I don’t have time to reply to all of these, but I think it’s worth saying re point 1, that inasmuch as hedonism ‘struggles’ with this, it’s because it’s basically the only axiology to commit to addressing it at all. I don’t consider that a weakness, since there clearly is some level of comparability between my stubbing my toe and my watching a firework.
Preference utilitarianism sort of ducks around this by equivocating between whether determining a preference requires understanding the happiness its satisfaction brings (in which case it has the same problem) or whether preferences rely on some even more mysterious forces with even weirder implications. I wrote much more on this equivocation here.
Also re size specifically, he literally says size ‘is closely analogous to the sense in which (if welfare is aggregable at all) one population can have more welfare than another due to its size. It’s common to joke about ‘hedons’, but I see no reason one should both be materialist and not expect to find some minimum physical unit of happiness in conscious entities. Then the more hedons an entity has, the sizier its happiness would be. It’s also possible that that we find multiple indivisible hedon-like objects, in which case the philosophy gets harder again gets harder (and at the very least, it’s going to be tough to have an objective weighting between hedons and antihedons, since there’s no a priori reason to assume it should be 1-to-1). But I don’t think hedonists should have to assume the latter, or prove that it’s not true.
I don’t have time to reply to all of these, but I think it’s worth saying re point 1, that inasmuch as hedonism ‘struggles’ with this, it’s because it’s basically the only axiology to commit to addressing it at all. I don’t consider that a weakness, since there clearly is some level of comparability between my stubbing my toe and my watching a firework.
Preference utilitarianism sort of ducks around this by equivocating between whether determining a preference requires understanding the happiness its satisfaction brings (in which case it has the same problem) or whether preferences rely on some even more mysterious forces with even weirder implications. I wrote much more on this equivocation here.
Also re size specifically, he literally says size ‘is closely analogous to the sense in which (if welfare is aggregable at all) one population can have more welfare than another due to its size. It’s common to joke about ‘hedons’, but I see no reason one should both be materialist and not expect to find some minimum physical unit of happiness in conscious entities. Then the more hedons an entity has, the sizier its happiness would be. It’s also possible that that we find multiple indivisible hedon-like objects, in which case the philosophy gets harder again gets harder (and at the very least, it’s going to be tough to have an objective weighting between hedons and antihedons, since there’s no a priori reason to assume it should be 1-to-1). But I don’t think hedonists should have to assume the latter, or prove that it’s not true.