Forgive me if this has already been addressed, but how do you account for situations where there's a first-order preference towards doing something, but a second-order preference towards not indulging that preference, and the illness comes about from the first order preference overriding the second order one? Take, for example, an addict…
Forgive me if this has already been addressed, but how do you account for situations where there's a first-order preference towards doing something, but a second-order preference towards not indulging that preference, and the illness comes about from the first order preference overriding the second order one? Take, for example, an addict. They have a preference or desire to do drugs at some moment, and they indulge in it, but at a higher level they have a genuine, internally-motivated desire to not indulge in that preference, not even because of external social sanction, but because they recognize it's destroying their body or their ability to feel pleasure outside of the drug. Or for an example more squarely within traditional mental illness, someone with OCD who in the moment has an overwhelming compulsion to perform some ritual action, where in the moment doing so is satisfying a desire, but at a higher level they wish they could get themselves to stop, because the compulsion is taking up all their time, or harming their bodies, or interfering with any other number of preferences they are unable to satisfy in the long run because of the OCD preferences being overwhelming in the moment. In this case, it seems like there is genuinely a higher level preference against expressing the addictive or mentally ill traits, and the problem that defines it as an illness is that these lower-level, more immediate preferences prevent that. I think the problem is refusing to acknowledge that preferences can exist at multiple levels of abstraction on top of each other, and recognizing that lower level preferences can interfere and prevent the attainment of more deeply held, but harder to act on, higher level preferences. Seen like this, I think you can return to the common sense model of genuinely respecting individual preferences, while recognizing that mental illnesses are an exception, because they represent a disordered conflict between lower and higher level preferences that needs to be remedied in order to allow an individual to genuinely express and be able to act on their higher level preferences (i.e. not shooting up heroin all day or washing their hands all day, which I think even the worst heroin addicts or sufferers of OCD would agree are genuine preferences they hold, despite their actions).
Forgive me if this has already been addressed, but how do you account for situations where there's a first-order preference towards doing something, but a second-order preference towards not indulging that preference, and the illness comes about from the first order preference overriding the second order one? Take, for example, an addict. They have a preference or desire to do drugs at some moment, and they indulge in it, but at a higher level they have a genuine, internally-motivated desire to not indulge in that preference, not even because of external social sanction, but because they recognize it's destroying their body or their ability to feel pleasure outside of the drug. Or for an example more squarely within traditional mental illness, someone with OCD who in the moment has an overwhelming compulsion to perform some ritual action, where in the moment doing so is satisfying a desire, but at a higher level they wish they could get themselves to stop, because the compulsion is taking up all their time, or harming their bodies, or interfering with any other number of preferences they are unable to satisfy in the long run because of the OCD preferences being overwhelming in the moment. In this case, it seems like there is genuinely a higher level preference against expressing the addictive or mentally ill traits, and the problem that defines it as an illness is that these lower-level, more immediate preferences prevent that. I think the problem is refusing to acknowledge that preferences can exist at multiple levels of abstraction on top of each other, and recognizing that lower level preferences can interfere and prevent the attainment of more deeply held, but harder to act on, higher level preferences. Seen like this, I think you can return to the common sense model of genuinely respecting individual preferences, while recognizing that mental illnesses are an exception, because they represent a disordered conflict between lower and higher level preferences that needs to be remedied in order to allow an individual to genuinely express and be able to act on their higher level preferences (i.e. not shooting up heroin all day or washing their hands all day, which I think even the worst heroin addicts or sufferers of OCD would agree are genuine preferences they hold, despite their actions).