I’m very sympathetic with what you call hedonism via objective value. I agree that hedonism does not fit very well with our normative intuitions. And I also agree that the notions of objective value or irreducible normativity seem dubious and meaningless, but I think hedonism is our best shot at making sense of them and resisting normative anti-realism/nihilism: if there is objective value at all, then pleasure and displeasure, understood as phenomenal states, are by far the best candidates to have it, and nothing else comes close. (And from there we can use the anti-nihilist wager to let hedonism guide our ethical behavior.) I’m not sure you really address the idea of hedonism as a “last-chance” normative theory, which is precisely what I find most compelling about it.
I agree that this version of hedonism is conditioned on realism about phenomenal properties, and even non-reductionism (phenomenal properties are not reducible to physical or functional properties), because if pleasure and displeasure were just some sort of physical or functional properties, it would be hard to maintain that they possess the weird characteristics that objective value is supposed to have.
The problems of how objective value can influence us and how we can get reliable access to it are extremely puzzling, but similar problems are already faced by dualism and other kinds of non-reductionism about phenomenal properties (phenomenal states are causally inert, etc.). So it would a small extra step to embrace hedonism, at least for people who find non-reductionism appealing.
Thanks for the interesting post !
I’m very sympathetic with what you call hedonism via objective value. I agree that hedonism does not fit very well with our normative intuitions. And I also agree that the notions of objective value or irreducible normativity seem dubious and meaningless, but I think hedonism is our best shot at making sense of them and resisting normative anti-realism/nihilism: if there is objective value at all, then pleasure and displeasure, understood as phenomenal states, are by far the best candidates to have it, and nothing else comes close. (And from there we can use the anti-nihilist wager to let hedonism guide our ethical behavior.) I’m not sure you really address the idea of hedonism as a “last-chance” normative theory, which is precisely what I find most compelling about it.
I agree that this version of hedonism is conditioned on realism about phenomenal properties, and even non-reductionism (phenomenal properties are not reducible to physical or functional properties), because if pleasure and displeasure were just some sort of physical or functional properties, it would be hard to maintain that they possess the weird characteristics that objective value is supposed to have.
The problems of how objective value can influence us and how we can get reliable access to it are extremely puzzling, but similar problems are already faced by dualism and other kinds of non-reductionism about phenomenal properties (phenomenal states are causally inert, etc.). So it would a small extra step to embrace hedonism, at least for people who find non-reductionism appealing.