CONCEPT
Strong Evaluation
Taylor's term for the distinctively human capacity to evaluate one's own desires — to ask not just what one wants but whether what one wants is worthy of the person one is trying to be.
Strong evaluation is the capacity to assess desires and motivations against qualitative frameworks of the good, rather than merely ranking them by intensity or convenience. Taylor distinguishes it from weak evaluation, which accepts desires as given and asks only how to satisfy them most efficiently. Strong evaluation introduces a second-order question: is this desire worthy of me? Is the self that would be expressed by acting on this desire the self I am trying to become? In the age of AI, where the amplifier serves desires with unprecedented efficiency, strong evaluation becomes the irreducibly human work — the discipline of rejecting smooth output that sounds better than it thinks, of declining the next productive hour when the hour has become compulsive.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Taylor developed the distinction in his 1976 essay Responsibility for Self and elaborated it across subsequent work as the capacity that distinguishes genuine moral agency from mere preference satisfaction. Weak evaluation