Against My Case For Hedonism About Well-being
In which I give the best solution to the lopsided lives challenge and various other puzzles
1 Introduction
A while ago, I presented what I thought was the best argument for hedonism called the lopsided lives challenge. Hedonism says that pleasure—good feeling mental states—are the only good and that pain—bad feeling mental states—are the only bad. The main alternative to hedonism is called objective list theory, and claims that there are a variety of things that make one well off—knowledge, pleasure, relationships, maybe achievements.
The basic idea behind the challenge is that hedonism is the only view that has a satisfactory explanation of how well off one is in cases where they are in lots of pain, have no pleasure, and have lots of objective list goods. The simplest version of objective list theory says that the more you have of the objective list goods the better off you are. But this implies that if you have enough friends, you could be very well off despite being in horrifying, bone-chilling agony. That’s false!
Over the years, I’ve grown more sympathetic to objective list theory. I still think hedonism is quite plausible, and probably is a bit more likely than objective list theory, but I think OLT isn’t totally crazy. The shift in my thinking on objective list theory has been for two reasons.
First, while this isn’t a totally new consideration, it does just seem that enjoyment gained from valuable relationships is better than other kinds of enjoyment. All else equal, it’s better to get happiness from spending time with loved ones than eating a cookie. Similarly, it seems like it would genuinely be bad for me if all my loved ones were robots who just acted like they cared about me but had no consciousness. I’d heard this argument before, but I’ve recently come to have the intuition more strongly.
Second, my credence in theism has gone up. Hedonism makes it hard to solve the problem of evil, while theism requires a successful solution to the problem of evil, so as theism gets more likely hedonism becomes less likely. (Theism isn’t strictly incompatible with hedonism because 1) there are some potential hedonist theodicies 2) there might be reasons we don’t know about for why God can’t just make everyone start out infinitely well off, or why there’s a necessary connection between certain goods and great pleasures 3) it might be that pleasure is the only thing of value in this life but that there are other great goods that earthly suffering is required for in the next life).
So here I’ll go through 4 of my old posts on hedonism. I do think these provide strong arguments for hedonism, but they’re not totally overwhelming. I’ll give what I think is the best way out of many of these objections. The answers here do have costs, but I think they’re not totally decisive.
2 Simplicity
One early article that I wrote raised the concern that objective list theory isn’t very simple. The simplicity of a theory is roughly about how long it would take to provide a full description of the theory. For example, the theory that a bunch of particles move in a circle is simple, because it’s easy to describe. But to describe, in detail, some procedure for measuring the value of relationships, knowledge, and friendship would be extremely difficult.
I think this is right, but that simplicity isn’t a virtue when it comes to necessary facts that one could figure out a priori. I suspect that the domain of non-physical facts may be infinitely complicated. To see this, consider two examples:
Universals: I think redness and height and chairness and so on exist. But this implies that there are probably an infinite number of universals that don’t reduce to others. So this means that one would need an infinitely complex description to fully describe the universals.
Godel’s incompleteness theorem says that any system of mathematical axioms must be either inconsistent or incomplete. So no finite system of axioms could summarize all the mathematical facts. But this means that describing the mathematical domain would require an infinitely long message.
I still think simplicity is some virtue, for the reasons given here. If a simpler theory can explain the data that gives it some advantage. But a theory being difficult to precisely describe is not, I believe, a decisive objection to it.
has a similar argument here.3 Joan of Arc
This objection argued that objective list theory is false because each of the goods imply counterintuitively that it could be very good for seemingly bad things to happen if they happen to increase objective list goods. For instance, on this view, it would be bad if Joan of Arc had secretly not actually been burned to death because that would mean so many people don’t have knowledge about her. I think this is basically right, but that knowledge isn’t on the objective list.
The best candidate for something that might be on the objective list is relationships. The counterexample I give to that in the article is the following: imagine someone named Robin has a huge number of friends (like quadrillions of friends). Right now, they’re all thinking “I’m so glad Robin is my friend,” and will continue thinking that for the next hour. On this view, it would be better for Robin to be tortured for an hour and then to be killed painlessly, because if Robin is killed painlessly, then all of them would have mistaken beliefs about Robin, and thus not actually be appreciating Robin. This would thus be bad for all of them, and there are enough people that this badness stacks up to be worse than Robin’s pain.
