PEA Soup

Does Benatar's asymmetry argument generalize?

Coming to exist is always a harm. Or so argues David Benatar in his provocative book, Better Never to Have Been.

A central pillar of Benatar's defense of this offputting 'anti-natalist' thesis is what he calls the asymmetry argument (BNHB, p. 30):
Pleasure benefits us and pain harms us.
(1) The presence of pain is bad.
(2) The presence of pleasure is good.
So far, pleasure and pain are symmetrical in their goodness and badness. But they are not symmetrical with respect to their absence.  More specifically:
(3) The absence of pain is good, even if that good is not enjoyed by anyone, but
(4) The absence of pleasure is not bad unless there is somebody (an actual somebody) who is deprived by its absence.

Kant, Well-being, and Happiness

I’m intrigued by Kant’s remarks on happiness and well-being. I’ve been thinking of the traditional understanding of his view and a passage we’ve discussed in a reading group on the Second Critique. I’m left with jigsaw puzzle where I cannot seem to make all the parts fit. I would be thankful for any help.

 

Well-being and Coherence

I'm attracted to a view of well-being with (roughly) the following structure: x is intrinsically good for y if and only if y believes that x is intrinsically good for y (under the right conditions, such as a coherent belief set).  In other words, there is nothing more to something's being good for x than for x to believe that it is good for her.  The closest cousin of this view is a desire-satisfaction view, which holds (again, very roughly, and leaving out all sorts of bells and whistles) that x is intrinsically good for y if and only if y desires x (under the right conditions, such as full-information, say).  I think the belief formulation can plausibly respond to several worries that plague desire accounts (such as the so-called "paradox of desire" and the problem of welfare-irrelevant desires, etc.).  But the view to which I'm attracted (call it, for lack of anything better, "belief-ism") faces an immediate and substantial hurdle: semantic circularity.  It looks as though the analysis of "intrinsically good" or "prudentially valuable", etc., is given in terms of the concept it purports to be analyzing.  Below the fold, I want to try out one possible response to this worry.

Does Mill believe in discontinuities?

As we all know, J. S. Mill claims that pleasures differ from each other, not only in quantity, but also in quality. Many commentators have read Mill as making the following two claims: 

1. Pleasures fall into two disjoint categories -- the "higher" pleasures and the "lower" pleasures.
2. There is a radical discontinuity between these two categories -- there is no amount (however large) of the lower-quality pleasures that can be more valuable than any amount (however small) of the higher-quality pleasures.

I believe that such discontinuity claims are intrinsically implausible. But that is not what I want to argue here. What I shall argue here is that there is no evidence that Mill made this second claim (2).

Online reading group on Broome

THIS looks very interesting. The postgraduate students at St Andrews are organising an online reading group on John Broome's brilliant Weighing Lives book. There's even a symposium with Broome in October.

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!