I can’t quite grasp the idea of having multiple terminal values, values other than happiness. It seems to me that the mother believes that if she DOESN’T save her child, the rest of her life her mental state will be poor, both from her son being dead but also the guilt of not saving him when she could. So, she is still picking between future mental states: either having a negative future mental state or having no mental state at all. She judges that the death of her son and the guilt that she would feel is great enough that her mental state will go down and never recover. This may not be TRUE, but she probably isn’t thinking very clearly. The point is she believes that she will never recover. So she decides that the better alternative is to end her life by sacrificing her son.
She could just commit suicide after her son dies to seemingly the same effect, but she probably believes that her ending moments will be happier if she actually is saving her son.
I’m uncertain in this, but I don’t understand how people just “gain” terminal values. Maybe I just have a bad picture of the human psyche but the explanation I provided makes more sense to me than “she just randomly had this specific terminal value for her son’s life”.
Another possible explanation for the mother’s actions are her acting irrationally. Humans are bad at imagining what death looks like. Even if she does not believe in an afterlife, she might still have this feeling that saving her son’s life will make her happy. In fact, the idea of people having inaccurate instrumental values is mentioned in this article. Perhaps the mother is so used to the instrumental value of “help my son” that she continues to help her son, even when it isn’t in her best interests.
I’m not sure, maybe I’m running this too far to the ground. Is there another good example of a person exhibiting behaviours seemingly going against their beliefs about their future mental state?
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I can’t quite grasp the idea of having multiple terminal values, values other than happiness. It seems to me that the mother believes that if she DOESN’T save her child, the rest of her life her mental state will be poor, both from her son being dead but also the guilt of not saving him when she could. So, she is still picking between future mental states: either having a negative future mental state or having no mental state at all. She judges that the death of her son and the guilt that she would feel is great enough that her mental state will go down and never recover. This may not be TRUE, but she probably isn’t thinking very clearly. The point is she believes that she will never recover. So she decides that the better alternative is to end her life by sacrificing her son.
She could just commit suicide after her son dies to seemingly the same effect, but she probably believes that her ending moments will be happier if she actually is saving her son.
I’m uncertain in this, but I don’t understand how people just “gain” terminal values. Maybe I just have a bad picture of the human psyche but the explanation I provided makes more sense to me than “she just randomly had this specific terminal value for her son’s life”.
Another possible explanation for the mother’s actions are her acting irrationally. Humans are bad at imagining what death looks like. Even if she does not believe in an afterlife, she might still have this feeling that saving her son’s life will make her happy. In fact, the idea of people having inaccurate instrumental values is mentioned in this article. Perhaps the mother is so used to the instrumental value of “help my son” that she continues to help her son, even when it isn’t in her best interests.
I’m not sure, maybe I’m running this too far to the ground. Is there another good example of a person exhibiting behaviours seemingly going against their beliefs about their future mental state?