One response to the claim that thresholds would be arbitrary is that utilitarianism may already be arbitrary, too. Why do you think pleasure and suffering can be measured cardinally at all (even on their own scales, but also on a common scale)? Why would people’s preferences or intuitions actually track the cardinal value? Why think there is anything cardinal to track at all? What plausible theory of consciousness actually establishes these numbers? Maybe people just have preferences over experiences or their only ordinal hedonic intensities, but it’s the preferences that construct the cardinal units, and these cardinal units don’t come with the experiences themselves.
If this is the case, and we rely on preferences to determine cardinal values, then we may get lexical thresholds in practice, because people may have lexical preferences (at least while in sufficiently extreme pain, perhaps). Or, we have to cast doubt on our use of preferences at all, and then what can we do?
It seems clear intuitively that we can distinguish between different levels of well-being and different levels of suffering. People get different amounts of enjoyment from reading different books for example. Any view that doesn’t put them on a precise cardinal scale is susceptible to Dutch Book arguments. I don’t have a super strong view on consciousness—I think it’s real and probably irreducible. To the extent that pain arose to deter actions and pleasure arose to encourage other actions, organisms would evolve to experience pain for when they do things that decrease their fitness roughly proportional to how much they decrease their fitness. Quantifications always seem arbitrary, but it’s clear that there is some quantity involved-unfathomable bliss is far better than a cupcake- even if it’s hard to quantify.
I’m a moral realist, so I don’t care only about what things people actually care about. I care about what we would care about if we were perfectly rational. I think the argument I presented provides a challenge for consistent lexical views. I’m a hedonic utilitarian, not a preference utilitarian.
Any view that doesn’t put them on a precise cardinal scale is susceptible to Dutch Book arguments.
This would only tell us that our preferences over pleasure and suffering (and everything else!) must be measurable on a cardinal scale (up to affine transformations), but it doesn’t tell us that there is one objective scale that should work for everyone. The preference-based scales are definitely different across people, and there’s no way to tell which preferences are right (although you might be able to rule out some).
Quantifications always seem arbitrary, but it’s clear that there is some quantity involved-unfathomable bliss is far better than a cupcake- even if it’s hard to quantify.
I’m a moral realist, so I don’t care only about what things people actually care about. I care about what we would care about if we were perfectly rational.
I suspect there’s actually no definitely correct cardinal scale when it comes to hedonic intensity, so there’s no very precise way we ought to care about tradeoffs between intensities (or between pleasure and suffering).
There might be arguments that can give us bounds, e.g. if a pattern of activation responsible for pleasure happens twice as many times per second in a brain experiencing A than in a brain experiencing B (by activating more neurons in the same pattern, or activating the same neurons more often, or both), then we might think there’s twice as much pleasure in A than B per second. Similarly for suffering. However,
This doesn’t tell us how to compare pleasure and suffering.
These arguments lose their applicability across brains when they’re sufficiently different; they might use totally different patterns of activations, and just counting neurons firing per second is wrong.
It’s not clear this is the right approach to consciousness/​hedonic intensity in the first place (although it seems fairly intuitive to me, and I assign it considerable weight).
One response to the claim that thresholds would be arbitrary is that utilitarianism may already be arbitrary, too. Why do you think pleasure and suffering can be measured cardinally at all (even on their own scales, but also on a common scale)? Why would people’s preferences or intuitions actually track the cardinal value? Why think there is anything cardinal to track at all? What plausible theory of consciousness actually establishes these numbers? Maybe people just have preferences over experiences or their only ordinal hedonic intensities, but it’s the preferences that construct the cardinal units, and these cardinal units don’t come with the experiences themselves.
If this is the case, and we rely on preferences to determine cardinal values, then we may get lexical thresholds in practice, because people may have lexical preferences (at least while in sufficiently extreme pain, perhaps). Or, we have to cast doubt on our use of preferences at all, and then what can we do?
It seems clear intuitively that we can distinguish between different levels of well-being and different levels of suffering. People get different amounts of enjoyment from reading different books for example. Any view that doesn’t put them on a precise cardinal scale is susceptible to Dutch Book arguments. I don’t have a super strong view on consciousness—I think it’s real and probably irreducible. To the extent that pain arose to deter actions and pleasure arose to encourage other actions, organisms would evolve to experience pain for when they do things that decrease their fitness roughly proportional to how much they decrease their fitness. Quantifications always seem arbitrary, but it’s clear that there is some quantity involved-unfathomable bliss is far better than a cupcake- even if it’s hard to quantify.
I’m a moral realist, so I don’t care only about what things people actually care about. I care about what we would care about if we were perfectly rational. I think the argument I presented provides a challenge for consistent lexical views. I’m a hedonic utilitarian, not a preference utilitarian.
This would only tell us that our preferences over pleasure and suffering (and everything else!) must be measurable on a cardinal scale (up to affine transformations), but it doesn’t tell us that there is one objective scale that should work for everyone. The preference-based scales are definitely different across people, and there’s no way to tell which preferences are right (although you might be able to rule out some).
I suspect there’s actually no definitely correct cardinal scale when it comes to hedonic intensity, so there’s no very precise way we ought to care about tradeoffs between intensities (or between pleasure and suffering).
There might be arguments that can give us bounds, e.g. if a pattern of activation responsible for pleasure happens twice as many times per second in a brain experiencing A than in a brain experiencing B (by activating more neurons in the same pattern, or activating the same neurons more often, or both), then we might think there’s twice as much pleasure in A than B per second. Similarly for suffering. However,
This doesn’t tell us how to compare pleasure and suffering.
These arguments lose their applicability across brains when they’re sufficiently different; they might use totally different patterns of activations, and just counting neurons firing per second is wrong.
It’s not clear this is the right approach to consciousness/​hedonic intensity in the first place (although it seems fairly intuitive to me, and I assign it considerable weight).