An experiment for those who think the intrinsic value of pleasure is beyond doubt
Many people take it as a given that positive experiences have intrinsic value, but I don’t think the matter is as clear-cut. So here I present a simple experiment which you can try if you are in the mood for listening to music.
Experiment: Listen to some music you like. After a while, mute the music. Alternate between silence and music while trying to appreciate how each feels.
When I mute the music, there is a lingering freedom from what I like to call the “heaviness of being”—basically any pain, unease or listlessness that I may otherwise feel. Turning the music back on definitely adds an enjoyable or gripping quality to the experience. But when I mute it, I don’t really get the sense that the experience has become worse, and yet I don’t find the peaceful silence better than neutral. This would seem to imply that listening to music is at best neutral.
To be clear, experiences can be impactful and leave a memory associated with meaning and value. Some event can cause me to feel deep sadness and still have this effect, even though I would hardly consider the moment-to-moment experience positive. And my aim here was precisely to call into question the intrinsic value of pleasure, its value when experienced for its own sake. I am curious about your thoughts if you tried the experiment!
I agree that hedonically “neutral” experiences often seem perfectly fine.
I suspect that there’s a sleight of hand going on where moral realist proponents of hedonist axiology try to imply that “pleasure has intrinsic value” is the same claim as “pleasure is good.” But the only sense in which “pleasure is good” is obviously uncontroversial is merely the sense of “pleasure is unobjectionable.” Admittedly, pleasure also often is something we desire, or something we come to desire if we keep experiencing it—but this clearly isn’t always the case for all people, as any personal hedonist would notice if they stopped falling into the typical mind fallacy and took seriously that many other people sincerely and philosophically-unconfusedly adopt non-hedonistic life goals.
See also this short form or this longer post.
Cannot moral realism be grounded at least in suffering, though? It seems inescapable to me that generating suffering in an experience machine would be disvaluable. For the experience to be suffering, it may require a component of wanting it to end, but this would still be a felt quality, right? So no matter when or where the suffering was experienced, no matter “who” experienced it, it would still be disvaluable due to its inherent nature.
Depends what you mean by “moral realism.”
I consider myself a moral anti-realist, but I would flag that my anti-realism is not the same as saying “anything goes.” Maybe the best way to describe my anti-realism to a person who thinks about morality in a realist way is something like this:
“Okay, if you want to talk that way, we can say there is a moral reality, in a sense. But it’s not a very far-reaching one, at least as far as the widely-compelling features of the reality are concerned. Aside from a small number of uncontroversial moral statements like ‘all else equal, more suffering is worse than less suffering,’ much of morality is under-defined. That means that several positions on morality are equally defensible. That’s why I personally call it anti-realism: because there’s not one single correct answer.”
See section 2 of my post here for more thoughts on that way of defining moral realism. And here’s Luke Muehlhauser saying a similar thing.
Thank you. My remaining question is: how do you make sense of the non-hedonistic life goals? When it comes to suffering, in the moment of experiencing it I am extremely confident about its disvalue because I think the experience provides real-time firsthand evidence of the disvalue. Whereas with other purported goods or bads it seems to me like the best that can be said in favor is something like “many reasonable people say so”. But why do they say so? Because they have a feeling that something or other has value? See also this comment.
When I said earlier that some people form non-hedonistic life goals, I didn’t mean that they commit to the claim that there are things that everyone else should value. I meant that there are non-hedonistic things that the person in question values personally/subjectively.
You might say that subjective (dis)value is trumped by objective (dis)value—then we’d get into the discussion of whether objective (dis)value is a meaningful concept. I argue against that in my above-linked post on hedonist axiology. Here’s a shorter attempt at making some of the key points from that post:
Earlier, when I agreed with you that we can, in a sense, view “suffering is bad” as moral fact, I would still maintain that this way of speaking makes sense only as a shorthand pointing towards the universality and uncontroversialness of “suffering is bad,” rather than it pointing to some kind objectivity-that-through-its-nature-trumps-everything-else that suffering is supposed to have (again, I don’t believe in that sort of objectivity). By definition, when there’s suffering, there’s a felt sense (by the sufferer) of wanting the experience to end or change, so there’s dissatisfaction and a will towards change. The definition of suffering means it’s a motivational force. But whether it is the only impetus/motivational force that matters to someone, or whether there are other pulls and pushes that they deem equally worthy (or even more worthy, in many cases), depends on the person. So, that’s where your question about the non-hedonistic life goals comes in.
