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 theyâre distressed by this, the appropriate response for their sake is not to drug or fool them until they feel better, itâs 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 donât think you do me any favour by just taking away my sadness; I donât want to stop feeling sad, what I want is for the bad in the world to be addressed.
Since this comment gets some attention every now and then, Iâm leaving another comment here to point to this sequence where I flesh out this kind of view more.
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 theyâre distressed by this, the appropriate response for their sake is not to drug or fool them until they feel better, itâs 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 donât think you do me any favour by just taking away my sadness; I donât 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 Goodhartâs law: it ignores the objects of our emotions. This distinction can also be made between different versions of preference utilitarianism/âconsequentialism, as âsatisfaction versionsâ and âobject versionsâ. See Krister Bykvistâs PhD thesis and Wlodek Rabinowicz and Jan Ăsterberg, âValue Based on Preferences: On Two Interpretations of Preference Utilitarianismâ (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.
Since this comment gets some attention every now and then, Iâm leaving another comment here to point to this sequence where I flesh out this kind of view more.