DRMacIver's Notebook

Why do you do things?

Why do you do things?

Published
2025-04-04

I recently watched CJTheX’s 6 Shapes of God. I don’t really know if I recommend it or not. I recommend giving it a go and either you’ll find it weirdly compelling and watch it or you won’t want to watch it and both are fine outcomes.

One of the things they talk about in it, partially rooted in some work by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt that I’m passingly familiar withAnd really should read more of. I find Frankfurt a bit dry, but generally he makes really interesting points about stuff I care about. is that there’s a sort of division into “instrumental ends” (e.g. I want to make money) and “terminal ends” (I want to have fun) that is natural to make, and also is sortof fake, because we also take on our “terminal ends” for instrumental reasons: If we didn’t have something to strive for, we’d be bored.I think I might here be conflating Harry Frankfurt’s views with Elijah Millgram’s “On being bored out of your mind”, but in my defence that paper is specifically building on Frankfurt’s work here.

FrankfurtI think. introduces the idea of “maeutic” ends - ends which lead to you taking on other ends in order to achieve them. e.g. you might want to be happy, but merely aiming directly at happiness doesn’t work. In order to achieve happiness, the most effective means is to find something that can matter to you for its own sake, and then sincerely take that on as an end, and happiness will emerge. e.g. when deciding what to do with your life, you might decide to be a doctor because that seems fulfilling to you, but you can’t be a doctor to seek fulfillment and expect to be fulfilled, you need to decide that being a doctor genuinely matters. You might later decide that it is not if it’s making you miserable and lacks the qualities that matter to you, but in the moment your day-to-day reason has to be about the end of being a doctor, not being a doctor in order to be fulfilled.

The instrumental/terminal distinction is still useful though, it’s just important to understand that “why?” answers are weird and defeasible and necessarily incomplete.

Why did you eat that cake? Because it was delicious.

If you look at this as a sort of pure logical syllogism sort of answer it’s obviously ridiculously incomplete. You’re not committing to eat all delicious cake. You’re just highlighting that deliciousness was among the most salient reasons to you for why you ate this particular cake.

I think you can tie yourself into logical knots very easily this way, but it’s still worth asking why you do things, and you can ask why those are motivating, etc. Some of htese will feel like more purely instrumental, some will feel more purely terminal, although most of them it will feel like you’re missing something.

I notice if I try to come up with a list of things that you get at the end of a chain of whys it doesn’t bottom out at a very large number of different things. e.g. I might come up with something like:

(This is in no way a complete list)

I notice that it’s relatively hard for me to treat something like “because it would bring me joy” as a motivating reason. Like… there’s something vaguely uncomfortable about that as an answer and I feel like I almost deflect it with some sort of interstitial answer. Like… if you asked me why I pet a cat, I would answer “because it was cute and fuzzy”. It feels somehow unnatural to take the next step. I don’t know that that’s necessarily wrong, in the same way that you feed the beggar because he is hungry but there’s something weird there.

I think as useful a tool of introspection as “Why?” is, I think maybe the problem is that it assumes a causal structure that isn’t there. You don’t do things for reasons, reasons are things that you use to explain the things you do. In some global sense, the reason you do anything is that it fits naturally into the practical activities of your life at that point there. You can do the dishes for a reason, or you can just do the dishes because the dishes are what you do now. You can pet a cat because it brings you joy or because it is cute and fuzzy or you can just pet a cat.

Reasons for doing things aren’t something you need when your life is functioning fluidly on its own. They’re a tool to fix when it isn’t, or to communicate something to someone else.

But… I do often find myself casting around for reasons. Why? Partly because it’s interesting, but mostly because I am distressed and I am trying to understand so I can reduce this distress.

One of the other fake but useful distinctions in this space is the idea that you have ends and you have means and they’re distinct. You can partly see this because of all the implicit constraints on means - you can achieve an end you want through undesirable means. You could argue that this is just that you have multiple ends, and that’s certainly true, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think that using a particular means can be an end in itself. If you’ve got a skillset, you probably enjoy using that skillset, and that enjoyment is pretty close to a terminal end.

This comes up a lot in programming. e.g. I like using the union/find algorithm to solve problems. Why? I think it’s neat. I enjoy using it. Like yes I suppose you could describe that as my terminal end being joy, but it feels weird to reduce my motivations here. The joy describes the action, it doesn’t justify it. It’s the same as petting the cat: I do it because the cat is fuzzy and the algorithm is neat.

Part of why I’ve been thinking about this at the moment is that I’ve been noticing that there are all sorts of… free floating wants, that seem attached to a specific action but has no really clear “why?” associated with it. I think this is what David Chapman calls a velleity,It would be uncouth to point out that this is a Western philosophical term, a discipline that David Chapman heartily rejects, so I will. but if so it feels like they are more complicated than I’d believed. A velleity is “the lowest degree of volition, a slight wish or tendency” but this doesn’t feel necessarily like it’s small. It can feel actually quite strong, but it feels strong in a way that doesn’t motivate action, or that feels like it requires permission to act in some way that’s missing.

For example I’ve been thinking about anecdotes recently and one of the problems I keep running into is when do I tell anecdotes? And why? My writing is actually fairly peppered with anecdotes, but that’s fine because they’re there with a clear purpose. But… I don’t know, can you just tell people things?

It feels like I’ve got a bunch of free floating anecdotes that are just sitting around with nothing clear to do. Means without an end attached to them. And I… think I’d like to share them? Or do something with them in some way?The complexity here is that there are a bunch of them that are quite embarrassing or shameful, either for me or for other, and I don’t know that sharing is what I want to do with them but if it’s not then I don’t know what to do. They feel like they have to be for something, but I don’t have a thing that they’re for.

Harry Frankfurt thinks we take on final ends for instrumental purposes to avoid being bored, but I think there’s another missing move: Sometimes we take on ends because we’ve got these means we want to use, and we choose them first and then set out to find reasons to use them.

Except… I don’t think I know how to do that. Maybe the answer is just make them into art, but I struggle with art at the best of times.

This is very much a half completed thought, but I think I need to finish here and sleep on the rest of this.