Oh yes absolutely. I have in mind Austin's comment that while word use should be the first word on a topic, it need not be the final one!

Thanks for the reference. I'd highlight, in another context, that there's room for revising an understanding in ordinary language for some purpose. Like "know" could mean something different in the context of a mathematical proof, a scientific experiment, or a history book. But it's not particularly relevant. Even if those understandings may even be better in context than the pretheoretical one which we all engage with.

Well that paper is very similar to the debate we're having.

I suppose it's also why people have invited you to reconsider the kind of things that can count as direct realism!

Well we're kinda screwed if we can't agree what we're disagreeing about.

And then, of course, there are direct realists who view experience/perception as the actualization of a capacity that persons (or animals) have to grasp the affordances of their world. Brains merely are organs that enable such capacities. — Pierre-Normand

Yes, that's a species of externalism isn't it?

Edit: removing some laziness in the question. There's the adage that externalism means "meaning ain't just in the head", ecological perception like Gibson sees signs and capacities for acting in nature. Environmental objects themselves are seen as sites of perceptual interaction, which imbues interactions with them with a dynamic/semantic content.

And this would be wrong. — Lionino

Eh, a perception is still an event in the world. Like your body adjusting under a load is proprioception.

I think that's one of the central axes this debate is happening on. Direct realists in thread seem to see experience/perception as a relationship between the brain and the world that takes place in the world. @Michael seems to see experience/perception as a relationship between the brain and the world that takes place in the brain.

Edit: so we've got externalism+directness+action vs internalism+indirectness+representation.

No. Experience exists within the brain (either reducible to its activity or as some supervenient phenomenon), whereas proximal stimuli exist outside the brain. So neither proximal stimuli nor distal objects are constituents of experience. — Michael

I think I understand. So for you, this process goes like:

distal object -> proximal stimulus -> interpretation -> mental phenomenon

and/or

distal object -> proximal stimulus -> interpretation -> experience

and for you, "interpretation" and "mental phenomenon", as steps of the process, are what perception is?

Mental phenomena; colours (inc. brightness), shapes, orientation. — Michael

Proximal stimuli?

Because naive and indirect realists mean the same thing by "visual experience" but disagree on its constituents and so disagree on whether or not we have direct knowledge of distal objects and their properties. — Michael

What are the constituents of visual experience?

Nothing Google couldn't tell you quicker than us.

The proximal cause is the entity that stimulates the sense receptors. With sight it's light, with hearing it's sound, with smell it's odour molecules in the air, and with touch and taste it's the distal object itself. — Michael

I see what you mean. I think you need to ask "which" sound or "which" light though. The light which serves as the stimulus for seeing a brown table is the light reflected off of that brown table. In that regard, the proximate cause of you seeing a brown table (in a case of veridical perception) is the reflection of that light from that brown table. In that regard, the behaviour of the distal object (the brown table) in its environment acts as the proximal cause of the perception event.

Does that seem suitable to you?

I am not claiming that the table is the "proximal stimulus" of the perceptual event, since that's not right, I'm claiming that the reflective properties of the table - IE, the properties of the distal object - are the proximal cause of the perceptual event which we'd call seeing the distal object. IE, the properties of the brown table proximately cause us to see it.

If you're looking at a brown table "out in the wild", what you see isn't the proximal stimulus either. Since there isn't just one, and it isn't unique. "The" proximal stimulus is instead a sprawling set of retinal images integrated with other senses through a process of interpretation. As part of sight (as part of perception broader), those retinal images are filtered and stabilised - IE interpreted - into time stable perceptual features. Vision doesn't happen all at once.

In that respect, when we're speaking of "proximal stimuli", we're not speaking of the familiar objects at hand. Proximal stimuli for vision are horrifying chaotic things. Dancing lights, colour patches with no depth or thickness, unpeopled, unfurnished, textureless and silent.

A tall woman standing to the right of my table, near the light illuminating it, reduced the incident light onto one portion of the table in my peripheral vision quite substantially. She then left. I saw the table as the same colour and intensity throughout despite her changing how light was reflected from it. I saw no changes in my proximal stimulus since those proximal stimuli are how I detect vision related environmental changes. I saw no changes in the distal object as my interpretation of it was not influenced by irrelevant detail.

There isn't a "proximal stimulus" of the brown table - what there is is a sequence of retinal images which are interpreted as part of sight into a brown table. There is however the distal object, which is the proximal cause of the table related aspects of all our proximal stimuli in veridical perception - and that is what we perceive.

