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?

Perfectionism, Hedonism, and Hume

Dale Miller's recent post on Mill's theory of value (and subsequent discussion) was quite enlightening. And it set me thinkin' about qualitative hedonism and perfectionism, and in particular the relationship between them. During our previous discussion, we appeared to be treating "Mill is a hedonist" and "Mill is a perfectionist" as mutually exclusive (or, at least, I was). I wonder if this isn't a mistake. And I wonder if it isn't possible to read one of Mill's sentimentalist forbears, viz., David Hume, as a person who holds both views. (Sorry, this post might be a little long. And sorry also if it reads like a collection of notes scribbled on a napkin; basically, it is.)

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?

Happiness: Good or Bad?

Psychologist Wray Herbert has written an article for Newsweek about happiness. The title is “Can You Be Too Happy?” How could you be too happy? Too happy for what? Sounds crazy. Let’s take a look!

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.

Happiness on MSNBC

Check out this interview on MSNBC with Psychiatrist Dr. Donald E. Rosen, conducted by MSNBC health editor Jane Weaver. I’m breaking it down FJM-style.

Philosophy of Enjoyment

One of the best parts of Crisp’s book so far is the section on enjoyment. He is a hedonist about well-being – something increases your well-being only in so far as it creates experiences of enjoyment for you. Having this view about well-being then supposedly requires a criterion for which experiences count as experiences of enjoyment. This is an interesting question and Crisp does a good job in laying out the dialectic on the basis of which he ends up with his own view. I’m not sure I understand what that view ultimately is and how plausible it is. But, I would be interested in hearing your views about the matter as I’m pretty clueless. For a basis of discussion, I’d like to give a brief sketch of Crisp’s presentation.

Necessary Well-Being

Sometimes philosophy can be even fun. One way to make it fun is to come up with absurd consequences of otherwise plausible views. This time I don’t mean blatantly false consequences but more just funny ones. The other day I was talking with Antti about a prima facie plausible view about well-being. We came up with a consequence it has that has entertained me for few days now. I know it’s sad.

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).