This is a really interesting post. A few points of pushback:
You object that facts about objective value would be causally inert (wouldn’t have a causal influence on people’s motivations or actions, or on anything else for that matter). Two things:
This isn’t true if you’re a naturalist moral realist, who holds that facts about objective value are reducible to natural facts that are causally efficacious.
Lots of other arguably unproblematic classes of facts are causally inert—including facts about mathematics, conscious experience (under some views of consciousness), and practical normativity. For example, we may think it’s objectively true that I ought not to stick my hand in a fire if doing so would hurt me and not help me at all. But this objective normative fact has no causal effect on my motivations or actions.
I don’t follow your discussion of why qualia anti-realism would undermine the idea that pleasure has intrinsic value. It seems possible to be a hedonist and also a naturalist or reductionist about conscious experience. The quote from Dr Drescher is pointing more at an evolutionary debunking argument against the belief that pleasure is intrinsically desirable than an argument that hedonism is incompatible with qualia anti-realism.
You claim your prioritization of goals other than pleasure is a counterexample to hedonism. But this is begging the question by assuming your priorities are reasonable or correct. Hedonists would simply argue in response that you’re mistaken about what to value and pursue. Similar remarks apply to your two thought experiments, which channel anti-hedonist intuitions. Hedonists would respond by arguing that these intuitions are mistaken (John’s comment gives some strong counter-intuitions). In fact, I think an evolutionary debunking argument much like the one Dr Drescher suggests would work very well at undermining these anti-hedonist intuitions.
Following the naturalism vs. non-naturalism distinction in metaethics, I see two ways of justifying hedonist axiology.
I meant the two justifications (“Hedonism via Objective Value” and “Hedonism as the True Life Goal”) to be separate. The arguments I make in “Objections to Objective Value” only apply against the first justification, the moral non-naturalist one. So it seems like we might agree!
The quote from Dr Drescher is pointing more at an evolutionary debunking argument against the belief that pleasure is intrinsically desirable than an argument that hedonism is incompatible with qualia anti-realism.
Yes, that’s why I mention “desirability realism” in that context. (Another word for “Objective Value” is “normative qualia,” as is the title of Hewitt Rawlette’s dissertation on the topic. That notion makes little sense without consciousness realism. You’re right to note that the other type of justification, the one I called True Life Goal justification, isn’t affected by Drescher’s considerations (that’s why the Drescher quote is in the section “Objections to Objective Value”).
You claim your prioritization of goals other than pleasure is a counterexample to hedonism. But this is begging the question by assuming your priorities are reasonable or correct.
I agree. At the same time, I feel like it’s a strong thing to claim that others are mistaken about what they value. I haven’t encountered a compelling description of the sort of mistake I’d be making.
But Hewitt Rawlette’s theory is naturalist (“synthetic naturalism”).
It is extremely important that it be understood that I am not suggesting that our normative phenomenology represents some further realm of normativity, that it somehow acquaints us with normative properties that also exist detached from phenomenal experience, perhaps in actions or in non-mental states of affairs...
My proposal is that intrinsic goodness and badness just are felt qualities.
Emphasis in original. As she points out, arguments like Hare’s don’t really work against this kind of realism (“Hare’s dismissal of objective value...”) .
You’re right that Hewitt Rawlette considers her theory a version of naturalist moral realism. I missed that and should have addressed it, because I treated her concept of “Objective Value” as a non-naturalist concept in my text.
That said, I continue to think the concept “Objective Value” seems non-naturalist. It comes across like the typical bedrock concept: we can’t explain it with the help of different terminology, and the concept even has its subjectivist counterpart (things being valuable in the sense of “valued by us”). (We can compare that to the distinction between “reasons simpliciter” or “irreducibly normative reasons” on the one hand versus “instrumental/subjectivist reasons” on the other. In that case, too, we have a bedrock concept and its subjectivist counterpart.) So to go from “valued by us” to “objectively valuable” – that’s the step that seems to get us away from mere naturalism.
It’s also worth noting that the SEP entry on moral non-naturalism mentions the following:
There may be as much philosophical controversy about how to distinguish naturalism from non-naturalism as there is about which view is correct. [...] Perhaps the most vexing problem for any general characterization of non-naturalism is the bewildering array of ways in which the distinction between natural and non-natural properties has been drawn.
Taking a step back, I’d say naturalism and non-naturalism face different challenges. Non-naturalism, if the concept works at all, is without question the morally relevant thing – but it faces accommodation charges (“queerness” objections). By contrast, naturalism is made of tangible stuff and therefore uncontroversial in terms of its fitting into our conceptual repertoire. Still, whatever natural properties one identifies as “those are the ones that are morally relevant,” someone could ask “Why do you say so?”