People choosing life goals is a personal thing, more existentialism than morality. I wouldn’t even use the word “value” here. People adopt life goals that motivate them to get up in the morning and go beyond the path of least resistance (avoiding short-term suffering). If I had tto sum it up in one word, I’d say it’s about meaning rather than value. See my post on life goals, which also discusses my theory of why/how people adopt them.
If you feel that we’re talking past each other, it’s likely because we’re thinking in different conceptual frameworks.
Let’s take a step back. I see morality as having two separate parts:
Morality as systematized altruism: the attempt to figure out the most altruistic life goal. (Not everyone cares about this, but even people who don’t themselves want to do altruistic things could still reason about it as an intellectual exercise.)
Most likely, there’s no single correct “most altruistic life goal.” Even so, some answers to “What’s systematized altruism?” are clearly worse than others! So, even if there’s no single correct morality, we can still make progress in finding the most defensible options. And among the mulitple good options, it becomes a question of whether we are, for one reason or another, drawn to one of them, or whether we are indifferent between them—see my long post on how moral uncertainty within moral anti-realism is sometimes better thought of as moral indecisiveness (and on other, related topics).
Morality as pondering obligations from the fact that other people may not share my life goals: contractualism, cooperation, respecting others’ autonomy; etc. All of that seems really important, so much so that answers to the bullet point above (“most altruistic life goal”) that would prompt us to completely thwart other people’s life goals don’t seem to be good answers.
Separately, there are non-moral life goals (and it’s possible for people to have no life goals, if there’s nothing that makes them go beyond the path of least resistance). Personally, I have a non-moral life goal (being a good husband to my wife) and a moral one (reducing suffering subject to low-effort cooperation with other people’s life goals).
That’s pretty much it. As I say in my post on life goals, I subscribe to the Wittgensteinian view of philosophy (summarized in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy):
Per this perspective, I see the aim of moral philosophy as to accurately and usefully describe our option space – the different questions worth asking and how we can reason about them.
I feel like my framework lays out the option space and lets us reason about (the different parts of) morality in a satisfying way, so that we don’t also need the elusive concept of “objective value”. I wouldn’t understand how that concept works and I don’t see where it would fit in. On the contrary, I think thinking in terms of that concept loses us clarity.
Some people might claim that they can’t imagine doing without it or would consider everything meaningless if they had to do without it (see “Why realists and anti-realists disagree”). I argued against that here, here and here. (In those posts, I directly discuss the concept of “irreducible normativity” instead of “objective value,” but those are very closely linked, such that objections against one also apply against the other, mostly.)
I think I can see why anti-realism is not an “anything goes” approach, but I still can’t see why “subjective” values (or meaning) should matter. Of course, I also used to look at value in terms of what I cared about, or what motivated me. But at some point I realized that what holding a belief about the importance of something boils down to is that I will feel various emotions and do various actions in response to situations that are related to the belief. There is no intrinsic (dis)value in me (dis)valuing something, I concluded, and this drove me to full-blown nihilism.
But then I realized that (dis)value is something that is, not something that I can choose for myself based on some criteria. Suffering is what gives meaning to the word “bad”. No possible belief about the experience of suffering could change its badness. Even when I was convinced that nothing mattered, my despair was producing genuine disvalue.
So now I care about reducing suffering, but if I thought I was failing in achieving the goal of reducing suffering, this wouldn’t by itself be bad. The world contains some amount of disvalue. My belief in the disvalue of suffering is an empirical claim about a feature of the world, and it motivates my actions and evokes emotions in me.
(I haven’t finished reading all the relevant texts you linked, but I am posting this comment for today.)