why does it follow from that that there aren’t rational reasons to avoid it? Is not wanting to treat other people like crap irrational?

We are more complicated creaturs than some of the popular accounts of human actions and attitudes seem to take for granted. The fact that an explanation of somebody’s behavior is ennobling is not necessarily a good reason to think that it’s false.