In light of that, it feels like Hewitt Rawlette is trying to have the cake and eat it. (Of course, if this actually works, that’s exactly what one would want to do!)
If I were to interpret her position as pure naturalism, I’d think she’s saying that pleasure has a property that we recognize as “what we should value” in a way that somehow is still a naturalist concept. I don’t understand that bit. I would get it if she said, “introspection about pleasure helps us recognize that pleasure is what we value” or “what’s right for us to value given the way we’re built.” After all, that’s how I set up the naturalist justification for hedonism (“Hedonism as the True Life Goal”). And maybe her use of the phrase “Objective Value” is just shorthand for that? However, it doesn’t seem to me like it is. That’s why I still consider her position non-naturalist in some way.
I think an important distinction is that her position focuses on the intrinsic nature of pleasure and pain as feelings, not any relationship they have either to some even more fundamental concept of “objective value” or to our judgements, thoughts, and desires. We know pleasure feels good in the same way we know what the redness of red is like. Defining pleasure in terms of behaviors, beliefs, or desires can’t capture this in the same way that the wavelength of red light doesn’t convey the experience of seeing red. The power of this argument comes from taking this direct concept of phenomenal goodness (“feels good”) and inflating it into a full fledged account of moral goodness (hedonic utilitarianism).
Put another way: If we started out with no language for normativity, we wouldn’t be able to describe pleasure and pain without inventing one. (Try it!).
So pleasure has a “what we should value” property in the sense that “should” is already defined in terms of pleasure. But at a more basic level, value just is pleasure in the way water just is H2O.
Since moral knowledge in this view is just a special kind of descriptive knowledge the subjective position seems to flow from the objective one in a relatively straightforward way.
This argument is a bit circular, but I think that’s hard to avoid in general re: qualia. Of course discussion of qualia in your OP is relevant.
That makes sense – your account sounds way more persuasive than what I came up with when I tried to steelman the view.
The power of this argument comes from taking this direct concept of phenomenal goodness (“feels good”) and inflating it into a full fledged account of moral goodness (hedonic utilitarianism).
This is where the logic doesn’t work for me. As I describe in the section “pleasure’s goodness is under-defined,” I disagree that the sense in which “pleasure feels good” is the same sense as “pleasure is good” according to hedonist axiology. Those seem like different claims, and the latter cannot reveal itself to us from mere observations about the way things are.
You say that “her position focuses on the intrinsic nature of pleasure and pain as feelings, not any relationship they have either to some even more fundamental concept of ‘objective value’ or to our judgements, thoughts, and desires.” I see the way the argument is supposed to work and that this explains how her position is “naturalist” in spirit, but on close inspection, I don’t buy it. I feel like Hewitt Rawlette (and other hedonists) are smuggling in extra connotations of “pleasure feels good” that bridge the gap to the normative realm. However, those connotations are subjective assumptions, which beg the question. As I phrase it in the post, “My error theory is that moral realist proponents of hedonist axiology tend to reify intuitions they have about pleasure as intrinsic components to pleasure.”
This is a really interesting post. A few points of pushback:
You object that facts about objective value would be causally inert (wouldn’t have a causal influence on people’s motivations or actions, or on anything else for that matter). Two things:
This isn’t true if you’re a naturalist moral realist, who holds that facts about objective value are reducible to natural facts that are causally efficacious.
Lots of other arguably unproblematic classes of facts are causally inert—including facts about mathematics, conscious experience (under some views of consciousness), and practical normativity. For example, we may think it’s objectively true that I ought not to stick my hand in a fire if doing so would hurt me and not help me at all. But this objective normative fact has no causal effect on my motivations or actions.
I don’t follow your discussion of why qualia anti-realism would undermine the idea that pleasure has intrinsic value. It seems possible to be a hedonist and also a naturalist or reductionist about conscious experience. The quote from Dr Drescher is pointing more at an evolutionary debunking argument against the belief that pleasure is intrinsically desirable than an argument that hedonism is incompatible with qualia anti-realism.
You claim your prioritization of goals other than pleasure is a counterexample to hedonism. But this is begging the question by assuming your priorities are reasonable or correct. Hedonists would simply argue in response that you’re mistaken about what to value and pursue. Similar remarks apply to your two thought experiments, which channel anti-hedonist intuitions. Hedonists would respond by arguing that these intuitions are mistaken (John’s comment gives some strong counter-intuitions). In fact, I think an evolutionary debunking argument much like the one Dr Drescher suggests would work very well at undermining these anti-hedonist intuitions.
Quoting from my post:
I meant the two justifications (“Hedonism via Objective Value” and “Hedonism as the True Life Goal”) to be separate. The arguments I make in “Objections to Objective Value” only apply against the first justification, the moral non-naturalist one. So it seems like we might agree!
