I don’t have a fully hedonistic view, but I’m sympathetic toward one. I prefer using different words than “hedonism”, since hedonism has a bad connotation. I like to say that I care primarily about conscious experiences, where conscious experience refers to the common sense referent of “what it’s like to be me” or similar (for intuition pumps, read how Chalmers defines consciousness).
To me it comes down to two related notions:
1. I don’t see how non-conscious facts could possibly ever imply a tragedy. It’s a tragedy if someone gets hurt, but in what sense is something ever a tragedy if no one’s actually experiencing the badness?
2. Likewise, how could something ever be good if no one experiences it. What fact could I learn that would make me leap with joy, assuming the fact had no bearing on whether someone had a positive life or experience?
In practice, arguments against pure hedonism come down to pointing out a few things that are left out in the naive hedonistic view. These include: a lack of diversity of experiences, a lack of concern for truth, a lack of a coherent “adventure” that exists beyond the feeling of adventure. Fair enough, but I feel like these all could be bought at less than 1% of the price of regular hedonism. In other words, I think that I can still reasonably maintain that 99% of value comes from conscious experience and still keep these things.
I am also very sympathetic to an account of value based solely on conscious experiences, and for basically the same reasons, but I don’t think this necessarily has to be put in terms of happiness/pleasure and suffering. We can talk about conscious drives, cravings or attitudes to and away from certain states/outcomes. These might be called “active preferences”.
I don’t have a fully hedonistic view, but I’m sympathetic toward one. I prefer using different words than “hedonism”, since hedonism has a bad connotation. I like to say that I care primarily about conscious experiences, where conscious experience refers to the common sense referent of “what it’s like to be me” or similar (for intuition pumps, read how Chalmers defines consciousness).
To me it comes down to two related notions:
1. I don’t see how non-conscious facts could possibly ever imply a tragedy. It’s a tragedy if someone gets hurt, but in what sense is something ever a tragedy if no one’s actually experiencing the badness?
2. Likewise, how could something ever be good if no one experiences it. What fact could I learn that would make me leap with joy, assuming the fact had no bearing on whether someone had a positive life or experience?
In practice, arguments against pure hedonism come down to pointing out a few things that are left out in the naive hedonistic view. These include: a lack of diversity of experiences, a lack of concern for truth, a lack of a coherent “adventure” that exists beyond the feeling of adventure. Fair enough, but I feel like these all could be bought at less than 1% of the price of regular hedonism. In other words, I think that I can still reasonably maintain that 99% of value comes from conscious experience and still keep these things.
I am also very sympathetic to an account of value based solely on conscious experiences, and for basically the same reasons, but I don’t think this necessarily has to be put in terms of happiness/pleasure and suffering. We can talk about conscious drives, cravings or attitudes to and away from certain states/outcomes. These might be called “active preferences”.