As well as intuitive critiques of hedonism like the experience machine, there are also strong intuitive arguments for hedonism. Imagine a world with no sentience, no conscious experience. No-one feels anything. It is full of things like tables and rocks. I fail to see why this world would matter.
Another point is that all theories of morality have a hedonistic component. Any plausible moral theory should say that the inflicting pain on someone is bad in and of itself, independent of its effects on anything else, such as their resources, capabilities, abilities to achieve their projects etc. It also seems like any plausible moral theory should say that it is better other things equal for people to have pleasure. If we have a choice between a festival in which people have loads of fun and one in which people have moderate amounts of fun, we should choose the former.
Experience machine-type arguments don’t work so well when we try them with suffering. According to hedonism, only bad conscious experiences are bad. Imagine experience machines that produced extreme unbearable torture for prolonged periods of time. It seems like a world in which as many sentient creatures as possible were in these negative experience machines would be as bad as it is possible to be. Other theories of value just don’t seem to do very well here. Imagine having your strongest preference violated (what if the torture victims are moral patients incapable of agency or preference). Imagine if you had no capabilities or no resources (still doesn’t seem as bad as the negative torture machine). Hedonism at least seems like the correct account of negative wellbeing, or a central component of it. By symmetry, we should also expect it to be a central component of positive wellbeing.
I might be misunderstanding but I don’t think the intuition you mentioned is really an argument for hedonism, since one can agree that there must be beings with conscious experiences for anything to matter without concluding that conscious experience itself is the only thing that matters.
I agree that this is the next stage of the dialectic. But then the situations is: sentient experience is a necessary condition on there being value in the world. No other putative intrinsically valuable thing (preference satisfaction, authenticity, friendship etc) is a necessary condition on there being value in the world—eg even proponents of the view that authenticity is good don’t think it is necessary for there being value in the world, as illustrated by the example of a torture experience machine. If you are assessing whether something is intrinsically good, I think a reasonable test is—imagine if that thing existed alone—would it matter? If the thing were good by virtue of its intrinsic or necessary properties, then it would be valuable all on its own. But that only seems to be true of sentient experience. eg if authenticity were really intrinsically valuable, then it would be valuable by virtue of its intrinsic properties. So, it should be the case that the world is better by virtue of the fact that agents have accurate beliefs about the world they interact with. But one can imagine worlds where this is true but that have zero value, namely worlds in which no agents are sentient. So, authenticity is not intrinsically valuable.
One possible view is to say that things like authenticity and friendship have conditional intrinsic value. I however don’t have this concept.
The fact that other putative intrinsically valuable things only become valuable when there is sentient experience in the world is also a debunking argument in favour of hedonism. The argument is that people confuse things that are merely connected in some way to sentient experience with what is intrinsically valuable.
(I’m also replying to the original comment in this thread.)
I agree that there are intuition pumps in favor of hedonism and it’s good that you mentioned some of them! I’m not saying that hedonism doesn’t have its appeal, just that it doesn’t have universal appeal.
No other putative intrinsically valuable thing (preference satisfaction, authenticity, friendship etc) is a necessary condition on there being value in the world
Why is it clear that we want to limit the option space for moral principles to intrinsically valuable things? Especially if we don’t necessarily expect moral realism to be true, I can see other options. You may say that every ethical system needs to be centered around some kind of thing (e.g., preferences, experiences, objective list). I agree with that, but if we go with some form of subjectivist account (which is similar to counting “preferences”), it wouldn’t necessarily say that preference satisfaction is intrinsically valuable. Instead, what’s good for someone is subjective, it’s what they want to live for.
You mention the concept of conditional value, which I find quite intuitive. For what it’s worth, I certainly wouldn’t think that “authenticity/contact with reality” has intrinsic value. If you had asked me a year ago, I’d have taken the experience machine without hesitation. At the time, my identity was only to a very small degree about specific relationships. (I like my friends but it doesn’t mean the same as loving someone.)
We can even view pleasure as having conditional value – it’s valuable to the degree that people care about it. They usually do, but maybe not always in quite the same way. Someone may care more about certain pleasures than others, orthogonal to “how good they feel.” For instance, it’s hard to believe that people who often go on traveling adventures really get the most hedons that way. But they seem to find meaning in exploration and adventure, so they value the pleasure from successfully camping on a frozen mountain lake without freezing to death or being eaten by a bear more than they value other types of pleasure.
You might say that the situation is confounded, that people who got bitten by the travel/adventure bug would go mad if they stayed cozily at home. So, given their situation, their lifestyle will make them happiest. Sure, but then we should discuss what we’re doing when we point out these kinds of “defeaters.” If anti-realism is indeed true, you can play this game endlessly, pointing out that the reason someone values something different from you is just an idiosyncratic part about the others’ psychology.
My view is that whether something is a moral bias or a foundational moral intuition is subjective.
In my next post, I sketch a descriptive account about how people seem to adopt self-enforcing identities, and those determine what we value. It might be interesting to continue the discussion in that context, once the post is out.
Experience machine-type arguments don’t work so well when we try them with suffering.
[...]
By symmetry, we should also expect it to be a central component of positive wellbeing.
Or positive wellbeing and suffering could be dissimilar.
The fact that other putative intrinsically valuable things only become valuable when there is sentient experience in the world is also a debunking argument in favour of hedonism. The argument is that people confuse things that are merely connected in some way to sentient experience with what is intrinsically valuable.