Well, certainly not when it comes to sight where the proximal stimulus is the light. In the case of touch and taste they'd agree. — Michael

Thanks.

Why do you think that the proximate cause for touch and taste is the distal object but not for sight? How about hearing? Kinaesthesis?

There's a distinction between a distal object being a constituent of experience and being a cause of experience. Indirect realists accept that distal objects are a cause of experience but deny that they are a constituent of experience. — Michael

Do you think that indirect realists can accept that distal objects are the proximate cause of experience? That is the sense I meant.

As I see it indirect realism is nothing more than the rejection of naive realism, with naive realism claiming that distal objects are literal constituents of experience, entailing such things as the naive theory of colour. — Michael

You mean like direct realism = the apple is distal object is numerically identical to the apple percept?

I have knowledge of percepts but I don't have knowledge of the proximal stimulus or distal object. — Michael

Right so let's go back to this. I'm trying to find something we can agree on a framing of so that we can start having a productive chat.

I agree that we have knowledge of percepts. To me that is distinct from forming a percept - ie perceiving. So to me, forming knowledge of percepts is distinct from the problem of whether perception is direct or not.

For reference I'd like to use SEP's characterisation of direct realism.

This has a few claims. We've touched on some of them.

• Ordinary Objects: perceptual experiences are directly of ordinary mind-independent objects.
• Presentation: perceptual experiences are direct perceptual presentations of their objects.
• Direct Realist Character: the phenomenal character of experience is determined, at least partly, by the direct presentation of ordinary objects.
• Common Kind Claim: veridical, illusory, and hallucinatory experiences (as) of an F are fundamentally the same; they form a common kind.

I'd agree -with some caveats- to ordinary objects, presentation, direct realist character, but reject the common kind claim (I imagine I'm some kind of disjunctivist). My caveats would be:

• Ordinary Objects Caveat: perceptual experiences are directly of ordinary mind-independent objects in the sense that mind-independent objects reliably cause percept properties to hold which intersubjectively count as each other. By this I don't mean that your red is identical to my red, but that if we both see the same apple, we can come to agree on whether it's red or not. For the dress, we can come to agree that it's either black and blue or gold and white.
• Presentation caveat: perceptual experiences are direct perceptual presentations of their objects in the sense that perceptual experiences are perceptions/percepts and that causes of percept properties are tightly constrained by distal object properties. Like reflectance spectra tightly constraining seen colour.
  
• Direct Realist Character: the phenomenal character of experience is determined, at least partly, by the direct presentation of ordinary objects. No caveats here.

I'd reject the common kind claim, for me illusions and hallucinations don't seem like an instances of perception. But for different reasons. Hallucinations don't have an in principle manipulable distal object or set of environmental causes, and thus aren't subject to the causal constraints of active perception. Illusions my jury is still out on.

For me, whether something seems to be X to me is not paradigmatic/definitive that I have perceived X. For example, I could have misperceived X, or what my perceptions seem to me to be (upon reflection, memory, the next moment...) may not be what they are. The paradigmatic instance of perception for me, then, is a veridical perception in an active account of perception.

I imagine, though please correct me if I'm wrong @Pierre-Normand, that my ordinary objects caveat is similar to @Pierre-Normand's reference to Evans'. Though I come at it from the belief that there's good evidence perception - as well as its character - is socially mediated.

I'm finding it hard to see how the posts you're making are related, which probably means we have very different presuppositions and ways of thinking about the topic.

So if I'm hearing you right, you believe that knowledge is only of percepts, and thus access to the world is indirect?

Having a rational awareness/understanding of it. — Michael

Right, so for you "access" is something like introspective awareness?

I have access to colours and pain and smells and tastes. These are all percepts. — Michael

Describe what you see that access as, please?

We have access to percepts. Percepts are often the consequence of the body responding to some proximal stimulus. The proximal stimulus often originates from some distal object. — Michael

Mmm... You don't have "access" to a percept. A percept is identical with either the whole, or a part of, the conceptual-perceptual state of an organism at a given time. That's a numerical/definitional identity, rather than an equivalence. Like the percept is not what perception or experience is of, the percept is an instance of perception. The taste percept of my coffee is the same as how I taste it in my tasting event.

The distinction there is between saying that a percept is an instance of perception vs saying that a percept is what perception acts upon.

Perhaps we disagree on something so fundamental that neither of us can see it!

If there were you should have to think on both sides of it.

