The simple case against hedonism is just that it is bizarrely restrictive: many of us have non-hedonistic ultimate desires about our own lives that seem perfectly reasonable, so the burden is on the hedonist to establish that they know better than we do what is good for us, andāin particularāthat our subjective feelings are the only things that could reasonably be taken to matter for our own sakes. Thatās an extremely (and I would say implausibly) restrictive claim.
When you say āwhat is good for usā, could it be translated as āwhat we are attached toā? If you care about knowledge or relationships, you will experience (dis)satisfaction depending on what relevant events happen in your life, and you will be motivated to achieve goals related to these things, but this is a far cry from what intrinsic value means in my view.
In essence, when I say suffering is intrinsically bad, I donāt mean that it is bad for anyone; I mean that it is bad period. The badness is an inherent feature of the experience.
So from my perspective, the non-hedonist is making an extraordinary and unfalsifiable claim when positing the existence of non-experiential goods.
See the Theories of Well-being chapter at utilitarianism.net for a detailed philosophical overview of this topic.
The simple case against hedonism is just that it is bizarrely restrictive: many of us have non-hedonistic ultimate desires about our own lives that seem perfectly reasonable, so the burden is on the hedonist to establish that they know better than we do what is good for us, andāin particularāthat our subjective feelings are the only things that could reasonably be taken to matter for our own sakes. Thatās an extremely (and I would say implausibly) restrictive claim.
When you say āwhat is good for usā, could it be translated as āwhat we are attached toā? If you care about knowledge or relationships, you will experience (dis)satisfaction depending on what relevant events happen in your life, and you will be motivated to achieve goals related to these things, but this is a far cry from what intrinsic value means in my view.
In essence, when I say suffering is intrinsically bad, I donāt mean that it is bad for anyone; I mean that it is bad period. The badness is an inherent feature of the experience.
So from my perspective, the non-hedonist is making an extraordinary and unfalsifiable claim when positing the existence of non-experiential goods.