Here I think one should think that mistaken beliefs about what one appreciates don’t undercut the value of the experience. Here, what is valuable about the experience is one appreciating their experience with Robin. But their relationship is no better if Robin is being tortured than if he’s dead.
In the article, I argued against this solution by saying that it seems like if a person appreciates their wife, but has dementia and their wife has been dead for 40-years, the experience isn’t as valuable as it would be if they weren’t deluded. I think there are two main responses:
You might just bite the bullet. Our intuitions might be polluted by the tragedy of their dementia. Accepting that thinking fondly of one’s loved ones and being mistaken about their death is as valuable as not being deeply mistaken isn’t so crazy.
You might think that certain very fundamental mistakes about one’s relationship with a person can undercut the value of the relationship. That is the case here but not with Robin.
Just being mistaken about random ancillary details of the thing one appreciates doesn’t undercut the value of it. If I spend a lot of time appreciating my friends, but I’m super confused about the ontology of friends or persons, that wouldn’t undercut the value of the appreciation. Similarly, even if the people doing the appreciation are specifically appreciating the fact that Robin is alive, there is still something to appreciate—that Robin existed at one point—that is just as valuable.
4 Lopsided lives
I briefly discussed the lopsided lives challenge at the beginning of the article. If you want to read more, and see why most standard solutions can’t succeed, read my other article. My solution is a variant of the asymptotic paired cap view discussed in section 9. The basic idea is that if one gets lots of pleasure from some good that is actually good, then one adds together the value of the pleasure and the good. So, for instance, if I appreciate a loved one, I might get 10 units of well-being from the pleasure and 10 from the value of the appreciation.
Crucially, there’s a cap on how much objective list goods can benefit one that’s based on how much joy one gets from them. If one has some relationship but doesn’t appreciate them at all or get any joy from them then they’re not valuable. The values of the objective list goods thus depend on the associated pleasure, but can have any degree of value. So, for instance, there’s a possible relationship so valuable that if one gets enough pleasure from it, it would have more non-hedonic value than all positive experiences in the history of the world.
One big objection I had to this view is that it seems like the value of pleasure derived from some good on the objective list is equal to the value of pain derived from some good on the objective list. If this is true, then one can derive the result that being in constant agony and having no pleasure isn’t bad. To see this, consider the following case:
Some person has a million units of pleasure from some extreme amount of a good on the objective list and a million and a half units of pain.
They could be quite well off on this view. But by the principle described in the above paragraph, this is as good as:
Some person has half a million units of pain which would have been a million and a half units if not for the reduction in pain by appreciating things on the objective list.
If reduction in pain by goods on the objective list is as good as pleasure from goods on the objective list, then those two people are equally well off. But the second person is badly off, so the first person also must be.
Now I think one should just reject the claim that reduction in pain by goods on the objective list is as good as pleasure from goods on the objective list. This case seems to be a counterexample to it, and there’s not a good reason to accept it. It’s not like we have strong intuitions about what happens when one reduces agony by unfathomable amounts in a way derived from goods on the objective list.
Because it posits no cap on the value one can get from well-being, it avoids some of the objections to the paired caps view. But a few remain:
It implies hyperinsensitivity, where sometimes increasing objective list goods by an arbitrarily large amount produces an arbitrarily small amount of extra value. Thus, sometimes you should take a bit of objective list goods over a huge amount of objective list goods later.
Yep! This, however, might not be a huge problem. It seems like you can’t just continually make someone better off by adding objective list goods—otherwise, a person in agony could be well off if they had enough friends—so the marginal value of more objective list goods must approach zero.