I think, and correct me if I am wrong, you read the OP and thought that I was referring to 'meaning' by 'definition'; and therefrom arises the disagreement. Am I on the right track? — Bob Ross

I think that's on the right track. Thank you for the help.

My OP, I see now, is a bit ambiguous: I did not make any distinction between the meaning of a concept and its definition. I don't think that simple concepts are themselves circular and unknowable in meaning but, rather, what I was referring to by 'definable' is the explication of meaning. — Bob Ross

I believe I also think of explication differently. As in, someone might learn what "is" means - and thus gain an understanding of what it means to be - through standard use of the word, and I'd count that as an explication of "is" and an explication of what it means to be. Though neither of those explications is an attempt to be as exhaustive or wide ranging as offering a definition might be.

I suppose when I read "explication", from you, I was reading it like expression. As in, "the cat is on the mat" and "there is a cup on that table" are both expressions/explications of "is", even though both senses of "is" are different but related in both. If instead you meant explication as a type of speech act, like offering a definition, or illustrating use, I think I was going off kilter.

I would also disagree with the latter use of explication with regard to fundamental concepts, but for a different reason.

Thanks again! I appreciate the continued thought on the matter.

Are you suggesting that deaf and illiterate mutes don't see colours (or see everything to be the same colour)? — Michael

Nope!

I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to ask here. — Michael

Ah well.

Those with 3 channel colour vision and those with 12 channel colour vision will agree that some object reflects light with a wavelength of 700nm, but they will see it to have a different colour appearance. — Michael

You could end up with a statement like:

(Shrimp) Mantis Shrimp Human sees X as P(X) and calls it "P(X)" if and only if human sees X as Q(X) and calls it "Q(X)".

Predicating of the distal object X now makes sense because we've reintroduced the idea that properties of distal objects influence the kinds they are seen and labelled as.

Do you think you need a numerical identity between the state of being that Mantis Shrimp Human has when they count X as P(X) and the human's that counts X as Q(X) even when P and Q have the same extension?

I don't particularly like my own formulation of (Shrimp) btw, as it bifurcates seeing as a perceptual act and classification as a linguistic one, whereas there's evidence that the two are reciprocally related - both predictively/inferentially/causally and phenomenologically (citation needed).

What defines them as being indirect realists is in believing that we have direct knowledge only of a mental representation. Direct realists believe that we have direct knowledge of the distal object because nothing like a mental representation exists (the bottom drawing of direct realism). — Michael

Another possibility was outlined by Pierre-Normand below.

In contrast, a direct realist posits no such intermediate representations at all. For the direct realist, the act of representing the world is a capacity that the human subject exercises in directly perceiving distal objects. On this view, phenomenology is concerned with describing and analyzing the appearances of those objects themselves, not the appearances of some internal "representations" of them (which would make them, strangely enough, appearances of appearances). — Pierre-Normand

The distinction between "no such intermediate representation" and "nothing like a mental representation exists". The other realist alternative is that the perceptual relationship itself is a representation relationship. IE, there is no intermediate representation between distal object (or cause) of a perceptual object. But that would not be because there is no representation - or an appearance even - , but because there is no intermediate object or relation between the distal object/cause and the perceiver.

In terms of the diagram, you'd label the lines in the bottom left "representation".

For illustrative purposes anyway, an enactivist would hate the diagrams focussing on vision, or labelling those arrows as representation relationships in the first place!

How do you conceptualise a distal object in the second construal of indirect realism? It looks to me like there's an intermediary perceptual object in a representation relationship with distal objects in only the upper indirect realist's portrayal. In the lower indirect realist's account there doesn't seem to be a distal object of a perceptual act, and thus no relation with one, and thus no representation relationship with one.

Thank you very much.

Right now I am at -2 on the mood scale. Have you ever experienced what it is like to be at -2 or -5 or +5? I have. I have to take 600 mg of Quetiapine XL per night to get to -2 on the mood scale. If I didn't take it, I would be stuck at -5. Have you ever had hallucinations? If you haven't, you won't understand how scary and confusing it is to have one's reality warped by things that are not really there. — Truth Seeker

That's rough.

I will read Hume and Kant if I ever get to either 0 or +1 on the mood scale. Thank you for the recommendations. — Truth Seeker

I find secondary literature easier in the pit. Hope things get a bit more okay for you soon.

