[thinking that] well-being concerns on happiness or affect would lead us to conclude that happiness wireheading as a complete and final solution, and that’s intuitively wrong for most people
Yes, I agree many people are against hedonism because of the (at least initially) counter-intuitive examples about wireheading and experience machines. As a purely sociological observation, I’ve been struck that social scientists I talk to are familiar with the objections to hedonism, but unfamiliar with those to desire theories and the objective list. Theorising doesn’t penetrate too deeply into the social sciences. As you say:
Because psychologists are empiricists, they don’t spend too much time worrying about whether affect, life satisfaction, or eudamonia are more important in a philosophical or ethical sense
I spend quite a lot of type talking to social scientists and it used to surprise me that they seem to think theorising is pointless (“you philosophers never agree on anything”). I now realise this is largely a selection effect: people who like empirical work more than theoretical work become social scientists instead of philosophers.That social scientists don’t spend too much time theorising is, I think, a bit of a problem. The impetus to write the paper came from the fact social scientists have developed this notion that life satisfaction is what really matters, and been running with it for some decades, without really stopping to think about what that view would imply.
Right now, the field is focusing on doing its empirical work better—the “open science” movement. I think that social scientists do engage in what we call “theoretical” work, but it is generally simply theories about how things empirically work (e.g., if religion is unique in its ability to produce high eudamonia for a large number of people, how can we conceptualize it as a eudamonia-producing system? Or which systems in the brain are responsible for production of pain experience; how is physical pain related to other forms of emotional pain?).
A fair number of us are probably logical positivists to a degree, in that we don’t want to go near a theoretical question with no empirical implications. That is a real shame. But to me, it just seems like theoretical values questions are outside of the domain of “social science” and in the domain of “humanities”. And one good reason to continue specialising/compartmentalizing like that is that many social scientists are just crap at formulating a clearly-articulated logical argument (try to read a theory in a psychology paper in the latter half of the Intro where they formulate hypotheses from their theory; compare the level of logical rigor and clarity with that from your philosophy papers). Collaborations between philosophers and psychologists are great (have you listened to Very Bad Wizards by Tamler Sommers and David Pizzaro? I only cite a podcast because honestly, I can’t think of actual research project collaborations) and collaborations should happen more, but honestly, it’s just difficult for me to even conceive of a psychologist trying to answer the question “what really matters more: eudamonia or net positive and negative affect?” because it seems to me at that point they’re doing humanities, not science.
I suppose there’s a whole history of that too; BF Skinner’s ‘behavioral turn’ really focused the field on what we can measure to the exclusion of anything that can’t be measured; it took a few decades just for the field to creep into thinking about things that could be in principle measured, or only indirectly measured (the ‘cognitive turn’) let alone thinking about entirely non-measurable values questions like “what ultimate moral end should we prefer?” Prior to Skinner, there was Freud and Jung and related theorists who did do theory, but I am not sure it was very good or useful theory.
To focus what I am trying to say: is there something we could gain from social scientists (particularly moral psychologists) theorising more about values that is unique or distinct from or would add to what philosophers (particularly moral philosophers) are already doing?
Some interesting points here, thanks!
Yes, I agree many people are against hedonism because of the (at least initially) counter-intuitive examples about wireheading and experience machines. As a purely sociological observation, I’ve been struck that social scientists I talk to are familiar with the objections to hedonism, but unfamiliar with those to desire theories and the objective list. Theorising doesn’t penetrate too deeply into the social sciences. As you say:
I spend quite a lot of type talking to social scientists and it used to surprise me that they seem to think theorising is pointless (“you philosophers never agree on anything”). I now realise this is largely a selection effect: people who like empirical work more than theoretical work become social scientists instead of philosophers.That social scientists don’t spend too much time theorising is, I think, a bit of a problem. The impetus to write the paper came from the fact social scientists have developed this notion that life satisfaction is what really matters, and been running with it for some decades, without really stopping to think about what that view would imply.
Right now, the field is focusing on doing its empirical work better—the “open science” movement. I think that social scientists do engage in what we call “theoretical” work, but it is generally simply theories about how things empirically work (e.g., if religion is unique in its ability to produce high eudamonia for a large number of people, how can we conceptualize it as a eudamonia-producing system? Or which systems in the brain are responsible for production of pain experience; how is physical pain related to other forms of emotional pain?).
A fair number of us are probably logical positivists to a degree, in that we don’t want to go near a theoretical question with no empirical implications. That is a real shame. But to me, it just seems like theoretical values questions are outside of the domain of “social science” and in the domain of “humanities”. And one good reason to continue specialising/compartmentalizing like that is that many social scientists are just crap at formulating a clearly-articulated logical argument (try to read a theory in a psychology paper in the latter half of the Intro where they formulate hypotheses from their theory; compare the level of logical rigor and clarity with that from your philosophy papers). Collaborations between philosophers and psychologists are great (have you listened to Very Bad Wizards by Tamler Sommers and David Pizzaro? I only cite a podcast because honestly, I can’t think of actual research project collaborations) and collaborations should happen more, but honestly, it’s just difficult for me to even conceive of a psychologist trying to answer the question “what really matters more: eudamonia or net positive and negative affect?” because it seems to me at that point they’re doing humanities, not science.
I suppose there’s a whole history of that too; BF Skinner’s ‘behavioral turn’ really focused the field on what we can measure to the exclusion of anything that can’t be measured; it took a few decades just for the field to creep into thinking about things that could be in principle measured, or only indirectly measured (the ‘cognitive turn’) let alone thinking about entirely non-measurable values questions like “what ultimate moral end should we prefer?” Prior to Skinner, there was Freud and Jung and related theorists who did do theory, but I am not sure it was very good or useful theory.
To focus what I am trying to say: is there something we could gain from social scientists (particularly moral psychologists) theorising more about values that is unique or distinct from or would add to what philosophers (particularly moral philosophers) are already doing?