Also, I would add that -- strictly speaking -- genes don't have desires. And when we speak (in shorthand) about our genes' "desires", we're doing one of two things:

(1) Talking about certain behavioral predispositions (i.e. "conscious preferences") that are genetically coded for.

(2) Taking the behavioral consequences that led to the genes' proliferation, and identifying them as "desires."

The first is unproblematic. I'm genetically predisposed to enjoy sex, and (whether I think about my genes or not) sex enters into my "utility judgments."

The second is far, far sketchier. I'm here, of course, as the result of an evolutionary process which favored those who were better at reproducing and surviving. So I have genes that predispose behaviors that (historically) lead to more reproducing and surviving.

Yet it's a huge (and, IMO, wholly unwarranted) philosophical leap to argue that I should care about reproducing and surviving above and beyond my non-gene-regarding preferences. And given that genes express themselves differently in different environmental circumstances, it's not even clear what a gene's true "desire" would be.

Finally, the gene-regarding preferences you describe amount to a gross form of defeatism. Imagine that in my family runs some genetic condition which kills all of the males by age 50. One could argue that, insofar as genes have "desires," mine desire that I don't live very long. Should I work for a cure to extend my life? Or should I respect my genes' "desire"?

I can't imagine the line of thinking that would recommend the latter.

Yea, weird huh. I came about this in a strange way awhile back. The argument is not so lucid however.

The first one is fine, I guess, since Catholicism (explicitly) and genes (implicitly) have the same "goal" of mass propagation.

I don't know that I agree with the last two. It seems like in many cases genetic manipulation would be a net genetic gain -- if I can get rid of some awful disease gene that would shorten my life, all the rest of my genes stand to "gain" a lot.

And the net impact of medical science on gene propagation is non-obvious. People who survive better reproduce better, albeit possibly less. I don't see why, if my genes could talk, they'd be anti-medical-science.

Certainly you can't claim that maximizing utility involves the actual outcome of choices as much as the intended outcome.

If I go to work every day for a year intending to build up a business that will make me rich and am struck by a bus on the day of the IPO you can't claim a-posteriori that what I was doing was not rational in terms of maximizing a hidden utility function, it just didn't work out in practice.

No rational person would believe that masturbating into a cup was LIKELY to cause death unless they had special information about the state of their health. In addition, genes that predispose people to masturbate into cups even with the risk of heart attack could not possibly be maximizing evolutionary utility, since only 1 in 100 million or so people would happen to be holding a winning lottery ticket.

I think the analogy is flawed, and it is still possible to consider innate evolutionarily controlled perturbations of a utility function as "belonging" to the individual.

Have you read "Freedom Evolves?" By Daniel Dennet? I bought it but haven't had a chance to read it yet. I think it deals with some of these issues.

Just because one course will bring you the most pleasure doesn't mean that's the one you will take. Pleasure is the mechanism by which we learn to seek, prefer, or perform certain hard-to-hardwire behaviors. More deeply hard-wired behaviors, by contrast, don't necessarily require pleasure feedback. A great deal of what we actually do might be easily explained by genetic utility without any apparent personal utility (yet still we do it!). Pleasure, happiness, pain, and sadness may be merely marginal predictors of human behavior, with the substrate dictated by less subjectively evident programming.