I feel increasingly unsympathetic to hedonism (and maybe experientalism generally?). Yes, emotions matter, and the strength of emotions could be taken to mean how much something matters, but if you separate a cow and her calf and they’re distressed by this, the appropriate response for their sake is not to drug or fool them until they feel better, it’s to reunite them. What they want is each other, not to feel better. Sometimes I think about something bad in the world that makes me sad; I don’t think you do me any favour by just taking away my sadness; I don’t want to stop feeling sad, what I want is for the bad in the world to be addressed.
I feel increasingly unsympathetic to hedonism (and maybe experientalism generally?). Yes, emotions matter, and the strength of emotions could be taken to mean how much something matters, but if you separate a cow and her calf and they’re distressed by this, the appropriate response for their sake is not to drug or fool them until they feel better, it’s to reunite them. What they want is each other, not to feel better. Sometimes I think about something bad in the world that makes me sad; I don’t think you do me any favour by just taking away my sadness; I don’t want to stop feeling sad, what I want is for the bad in the world to be addressed.
Rather than affect being what matters in itself, maybe affect is a signal for what matters and its intensity tells us how much it matters. Hedonism as normally understood would therefore be like Goodhart’s law: it ignores the objects of our emotions. This distinction can also be made between different versions of preference utilitarianism/consequentialism, as “satisfaction versions” and “object versions”. See Krister Bykvist’s PhD thesis and Wlodek Rabinowicz and Jan Österberg, “Value Based on Preferences: On Two Interpretations of Preference Utilitarianism” (unfortunately both unavailable online to me, at least).
Of course, often we do just want to feel better, and that matters, too. If someone wants to not suffer, then of course they should not suffer.
Related: wireheading, the experience machine, complexity of value.