It’s an interesting position. I’m not sure if it’s exactly the same, but it seems similar to desert-adjusted attitudinal hedonism (see here) where certain pleasures/pains don’t count if they are(/aren’t) accompanied by the right attitudes. I feel the intuitive pull behind it but, on reflection, I don’t buy it.
One issue is going to be providing a non-question-begging around of why makes certain emotions, but not others, well-grounded. Does the groundedness related to the emotion? If so, why some rather than others? Does it relate to the beliefs? If so, why is my pleasure only good for me if the beliefs that contribute to it are correct? That doesn’t seem relevant at all. This isn’t my area of expertise, but I’d be surprised if there was any really good way of doing this.
It strikes me a more plausible way of accounting for the intuitions is that, as a pragmatic matter, we don’t want to reward people for being ‘bad’ (in some, to be specified, sense) lest it gives them incentives to keep doing it. It’s an appeal to deterrence, rather than retribution, c.f locking up criminals to demotivate their activities just to punish them for being bad people. On this understanding, you need to actually inform people of your decision-making, otherwise it will just seem, to them, an arbitrary punishment.
In this case, I don’t see how deterrence would work here. Would you, um, tell people that you would be giving them lots of money, but now you won’t because you’ve learnt this makes their neighbours jealous?
There are some other issues that spring to mind, but hopefully that suffices!
Hello SamiM,
It’s an interesting position. I’m not sure if it’s exactly the same, but it seems similar to desert-adjusted attitudinal hedonism (see here) where certain pleasures/pains don’t count if they are(/aren’t) accompanied by the right attitudes. I feel the intuitive pull behind it but, on reflection, I don’t buy it.
One issue is going to be providing a non-question-begging around of why makes certain emotions, but not others, well-grounded. Does the groundedness related to the emotion? If so, why some rather than others? Does it relate to the beliefs? If so, why is my pleasure only good for me if the beliefs that contribute to it are correct? That doesn’t seem relevant at all. This isn’t my area of expertise, but I’d be surprised if there was any really good way of doing this.
It strikes me a more plausible way of accounting for the intuitions is that, as a pragmatic matter, we don’t want to reward people for being ‘bad’ (in some, to be specified, sense) lest it gives them incentives to keep doing it. It’s an appeal to deterrence, rather than retribution, c.f locking up criminals to demotivate their activities just to punish them for being bad people. On this understanding, you need to actually inform people of your decision-making, otherwise it will just seem, to them, an arbitrary punishment.
In this case, I don’t see how deterrence would work here. Would you, um, tell people that you would be giving them lots of money, but now you won’t because you’ve learnt this makes their neighbours jealous?
There are some other issues that spring to mind, but hopefully that suffices!