I don't think that it's science's job to either establish or disconfirm this thesis. I think the mind/body problem, the so-called hard-problem of consciousness and radical skepticism stem from distinctive philosophical outlooks regarding the disconnect between the "manifest image" and the "scientific image" that Wilfrid Sellars identified as "idealizations of distinct conceptual frameworks in terms of which humans conceive of the world and their place in it." On my view, it's entirely a philosophical problem although neuroscience and psychology do present cases that are illustrative of (and sometimes affected by) the competing philosophical theses being discussed in this thread. — Pierre-Normand

I had been wanting to make a thread on precisely this line of argument. That the hard problem of consciousness appears only when you expect an isomorphism between the structures of experience posited by the manifest image of humanity and those posited by its scientific image. Do you have any citations for it? Or is it a personal belief of yours? I'm very sympathetic to it, by the by.

I think ‘using’ a concept is more generic than ‘presupposing it’: both are ‘using’ it, the former is just what it means to ‘use’ generally, and the latter is to leave it unexplicated. — Bob Ross

I think I see what you mean. Though it strikes me as very difficult to be able to say which concepts are presupposed by which understandings. Could you take the statement "the cat is on the mat" and spell out all of its presupposed concepts, and the underlying fundamental concepts which are implicit in those presuppositions?

You are absolutely right that one can learn a concept through merely interacting with it or observing other people discuss about it, without its exact definition being clarified. I just don’t see how this negates my position, I guess. — Bob Ross

I've not been too explicit in spelling out how I disagree with you. I think we do disagree, but I don't know exactly where. I think we're getting close though.

If we want to be really technical, then I would say that we first, in our early years, learn notions; then we (tend to) refine them in our young adulthood into ideas; then we (tend to) refine them more in our older years into concepts. I just mean to convey that we sort of grasp the ‘idea’ behind a thing slowly (usually) through experience (whether that be of other people conversing or interacting with something pertaining to the ‘idea’); and I sometimes convey this by noting a sort of linear progression of clarity behind an ‘idea’ with notion → idea → concept. It isn’t a super clean schema, but you get the point.

I think I get the point. The prospect of cleanliness strikes me as an illusion though? I don't believe concepts have a linear progression of articulation like that, especially in discrete stages of clarity. That seems to me to make a concept very fixed while its articulation and understanding highly varies. I don't doubt that people can "aim their understandings" at a common concept while wrestling with it, even explicitly.

A good example of this is Eulerian polygon in Lakatos' Proofs and Refutations. People offered many definitions of Eulerian polygons over the years. But people came up with "counterexamples" to those - things which obviously were not Eulerian polygons -intensionally- but were Eulerian polyhedron -extensionally- in terms of the definition.

That history illustrates two things, in my view, that definition is in some sense derivative of communally negotiated understanding -even of intensionally fixed analysands like the concept of the Eulerian polyhedron -, and that communal articulation changes such conceptions.

Out in the wild, away from concepts which can be relatively well explicated in a formal language, things are both much fuzzier analytically and much more concrete pragmatically+semantically, I believe. Understanding what a chair is must include the act of sitting upon it, not just the words "something you can sit on" - which includes the floor and rocks. And there are no speech acts which are behaviourally equivalent to the act of sitting, since that's not what words do, they don't sit down.

Because the majority of the concepts we enjoy in our lives are more analytically fuzzy, their "full" explication, something maximally clear, cashes out in a pragmatic - perhaps even phenomenological - understanding rather than explicating word strings. Even if that pragmatic understanding must be accompanied by the appropriate words. eg "I sit down in my chair", and I am sitting, I illustrate this by sitting down.

That strikes me as most concepts must, thus, be fundamental. If they are constituted by being unable to be explicated. Since I cannot explicate sitting down with words alone. And if such explication is broadened to speech acts, then I can sit down while saying "this is sitting down", and explication becomes part of the fuzzy world of communally negotiated - social - understandings. In which clarity turns out to be grasping pragmatics and context.

Flowers for Algernon - very insightful about how emotions are conceptualised. Some brutally incisive depictions of growing up a working class guy in a poor family - with added learning disability. This book is heartrending from start to finish.

I didn’t understand this question: can you re-phrase it? — Bob Ross

Apologies. You answered my question already.

To use a concept, is to deploy it; and to presuppose a concept is to use a concept in a manner whereof one does not explicate its meaning (but, rather, uses it implicitly in their analysis). — Bob Ross

I'd very much like to see an example of this. I'm not saying I don't understand or have any idea of what you mean, I'd just like to see where you're coming from with this distinction between deploying a concept and explicating its meaning. I can imagine a world in which deploying a concept is an instance of explicating a meaning, regardless of whether a definition is offered.

