PEA Soup

Objective and Subjective Hedonism

You are offered a choice between two experience machines.

Machine A is just like the ones you already know about.  You'll be on the experience machine until you are 120 years old, getting lots of various sorts of pleasure.

Machine B offers exactly the same experiences as Machine A.  However, the experiences are crammed into a much shorter period of time:  just one day.  The first 12 hours of this day seem to last 12 hours.  The next 6 hours seem to last 12 hours.  The next 3 hours seem to last 12 hours.  And so on (as in Sorensen's "The Cheated God").  A fraction of a second before the 24 hours are up, the machine kills you painlessly.  At that time it seems to you as if you have lived 120 highly pleasant years.

Which machine should you choose?

Mill's Theory of Value

In the comments on Jussi's thread, a side discussion developed about Mill's theory of value.  Dale Dorsey indicated that he has concluded that Mill is not a hedonist.  I'm inclined to defend the claim that he is.  I'm not prepared to defend hedonism, and so I think that considerations of charity favor ascribing a different view to him, but I think the textual evidence is strong enough that we just have to say that Mill got this one wrong.  Of course, the first piece of evidence for me to cite is the following passage from Utilitarianism II2:

The Value of Practical Reason

Some thought-experiments just grab you and so you think about them for months. Here’s one that I’ve been pondering about for awhile now. It’s from Roger Crisp’s Mill on Utilitarianism (p. 60-62) but adapted from Griffin (Well-Being, p. 9):

The Committee          When you are 22 years old, you are approached by a committee composed of friends and family. One of the members tells you that the committee will, if you wish, take over the running of your life for you. The committee will decide which job you take, where you should live, which hobbies you should indulge in and so on.

Hedonism and Categorization

It's fairly common to talk about welfare in three categories: hedonism, desire satisfaction, and objectivism (where this includes views like perfectionism and the objective list view). But this always seemed a little strange to me--there's loads of logical space missing here. So I prefer the following categorization: hedonism, subjectivism, and objectivism. Define "subjectivism" as the view that that a necessary condition of the welfare value of x is agential ratification. I leave "agential ratification" purposefully vague; I mean desires, evaluative beliefs, etc., whether actual, idealized, or dispositional. Define "objectivism" as the view that denies subjectivism: there can be xs that enhance welfare independent of desires, preferences, or agential ratification whether actual or idealized. But this is puzzling as well: the distinction between subjectivism and objectivism appears to capture the whole of logical space! So where does hedonism fall?

Metaethics with Pictures

Anyone interested in metaethics should take a look at Antti Kauppinen's brilliant slideshows at the University of St Andrews. They can be accessed from the webpage of his course HERE.

States of affairs are all you need

Some philosophers opposed to consequentialism think that one of the basic mistakes that consequentialists make is to think that all value is located in states of affairs. (E.g., there are remarks to this effect in T. M. Scanlon's What We Owe to Each Other; in R. M. Adams's Finite and Infinite Goods; in Philippa Foot's "Utilitarianism and the Virtues"; in Bernard Williams's Utilitarianism: For and Against; and so on.)

Now, I am no friend of consequentialism (au contraire, in fact ...), but this attack on the idea that the locus of value is states of affairs seems to me a hopeless manoeuvre for the opponents of consequentialism to make. As I shall argue below the fold, locating all the values that one proposes to talk about in states of affairs is a completely harmless "housekeeping" move which makes no substantive difference to one's overall ethical theory.

As I intend to argue on another occasion, the crucial issue that really divides consequentialists and their opponents is whether the only appropriate response to values is to promote them, or whether other responses are sometimes more important -- such as honouring or respecting values, not harming them, acting in a way that expresses one's cherishing of them, and so on.

A life worth living

Update (13 August, 2007). I've now written a very short paper on this issue: How to Live a Life Worth Living. As you'll see, it was significantly influenced by useful comments I received here.

The recent discussion of McTaggart initiated by Kris has been very interesting. Among other things, it has got me thinking about the notion of "a life worth living". Although ubiquitous in population ethics, this notion resists easy analysis. One wants to say that a life is worth living just in case it would be better to live it rather than live no life at all. But on reflection, that seems mysterious. How does one live no life at all? It seems like one of the relata of the "better than" relation has gone missing. We're trying to compare something, a life, with nothing.

Here I shall propose an analysis that avoids such mysterious comparisons. On my proposal, whether a life is worth living depends solely on whether it is better than certain other lives.

The Buck-Passing Account of Value and a False Dichotomy

Consider the following passage from Scanlon:

 

[B]eing good, or valuable, is not a property that itself provides a reason to respond to a thing in certain ways. Rather, to be good or valuable is to have other properties that constitute such reasons. (Scanlon 1998, 97)

 

Thus Scanlon is a proponent of the buck-passing account of value (BPV) who accepts both the following negative thesis and the following positive thesis:

The Irrelevance of Harm

In Mike Almeida's recent post, this topic came up:  what is it for a person to harm someone?  I'm interested in a more general question: what is it for an event or state of affairs to harm someone?  Here's the view I like best:

(H) X harms S iff X makes S worse off than S would have been had X not occurred or obtained.

Below the fold I defend the following disjunction:  either (H) is the correct account of harm, or harm is irrelevant (or maybe both).

Parfit's "Argument from Below" vs. Johnston's "Argument from Above"

First, a sort of apology: this post is a bit lengthy, and it may be a bit more “metaphysicsy” than the usual on PEA Soup, but it’s on a topic that has an important bearing on the ongoing debates over the role metaphysics, and in particular personal identity theory, has on our practical concerns, in particular our future-directed self-concern.  It has to do with an exchange between Derek Parfit and Mark Johnston, stemming from Johnston’s argument (in, among other places, “Human Concerns Without Superlative Selves,” from the Dancy collection Reading Parfit) that personal identity can still have non-derivative importance, even on Parfit’s reductionist view, according to which the facts about personal identity just consist in more particular facts about brains, bodies, and mental/physical continuity, and even where those more particular facts themselves don’t have non-derivative importance.  In “The Unimportance of Personal Identity,” Parfit replies to Johnston’s objection.  Here I simply want to try and track the dialectic between Johnston and Parfit, and I’ll explain why I think that Parfit’s response doesn’t adequately meet Johnston’s concern.  (Because I want to keep the post as short as possible, though, what I say here will be quite compressed and will assume knowledge of Parfitian reductionism, so readers not familiar with the basics of the debate may not want to read any further.)