Interesting. A point I could get out of this is: “don’t take your own ideology too seriously, especially when the whole point of your ideology is to make yourself happy.”
An extreme hedonism (a really faithful one) is likely to produce outcomes like:
“I love you.”
“You mean, I give you pleasure?”
“Well, yeah! Duh!”
Which is a funny thing to say, kind of childish or childlike. (Or one could make the exchange be creepy: “Yeah, you mean nothing more to me than the pleasure you give me.”)
Do people really exist to each other?
I see a person X:
1. X has a body. --Okay, on that level they’re real.
2. I can form a mental model of X’s mind. --Good, I consider them a person.
3. X exists for me only relevant to the pleasure or pain they give to me. --No, on that level, all that exists to me is my pleasure or pain.
If I’m rigorously hedonistic, then at that deepest level (level 3 above), I am alone with my feelings and points of view. But Bentham maybe doesn’t want me to be rigorously hedonistic anyway.
Interesting. A point I could get out of this is: “don’t take your own ideology too seriously, especially when the whole point of your ideology is to make yourself happy.”
An extreme hedonism (a really faithful one) is likely to produce outcomes like:
“I love you.”
“You mean, I give you pleasure?”
“Well, yeah! Duh!”
Which is a funny thing to say, kind of childish or childlike. (Or one could make the exchange be creepy: “Yeah, you mean nothing more to me than the pleasure you give me.”)
Do people really exist to each other?
I see a person X:
1. X has a body. --Okay, on that level they’re real.
2. I can form a mental model of X’s mind. --Good, I consider them a person.
3. X exists for me only relevant to the pleasure or pain they give to me. --No, on that level, all that exists to me is my pleasure or pain.
If I’m rigorously hedonistic, then at that deepest level (level 3 above), I am alone with my feelings and points of view. But Bentham maybe doesn’t want me to be rigorously hedonistic anyway.