Oh, I think I understand where your are heading; so let me clarify: by claiming ‘being’, or any absolutely simple concept, is unanalyzable and primitive, I DO NOT mean to convey that we cannot come to know what they are. I mean that we can’t come to know them through conceptual analysis: they remain forever notions, which are acquired via pure intuitions (about reality). — Bob Ross

I think I see what you mean. Though I think you're relying on a strict distinction between regular acts of speech and the analysis of concepts. I can certainly see that there is a distinction between them. What we're doing right now is a very analytical use of language. But you do pick up and refine concepts just by listening and chatting.

If we classify it as such, it would no longer fit OP's criterion of "not want to be a person who does it". We don't do diseases. — Lionino

It's an odd disease then, where how you act both gives you it and keeps it going. It strikes me as something like football. You don't do football, but you are a football player. Which isn't quite being an instance of football...

Regardless, the original post's sense of immoral applies to person types and persons.

With this in mind do you think there things that aren’t immoral but you still shouldn’t want to be the kind of person that does them even if you’re the only person affected? — Captain Homicide

In fact the question is about that dynamic. If immorality only applies to acts, then we can end the discussion. The question remains open if you can consider a type of person immoral.

You may bring up the example of touching a hot pan, — Lionino

Good catch. I think it was sticking a hand in the fire? I had in mind a kid touching a hot thing intentionally. Foolish, I think, not immoral.

↪Fooloso4 Is it possible to be too preoccupied with defending Descartes to see Midgley's point? I doubt that Midgley would have disagreed with your account of Descartes. — Banno

It'll depend on how much of Midgley's point depends upon misconstruing Descartes. The article springboards against Descartes' alleged solipsistic starting point and methodology, even if he's not an outright solipsist. @Fooloso4 is substantively disagreeing with the article's construal of Descartes. Specifically how it construes his method as solitary and solipsistic.

So even if you end up agreeing with Midgley's conclusion, you can criticise how she gets there by (perhaps uncharitably) criticising Descartes.The dude was a mathematician and a natural scientist surrounded by all kinds of scholasticism and dogma, his methodological withdrawal thus could be construed as inspired by his mathematical inclination - as a means of cutting through what he couldn't outright say was ill thought out bullshit.

I hold that some concepts are primitive and absolutely simple, and as such cannot be defined without circular reference (to itself). I am curious as to how many people hold a similar view, and how many completely reject such an idea. — Bob Ross

I reject it.

I will give the best example I have: being (viz., ‘to be’, ‘existence’, ‘to exist’, etc.). When trying to define or describe being, it is impossible not to use it—and I don’t mean just in the sense of a linguistic limitation: it is impossible to give a conceptual account without presupposing its meaning in the first place.

Under what conditions do you believe a concept presupposed in an act of speech? Can you distinguish presupposing a concept from using a concept? Or needing to learn a concept before deploying it? These aren't rhetorical questions.

So, do you agree that some concepts are absolutely simple, and thusly unanalyzable and incapable of non-circular definitions, but yet still valid; or do these so-called, alleged, primitive concepts need to be either (1) capable of non-circular definition or (2) thrown out?

I'd call a concept X presupposed by another concept Y iff any judgement or act which articulated or used Y could not be understood without understanding X. An example, try to imagine riding a bike ( Y ) without understanding what a bike is ( X ).

I'd call a concept fundamental if it is presupposed by types of judgement or acts. Like truth for my claim that it's windy outside.

That concept of presupposition yields a puzzle. How would someone learn any derivative concept of any fundamental concept? Imagine for a moment that "bike" was fundamental, then no one could learn to speak about riding a bike until they understood what a bike is. That sits at odds with how omnipresent fundamental concepts may be construed to be - being, the meaning of "is", experience, quality, quantity, truth and so on. How could you come to understand what a bike is without understanding what "is" means? The same analysis would hold for any practice which involved an object - any activity. But we live in a world where plenty of people know how to ride bikes, so they must understand riding bikes, so must understand what a bike is.

So it seems we live in a world where either people understand none of what we do, or fundamental concepts are rarely if ever employed for understanding anything.

Which would mean either that fundamental concepts are not used in the understanding or judgement of almost anything, or that understanding and judgement can be done without understanding presupposed concepts in the sense I outlined. Note "can" there won't apply to every act, just some acts.

Conversely, we live in a world in which people understand how to ride bikes and pick up trash, but not what existence means. So it would seem to me that fundamental concepts require everyday concepts to be in place before fundamental concepts themselves are understood.

