Self-Improvement Without a Self: Fact-Relative and Belief-Relative
I want to continue the discussion from last time and introduce another object that Parfit talks about.
Similar to how we have actual vs perceived causes Parfit has an analogue for reasons. I forget if he has a name for it, but the idea stems from determining what you ought to do from false beliefs instead of from facts. I don't like to use the word ought there cause I believe Parfit uses it to refer to whatever "normative" reason you have most reason to do. Parfit doesn't used the word normative because he thinks reasons have implied normativity because they stem from facts, but I'm having a hard time finding a word for determining what you believe you ought to do from false beliefs and I don't think Parfit has one.
Just for sake of having a word I think I'll use the term "belief based reason" and "belief based ought" to distinguish between a reason based on facts and a reason based on beliefs. If there is a better term I'm missing, then someone reach out to me and let me know.
I think we have similar dichotomy between belief based reason and perceived causes to what we had with reasons and actual causes.
I think the main idea being we may have some beliefs that tell us how we belief based ought to act, but because of some other factors that prevent us from acting in what we believe to be the optimal action (our belief based ought) to perform we have our perceived causes for how we actually act.
Where I'm landing here is we have sort of a function that takes the source of our knowledge (beliefs or facts) and produces two categories of objects (oughts and whys). So in the end we end up with either belief based reasons and belief based whys (perceived causes) or fact based reasons (just reasons) or fact based whys (actual causes).
I think now that we have these terms I want to start thinking about how we can update our beliefs to match facts and how we can set ourselves up so that we act in the way that we believe we ought to when we don't even have free will.