I know, it’s hard for you. I have preferences, as other do. I try to make it so that things are more like I like them to be and less like I don’t like them to be. Calling it pragmatism is a fancy ass way of describing it. Call it practical instead. Does that help?
People are like this at work or with a hobby. What do I want? I want a ship in that bottle. Hm. How do I get that to happen? What skills do I need what actions do I need to take? Perhaps I realize it will take time from something I prioritize higher (because I like it more) so I drop the hobby of trying to get little ships in a bottle.
Someone attacks my wife in the street. I try to stop that.
Empathy is also a factor. and not just for those closest to me.
This is hard stuff, I know.
I see this in other people, all of them, though some seem to lack empathy or have talked themselves out of it. Being practical may be hidden underneath a moral system, but it’s there. I tend to think it is what really underlies and drives the moral system.
It’s not easy, because life presents a lot of problems, obstacles, suffering. I am heartily challenged, like everyone else. Life isn’t easy regardless. I don’t have the objectivist goal of putting my preferences in objective morals. Being objectivist leads to F&F because generally people then have to live up to their objective morals, and parts of them will not want to. So they get splits.
I also don’t share your project of finding out ‘how one ought to live’ or of trying to find unresistable moral arguments that will convince all humans.’ I think those lead to F & F, but sure, I could be wrong. I think it is setting you up to judge your preferences since you can’t know they are the preferences all rational people should have. That’s a split right there, it seems to me. You can’t choose an approach to improve things for yourself based on your preferences, it has to be one everyone would follow.
But hey, You could be more F &F than me because of trauma - I’ve gone through trauma both as a child and as an adult, but it was likely different traumas from yours, or perhaps I got lucky in the support I chose or had available - or perhaps your F and F is based on long term disappointment or any of a number of things. Where your dna met your experience led to more F & F than where my DNA met my experiences. Could be a simple as me having the right friend at the right time, where you didn’t get that. Could be a genetic tendency to brooding over certain things. Could be that following one’s intuition regarding an approach to feeling better, rather than taking a universal up in the clouds 'everyone should be convinced it is the right approach way of choosing things is a better approach to helping oneself. But it’s certainly not like I know what might make you feel less F & F. I don’t really know what causes that in you. I do understand what you think causes it, but people are notoriously poor, in many instances, when it comes to self-evaluation.
You are also practical. You choose to do things out of likes and dislikes. In this sense any human, or even mammal/animal, is practical. Humans can add all sorts of things to being practical and striving for what they want and trying to minimize what they wish there was less of (around them, in the world). But at root, they do what I do in many facets of their lives.
A hornet is flying around in their car while they are on the highway. They open the windows, they pull over and try to force it out.
They are hungry, they go get a meal.
Since we are humans these ‘projects’ can be incredibly complicated and involve things a goat could not consider. But it’s the same practicalness in essense. There’s a wolf over there, get in a tight pack with the others. I want that ewe, going to have to challenge Bruno for her.
I know you must do this - not with the ewes but you know what I mean. So it’s like that. Trying to get things better using those resources one has.
You keep mulling over it. I think you’ll get it. Unless you have some agenda that makes it unpleasant to want to understand it, say. For example. Or perhaps something else will get in the way and does now. Who knows?
Fortunately you’re not being able to understand something is just your not being able to understand something.
And just so it is clear, like most mammals, I seem to like expressing myself, engaging passionately in certain activities, being close to people (other mammals of my species and even other species’ members). It is not problem solving from waking to sleeping. There is an expressive set of likes. There are, not as often as I would like, moments where spontanaity works. Or where I can simply express, rather than try to change things. I don’t have an overriding philosophy name for this or the combination of enjoying expressing being part of certain ‘things’ and also the problem solving facet of life.
A long time ago in a post I called it a pragmatism. You ran with this for a long time and here you bring it back. It was a best shot in that moment at a shorthand name for what we all do. I then took many posts explaining that it was not a philosophy and you could stop trying to make it one. It’s simply something all creatures do only I don’t have what many humans add on to this, which both you and the objectivists do.