What if there’s a small hedonic cost to creating the beautiful world? Suppose option 1 is “Creating a stunningly beautiful world that is uninhabited and won’t influence sentient beings in any way, plus giving a random person a headache for an hour.”
In that case I can’t really see a moral case for choosing option 1, no matter how stunningly beautiful the world in question is. This would suggest that even if there is some intrinsic value to beauty, it’s extremely small if not lexically inferior to the value of hedonics. I think for basically all practical purposes we do face tradeoffs between hedonic and other purported values, and I just don’t feel the moral force of the latter in those cases.
What if there’s a small hedonic cost to creating the beautiful world? Suppose option 1 is “Creating a stunningly beautiful world that is uninhabited and won’t influence sentient beings in any way, plus giving a random person a headache for an hour.”
In that case I can’t really see a moral case for choosing option 1, no matter how stunningly beautiful the world in question is. This would suggest that even if there is some intrinsic value to beauty, it’s extremely small if not lexically inferior to the value of hedonics. I think for basically all practical purposes we do face tradeoffs between hedonic and other purported values, and I just don’t feel the moral force of the latter in those cases.