How would you aggregate within a life under hedonism? Can we take for granted peopleâs intuitive judgements of felt hedonistic intensity? I lean towards no, and I think thereâs actually no (at least precise) fact of the matter. I can imagine it being the case that cardinal hedonistic intensity assessments are created by parts of the brain that arenât responsible for the hedonistic component of experience, rather than âread offâ, and judgements would differ between people who differ only in the parts of the brain resposponsible just for the cardinal assessments.
Maybe one promising approach is a mixed experience test to match intensities of positive and negative valence, although this wouldnât give us a cardinal scale, only a scale where we can say some pains are about as bad as some pleasures are good. What I have in mind is having someone experience both negative and positive components at the same time, and checking which dominates their attention, or how the person compares the overall experience to a hedonistically neutral one. However, I still have doubts about whether this reflects what we want. Mixed states could be too different from purely positive or purely negative states (e.g. attention may work in complicated ways), so judgements may not reliably generalize to them from this test.
If you want to just use peopleâs preferences over hedonistic components of experience, then this is less paternalistic, and judgments will vary widely. For example, I donât think itâs true that more intense pleasure is necessarily better, all else equal. That being said, I lean more towards a preference view anyway.
I can imagine it being the case that cardinal hedonistic intensity assessments are created by a part of the brain that isnât responsible for the hedonistic component of experience, rather than âread offâ, and judgements would differ between people who differ only in the parts of the brain resposponsible just for the cardinal assessments.
How would you aggregate within a life under hedonism? Can we take for granted peopleâs intuitive judgements of felt hedonistic intensity? I lean towards no, and I think thereâs actually no (at least precise) fact of the matter. I can imagine it being the case that cardinal hedonistic intensity assessments are created by parts of the brain that arenât responsible for the hedonistic component of experience, rather than âread offâ, and judgements would differ between people who differ only in the parts of the brain resposponsible just for the cardinal assessments.
Maybe one promising approach is a mixed experience test to match intensities of positive and negative valence, although this wouldnât give us a cardinal scale, only a scale where we can say some pains are about as bad as some pleasures are good. What I have in mind is having someone experience both negative and positive components at the same time, and checking which dominates their attention, or how the person compares the overall experience to a hedonistically neutral one. However, I still have doubts about whether this reflects what we want. Mixed states could be too different from purely positive or purely negative states (e.g. attention may work in complicated ways), so judgements may not reliably generalize to them from this test.
If you want to just use peopleâs preferences over hedonistic components of experience, then this is less paternalistic, and judgments will vary widely. For example, I donât think itâs true that more intense pleasure is necessarily better, all else equal. That being said, I lean more towards a preference view anyway.
Would love to see more research on this!