While we're having a mini-Mill-fest, I thought I'd try out the following wee argument, which I've been thinking about lately.
John Stuart Mill [thanks, Dale M.] famously held that 'higher pleasure' (roughly, pleasure of the intellect) was superior to 'lower pleasure' (pleasure of the senses). Moreover, on what is perhaps the standard interpretation of Mill, he held that the value of higher pleasure was so much greater as to have lexical priority over lower pleasure. Of any two lives differing only in the quantities of higher and lower pleasure they contain, the life with greater higher pleasure is always better, regardless of the particular quantities involved. No gain in lower pleasure, however great, could ever by itself fully compensate for a loss in higher pleasure, however slight.
It is, I gather, somewhat controversial whether this interpretation of Mill is correct, whether he really did hold the extreme, lexical priority view. Here, however, I am not so much interested in interpretative questions as in the substantive philosophical question whether this view commonly attributed to Mill, whether correctly or not, is itself plausible. If Mill himself did not hold the view, others do. (For example, Roger Crisp, who attributes the view to Mill, also endorses it himself in his book Mill on Utilitarianism.) So it's worthy of investigation, independently of its historical connection with Mill.
I shall argue that the view is not plausible. As any hedonist surely must agree, pleasure is not all that matters in evaluating a life. Pain matters too. Two lives that are equal in pleasure might nonetheless be unequal in overall value, because the pleasure in one might be accompanied by greater pain than the pleasure in the other. However, as I shall argue, any plausible hedonistic view of the value of life, which incorporates both pleasure and pain, will be inconsistent with the lexical priority view.
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