Yes, that’s why I mention “desirability realism” in that context. (Another word for “Objective Value” is “normative qualia,” as is the title of Hewitt Rawlette’s dissertation on the topic. That notion makes little sense without consciousness realism. You’re right to note that the other type of justification, the one I called True Life Goal justification, isn’t affected by Drescher’s considerations (that’s why the Drescher quote is in the section “Objections to Objective Value”).
I agree. At the same time, I feel like it’s a strong thing to claim that others are mistaken about what they value. I haven’t encountered a compelling description of the sort of mistake I’d be making.
But Hewitt Rawlette’s theory is naturalist (“synthetic naturalism”).
Emphasis in original. As she points out, arguments like Hare’s don’t really work against this kind of realism (“Hare’s dismissal of objective value...”) .
You’re right that Hewitt Rawlette considers her theory a version of naturalist moral realism. I missed that and should have addressed it, because I treated her concept of “Objective Value” as a non-naturalist concept in my text.
That said, I continue to think the concept “Objective Value” seems non-naturalist. It comes across like the typical bedrock concept: we can’t explain it with the help of different terminology, and the concept even has its subjectivist counterpart (things being valuable in the sense of “valued by us”). (We can compare that to the distinction between “reasons simpliciter” or “irreducibly normative reasons” on the one hand versus “instrumental/subjectivist reasons” on the other. In that case, too, we have a bedrock concept and its subjectivist counterpart.) So to go from “valued by us” to “objectively valuable” – that’s the step that seems to get us away from mere naturalism.
It’s also worth noting that the SEP entry on moral non-naturalism mentions the following:
Taking a step back, I’d say naturalism and non-naturalism face different challenges. Non-naturalism, if the concept works at all, is without question the morally relevant thing – but it faces accommodation charges (“queerness” objections). By contrast, naturalism is made of tangible stuff and therefore uncontroversial in terms of its fitting into our conceptual repertoire. Still, whatever natural properties one identifies as “those are the ones that are morally relevant,” someone could ask “Why do you say so?”
In light of that, it feels like Hewitt Rawlette is trying to have the cake and eat it. (Of course, if this actually works, that’s exactly what one would want to do!)
If I were to interpret her position as pure naturalism, I’d think she’s saying that pleasure has a property that we recognize as “what we should value” in a way that somehow is still a naturalist concept. I don’t understand that bit. I would get it if she said, “introspection about pleasure helps us recognize that pleasure is what we value” or “what’s right for us to value given the way we’re built.” After all, that’s how I set up the naturalist justification for hedonism (“Hedonism as the True Life Goal”). And maybe her use of the phrase “Objective Value” is just shorthand for that? However, it doesn’t seem to me like it is. That’s why I still consider her position non-naturalist in some way.
I think an important distinction is that her position focuses on the intrinsic nature of pleasure and pain as feelings, not any relationship they have either to some even more fundamental concept of “objective value” or to our judgements, thoughts, and desires. We know pleasure feels good in the same way we know what the redness of red is like. Defining pleasure in terms of behaviors, beliefs, or desires can’t capture this in the same way that the wavelength of red light doesn’t convey the experience of seeing red. The power of this argument comes from taking this direct concept of phenomenal goodness (“feels good”) and inflating it into a full fledged account of moral goodness (hedonic utilitarianism).
Put another way: If we started out with no language for normativity, we wouldn’t be able to describe pleasure and pain without inventing one. (Try it!).
So pleasure has a “what we should value” property in the sense that “should” is already defined in terms of pleasure. But at a more basic level, value just is pleasure in the way water just is H2O.
Since moral knowledge in this view is just a special kind of descriptive knowledge the subjective position seems to flow from the objective one in a relatively straightforward way.
This argument is a bit circular, but I think that’s hard to avoid in general re: qualia. Of course discussion of qualia in your OP is relevant.
That makes sense – your account sounds way more persuasive than what I came up with when I tried to steelman the view.
This is where the logic doesn’t work for me. As I describe in the section “pleasure’s goodness is under-defined,” I disagree that the sense in which “pleasure feels good” is the same sense as “pleasure is good” according to hedonist axiology. Those seem like different claims, and the latter cannot reveal itself to us from mere observations about the way things are.
You say that “her position focuses on the intrinsic nature of pleasure and pain as feelings, not any relationship they have either to some even more fundamental concept of ‘objective value’ or to our judgements, thoughts, and desires.” I see the way the argument is supposed to work and that this explains how her position is “naturalist” in spirit, but on close inspection, I don’t buy it. I feel like Hewitt Rawlette (and other hedonists) are smuggling in extra connotations of “pleasure feels good” that bridge the gap to the normative realm. However, those connotations are subjective assumptions, which beg the question. As I phrase it in the post, “My error theory is that moral realist proponents of hedonist axiology tend to reify intuitions they have about pleasure as intrinsic components to pleasure.”