However, I don't mean to construe thinking about fundamental concepts as useless. When people change how they think and act about something fundamental, it can have widespread effects. For example, whether people consider agents worthy of moral consideration defined by the presence of a soul, or indeed whether they need be human at all.

Fundamental concepts thus play a regulative role inferentially and analytically upon that which they impact. Even if their understanding is not presupposed in the articulation or judgement of what they inferentially and analytically constrain.

Thus, I view fundamental concepts as central strands in our collective web of thoughts and judgements. You can't make the web without having them there, but the web needs to be made at the same time as them. They are fundamental in terms of the scope of change their modification can bring, but not presupposed for understanding everything their change would impact.

Reading The Drowning Girl by Caitlin R. Kiernan. Strongly recommend.

I'm not sure what your intention is in saying a person 'who wants to be an alcoholic'. Do you mean this literally, or do you take it as the implication of their behavior? Many problem drinkers don't want to be this way and others don't even know they are problem drinkers. But I get your boarder point. — Tom Storm

I mean it literally. As it's all that is required from the OP - find a thing which isn't immoral but we shouldn't want to be. I realise that it's absurd. I think that's a strength of what I'm saying - no one gonna wanna be an alcoholic, no one who has any understanding of addiction gonna think it's immoral. It could very well sound like I'm being discriminatory against alcoholics, or saying somehow that alcoholics want to be alcoholics... I'm not. I'm saying that someone who would aspire to be an alcoholic would be being a fool (and thus shouldn't want it). But wouldn't be doing anything immoral by being an alcoholic.

That's an interesting one. What do you mean by alcoholism? Alcohol use disorder includes a broad range of behaviours. — Tom Storm

I'll just go by a dictionary definition for the purposes of the thread since I don't think it matters. Only one thing matters to me really - finding an example of a something which isn't immoral but you shouldn't want to be the kind of person who does it. In my case, alcoholism and being an alcoholic.

Referring to "alcohol use disorder" as "alcoholism". So I'm making the claim that having alcohol use disorder isn't immoral, but simultaneously someone should not want to be an alcoholic.

a chronic relapsing disorder characterized by alcohol abuse or dependence, as compulsive use of alcoholic beverages, the development of physical or psychological symptoms upon reducing or ceasing intake, and decreased ability to function socially and professionally. — Dictionary.com, alcohol use disorder

Instead of finding necessary and sufficient conditions for being immoral, or for "a kind of person you should not be", I just want to demonstrate that you can be one but not the other. In order to do that I think it suffices to show they're not the same concept. Principally, an act can be immoral and a person can be said to be immoral. But only a person can be an example of a type of person which you should not be. There is thus a sense (in the OP) of immorality which may apply to acts, as well as another (not necessarily distinct) one which applies to persons.

( A1 ) Alcoholism is an illness.
( A2 ) A person who has any illness is not immoral on that basis alone.
( A3 ) Any alcoholic is not immoral on the basis of their alcoholism alone (from A1, A2)

The sense of "shouldn't" in the OP is also worth examining. As there are things we shouldn't do which aren't immoral - they may instead be foolish, irresponsible and other nice words for things which we shouldn't do for some reason. For example, sticking your hand in a fire, misplacing your wallet, never cleaning your house, walking out of the house without putting a shirt on when it's -1 Celcius outside...

I'm just going to assert without argument that an alcoholic behaving in a manner that sustains and potentiates a dependence on alcohol is very irresponsible. And for now assert without argument that people shouldn't want to do anything which is very irresponsible. Also assert without argument that someone will be an alcoholic if and only if they act in a manner which sustains and potentiates a dependence on alcohol.

That would give you:

(B1) Behaving in a manner that intentionally sustains and potentiates a dependence on alcohol is very irresponsible.
(B2) A person who wants to be an alcoholic behaves in a manner that intentionally sustains and potentiates their dependence on alcohol.
(B3) You shouldn't want to do anything very irresponsible.
(B4) You shouldn't want to behave in a manner that sustains and potentiates a dependence on alcohol. (from B1,B4)
(B5) You shouldn't want to be an alcoholic (from B2, B4)

( A3 ) and ( B5 ) taken together give you a sense in which someone shouldn't want to be an alcoholic (the type of person that an alcoholic is...someone with alcoholism), but that alcoholism isn't immoral.

The crux of this is really a distinction between the "should" of immorality (a thou shalt not!) and the gentle "should" that we shouldn't wish to behave foolishly. Is it immoral to want to be an alcoholic? No, but it is a rather silly aspiration. A supportive parent would not want their child to have that as their profession.