Introduction
One fact favoring hedonism is the fact that it seems to be only sentient beings that matter. After you die, you stop being able to be benefitted or harmed, but a sentient plant would matter if it could suffer — see this paper for a very forceful pressing of the argument.
Even non-hedonists seem to have the intuition that life can’t go well for a zombie — a physical replica of a human who is not sentient. Kriegel provides a series of theories that attempt to explain it, quickly dismissing hedonism as unviable. This dismissal is too hasty — while some of the arguments are original, many are the same old tired anti-hedonist talking points that have been addressed at length by hedonists in the literature. I decided it would be worth taking the time to address these objections. Even if we think that these factors end up counting against hedonism, it’s clear that the fact that zombies don’t seem to matter does favor hedonism. Kriegel rejects hedonism for other reasons, however, this doesn’t undercut the force of the zombie datum.
1 The Experience Machine
Hedonism was out of favor at the end of the twentieth century, mostly due to Nozick’s (1974: 42-3) “experience machine” objection. More recently, however, it has seen something of a revival (Crisp 2006, Bramble 2016). Might we take the zombie datum as just one more reason to accept hedonism? I think consideration of certain variants of the divineintervention thought experiments already aired may discourage this. Nozick’s experience-machine objection can itself be cast as a kind of divineintervention scenario. Suppose God, having looked into your future, offers you to enter an experience machine that would reproduce your experiential life perfectly, except for one 5 little improvement: a strawberry you’d be eating in real life when you’re 70 and find somewhat underwhelming would taste ah-mazing in the experience machine. Moreover, God promises to install a zombie duplicate of you in your house, so that nobody else (family, students, etc.) would even notice your absence, much less be negatively affected by it. Should you accept this offer? Most people report a preference for staying out of the experience machine and braving that mediocre strawberry. And this suggests that what we value in our life is not just the pleasurable experiences we have. (To be clear, when I speak, here and in what follows, of “what we would prefer” or “what you would choose” in such scenario, I mean what one prefers or chooses from an entirely prudential standpoint, and bracketing any other considerations.) In recent years, hedonistic responses have proliferated, often attempting to debunk the experience-machine intuition (e.g., Silverstein 2000, Crisp 2006, De Brigard 2010). Still, it’s hard to avoid the thought that whether our experience connects up with “real value” is something that makes a difference to the goodness of our life. Imagine two persons who lead experientially equi-valuable lives: the same amount of joy, the same amount of frustration and irritability, the same experience of meaning and fulfillment, and so on. But one of them is Shakespeare and one is Sisyphus (cf. Wolf 1997). Shakespeare writes one mind-blowing play after another, Sisyphus pushes a rock up an endless hill grinning. Both experience an incredible sense of fulfillment and meaning as a result of their respective activities. The only difference is that Shakespeare’s lifework really is meaningful, whereas Sisyphus’ is entirely pointless. Do we really think they’ve led equally good lives? If God told you there’s an afterlife and offered you to live either type of life (without remembering this conversation!), would you really be indifferent and tell God to flip a coin? We can also tweak the thought experiment so that Sisyphus gets one extra second in his life, and in that second has a very pleasant experience – another wonderful strawberry, or perhaps even a cheesecake. Would you then cease to be indifferent and ask to live the Sisyphus-type life over a Shakespeare-type life? I certainly wouldn’t. This seems to suggest that we intuitively take the goodness of our life to depend in part on things that go beyond our experience and pertain to “real value.”
It’s worth noting first of all that this isn’t actually an objection to hedonism. Any person with a modicum of moral uncertainty will hold that one needs a boost in pleasure to plug in to the experience machine. After all, there’s a chance that plugging in is very bad, so one extra lovely strawberry is not going to make plugging in worthwhile. But I’ve already addressed the experience machine — I won’t repeat myself.