If that were true, would you predict non-hedonists to be systematically worse at coming up with “good thought experiments?” If so, that’s something we could potentially measure! Have hedonists and non-hedonists come up with intuition pumps for (or against) hedonism. Have the judges try to guess which ones were written by hedonists vs. non-hedonists.
As well as intuitive critiques of hedonism like the experience machine, there are also strong intuitive arguments for hedonism. Imagine a world with no sentience, no conscious experience. No-one feels anything. It is full of things like tables and rocks. I fail to see why this world would matter.
Another point is that all theories of morality have a hedonistic component. Any plausible moral theory should say that the inflicting pain on someone is bad in and of itself, independent of its effects on anything else, such as their resources, capabilities, abilities to achieve their projects etc. It also seems like any plausible moral theory should say that it is better other things equal for people to have pleasure. If we have a choice between a festival in which people have loads of fun and one in which people have moderate amounts of fun, we should choose the former.
Experience machine-type arguments don’t work so well when we try them with suffering. According to hedonism, only bad conscious experiences are bad. Imagine experience machines that produced extreme unbearable torture for prolonged periods of time. It seems like a world in which as many sentient creatures as possible were in these negative experience machines would be as bad as it is possible to be. Other theories of value just don’t seem to do very well here. Imagine having your strongest preference violated (what if the torture victims are moral patients incapable of agency or preference). Imagine if you had no capabilities or no resources (still doesn’t seem as bad as the negative torture machine). Hedonism at least seems like the correct account of negative wellbeing, or a central component of it. By symmetry, we should also expect it to be a central component of positive wellbeing.
I might be misunderstanding but I don’t think the intuition you mentioned is really an argument for hedonism, since one can agree that there must be beings with conscious experiences for anything to matter without concluding that conscious experience itself is the only thing that matters.
I agree that this is the next stage of the dialectic. But then the situations is: sentient experience is a necessary condition on there being value in the world. No other putative intrinsically valuable thing (preference satisfaction, authenticity, friendship etc) is a necessary condition on there being value in the world—eg even proponents of the view that authenticity is good don’t think it is necessary for there being value in the world, as illustrated by the example of a torture experience machine. If you are assessing whether something is intrinsically good, I think a reasonable test is—imagine if that thing existed alone—would it matter? If the thing were good by virtue of its intrinsic or necessary properties, then it would be valuable all on its own. But that only seems to be true of sentient experience. eg if authenticity were really intrinsically valuable, then it would be valuable by virtue of its intrinsic properties. So, it should be the case that the world is better by virtue of the fact that agents have accurate beliefs about the world they interact with. But one can imagine worlds where this is true but that have zero value, namely worlds in which no agents are sentient. So, authenticity is not intrinsically valuable.
One possible view is to say that things like authenticity and friendship have conditional intrinsic value. I however don’t have this concept.
The fact that other putative intrinsically valuable things only become valuable when there is sentient experience in the world is also a debunking argument in favour of hedonism. The argument is that people confuse things that are merely connected in some way to sentient experience with what is intrinsically valuable.
(I’m also replying to the original comment in this thread.)
I agree that there are intuition pumps in favor of hedonism and it’s good that you mentioned some of them! I’m not saying that hedonism doesn’t have its appeal, just that it doesn’t have universal appeal.
Why is it clear that we want to limit the option space for moral principles to intrinsically valuable things? Especially if we don’t necessarily expect moral realism to be true, I can see other options. You may say that every ethical system needs to be centered around some kind of thing (e.g., preferences, experiences, objective list). I agree with that, but if we go with some form of subjectivist account (which is similar to counting “preferences”), it wouldn’t necessarily say that preference satisfaction is intrinsically valuable. Instead, what’s good for someone is subjective, it’s what they want to live for.
You mention the concept of conditional value, which I find quite intuitive. For what it’s worth, I certainly wouldn’t think that “authenticity/contact with reality” has intrinsic value. If you had asked me a year ago, I’d have taken the experience machine without hesitation. At the time, my identity was only to a very small degree about specific relationships. (I like my friends but it doesn’t mean the same as loving someone.)
We can even view pleasure as having conditional value – it’s valuable to the degree that people care about it. They usually do, but maybe not always in quite the same way. Someone may care more about certain pleasures than others, orthogonal to “how good they feel.” For instance, it’s hard to believe that people who often go on traveling adventures really get the most hedons that way. But they seem to find meaning in exploration and adventure, so they value the pleasure from successfully camping on a frozen mountain lake without freezing to death or being eaten by a bear more than they value other types of pleasure.
You might say that the situation is confounded, that people who got bitten by the travel/adventure bug would go mad if they stayed cozily at home. So, given their situation, their lifestyle will make them happiest. Sure, but then we should discuss what we’re doing when we point out these kinds of “defeaters.” If anti-realism is indeed true, you can play this game endlessly, pointing out that the reason someone values something different from you is just an idiosyncratic part about the others’ psychology.
My view is that whether something is a moral bias or a foundational moral intuition is subjective. In my next post, I sketch a descriptive account about how people seem to adopt self-enforcing identities, and those determine what we value. It might be interesting to continue the discussion in that context, once the post is out.
Or positive wellbeing and suffering could be dissimilar.
If that were true, would you predict non-hedonists to be systematically worse at coming up with “good thought experiments?” If so, that’s something we could potentially measure! Have hedonists and non-hedonists come up with intuition pumps for (or against) hedonism. Have the judges try to guess which ones were written by hedonists vs. non-hedonists.