A second objection is:
It implies, implausibly, that moving when one experiences some piece of knowledge or friendship to a time when they are experiencing more sublime joy from experiencing it to one where they experience less joy, could bring an improvement. This is because the marginal effect of the objective list goods is lower when one has both more pleasure and objective list goods. In fact, this seems to imply the same type of hypersensitivity as is implied by momentary caps—if we imagine over time one gains more and more pleasure that is appropriately tied to objective list goods, by shifting when some marginal quantity of objective list goods occur to an earlier moment with less pleasure, we could arbitrarily increase their welfare, even if this doesn’t affect the intensity of teh appreciation. The hypersensitivity is odd, as is the conclusion that it’s sometimes better to have some objective list goods at a time when one experiences them less rather than more. If you could either derive 100 units of joy from appreciating your spouse, that would seem to better than deriving 100 units of joy from appreciating a mild acquaintance, no matter when those are experienced, but this view requires denying that.
To avoid this, we can add appreciation to the objective lists. This is pretty plausible—spending time appreciating the wonder of the world, for instance, seems better than just appreciating tasty food. So therefore, changing appreciation to appreciating just one bad thing and getting some pleasure doesn’t make one better off.
However, the view still implies that appreciating good things that one’s already appreciating—e.g. one’s spouse—might be less bad than appreciating barely good things that one is not already appreciating (e.g. a painting). But that might not be so crazy. After one eeks all the value one can get from the objective good of appreciating a spouse, perhaps it’s better to get the “low-hanging” value of other goods, just as, for example, even though love is better than eating tomatoes, one should spend some time eating tomatoes.
Another objection was:
This view is so weird and contrived, it just strikes me as adding epicycles to wriggle out of the plainly absurd conclusions of objective list theory. If you start having to have multiple thresholds depending on each other to meet common-sense, something has gone deeply wrong.
This has some force, but it’s not totally decisive. Sometimes the truth is complicated—e.g. about math. This solution is also simpler than many of the others.
Because it implies distribution matters, it entails that one life can have more pleasure and more of every objective list good than another life, and yet the second can be better than the first.
This isn’t that counterintuitive. If it’s especially valuable to appreciate and get joy from objective list goods, then even if a life has more happiness and objective list goods, it still may be less valuable on account of containing less appreciation of those goods.
The final objection to this view is that it implies, counterintuitively given objective list theory, that getting a tiny amount of pleasure is sometimes more valuable than getting any amount of objective list goods. Any view will have to accept either:
Pleasure Offsetting: No matter how much agony one is in, if their pleasure is increased sufficiently, their well-being will be positive.
Or
Objective List Non-Offsetting: There is some amount of agony such that no non-pleasure good on the objective list can offset it, no matter how much of it there is.
Or
Enough Pain at Each Time, Limited Well-Being (EPTLW): Any life that contains no pleasure and at least finite amount of pain P at each time cannot have an overall well-being score that exceeds finite limit L, no matter how much nonhedonic goodness it contains.
(for the proof of this, see section 4).
However, this isn’t totally implausible. If what matters is appreciating the goods, then just having lots of them but not appreciating them won’t be that valuable. While this might be a bit hard to stomach, it’s definitely the best way for objective list theorists to go. This also enables solving another puzzle, which I won’t discuss in detail, but basically you can show that very plausible principles require that objective list theorist rejects:
Non relative hyperinsensitivity: If some action gives you 100,000,000 times more of an objective list good with 1,000,000,000 times the probability of another act, and has no other effects, it is better than the action that gives you 1/100,000,000th the amount of objective list goods with 1/100,000,000th the probability.
This solution gives a reason to reject it. Objective list goods are only valuable if appreciated. This also solves the puzzle in section 2 of that article for the same reason.
The last objection is the vagueness problem. It seems like how valuable a relationship is is vague, while value can’t be vague. Here, I think objective list theorists should just say there are precise facts about the value of a relationship. This isn’t particularly hard to believe if you think that the necessary facts don’t need to be simple—the specification scheme can thus be pretty complicated.
5 Conclusion
Here, I’ve argued that there are ways out of each of the puzzles for objective list theory. They’re not very attractive, many are hard to stomach, but they’re not complete takedowns. Hedonism is a marginally better view when one considers ethics alone, but neither view is completely crazy.
*Wipes tear* They grow up so fast!