2 Vulcanization
Regardless of the ongoing experience-machine controversy, phenomenological hedonism faces significant difficulties with other divine-intervention scenarios. Suppose God, seeing the disappointment on your face (and in your soul) after announcing to you the news that you’ll be zombified, offers the following reprieve: instead of zombifying you entirely, He will “zombify” only your affectively valenced states. This is a procedure that retains these states’ functional role but removes their valenced phenomenology, without messing with any of your non-valenced phenomenology. In other words, what God is offering is to tune the affective dimension of your experiential life all the way down to zero, while keeping intact whatever other phenomenal dimensions your experiences have. For the remainder of your life, nothing will feel pleasant or unpleasant to you, but you will still 6 have conscious awareness, and you will still undergo other, “affectively neutral” experiences. Thus, you’ll have perceptual experiences, such as smelling freshly ground coffee; mnemonic experiences, such as recalling the first time you saw a panda at the zoo; intellectual experiences (with their so-called cognitive phenomenology), such as suddenly realizing the solution to some problem; conative experiences (with their agentive phenomenology), such as exerting effort trying to move the desk to the living room; and perhaps other experiences. None of these will occasion any pleasure or satisfaction, of course, and you may reasonably prefer keeping your shorter and affectively invested life over this affectively muted existence. Still, when God announces to you that you won’t be completely zombified, but will get to keep your non-valenced experiences, and with them your conscious existence, it would probably seem to you like a major break. At least you’ll get to be there, in a very basic sense. Your experiential death sentence has been commuted. But if phenomenological hedonism is true, then you should really be entirely unmoved by this development. For without affectively valenced experience, say phenomenological hedonists, life is not worth living. Moreover, if phenomenological hedonism is true, then if the devil comes around snickering again, informing you that in a week’s time you’ll be destroyed and replaced by a replica, you should be just as unimpressed as before. But in fact this time I’d think you’d care a little more about being killed and replaced by someone else. Intuitively, it would be great to keep your non-valenced phenomenology (as compared to being completely zombified) and terrible to be killed if you have it. David Chalmers (2022 Ch.17-18) calls creatures that are like us experientially except they lack affectively valenced phenomenology Vulcans. He argues that while our intuitive resistance to pushing the fat man off the bridge to stop a trolley from running over five people diminishes immensely once we’re told that the man is a zombie, much of that resistance is left with us if we’re told rather that he’s a Vulcan. Likewise, I’m suggesting, if you yourself have to choose between being a zombie and being a Vulcan, the difference to you might be enormous. I am well aware, of course, that trolley cases probe our intuitions about moral value whereas the present topic is prudential value. But there is this relevant similarity: intuitively, as a Vulcan, your life should matter to others very much in trolley cases, whereas as a zombie, it should not; and likewise, intuitively, as a Vulcan, your life should matter to you in the cases we’re considering, whereas as a zombie, your life – in whatever sense of “you” and “life,” if any, makes it the case that you have a life – should not matter to you.
Our intuitions about vulcans are only apparent — they crumble upon reflection. It’s so hard to imagine what it’s like to be a vulcan — for no experience to ever feel good or bad — that it’s very difficult to have firm intuitions about it. Really think about this — if you never had any pleasant or unpleasant experiences, is it really obvious whether things would be good or bad?
Several thoughts motivate the view that vulcanization would be bad. First, hedonism naturally explains why some mental states are good. Goodness is just a phenomenal property of mental states — much like some sound experiences have volume, many of our experiences have intrinsic goodness. It’s not at all difficult to see why things that, by their nature, feel intrinsically good would, in fact, be intrinsically good. If we posit the intrinsic goodness of experience, that wondrously explains why our experiences are good. But the notion that experiences that don’t feel good are good nonetheless is a bizarre one and lacks an adequate explanation for why conscious states are good.
Second, the only time I’ve ever had anything like vulcanization has been in dreams. I’ve had dreams where I didn’t have valenced mental states, to the best of my knowledge. In those dreams, nothing seemed good or bad for me.
Third, hedonism naturally explains why lots of other things are good for you. The reason why love, friendship, and virtue are good is that they produce pleasure. But it seems that a friend that doesn’t make you happy isn’t a good friend — hedonism parsimoniously explains that.
Fourth, hedonism naturally explains the neutral well-being baseline. If we take some intensely pleasurable experience and make it slightly less pleasurable but longer lasting, it is possibly an improvement. However, this clearly has to stop somewhere — otherwise an infinitely long infinitely unpleasant experience would be better than a billion years of bliss. Neutral hedonic states offer a reasonable baseline — the non-hedonist experientialist baseline seems much more ad-hoc.
Fifth, given the ubiquity of valenced mental states, it may be hard to imagine being a vulcan. Indeed, Kriegel suggests “you’ll have perceptual experiences, such as smelling freshly ground coffee; mnemonic experiences, such as recalling the first time you saw a panda at the zoo; intellectual experiences (with their so-called cognitive phenomenology), such as suddenly realizing the solution to some problem; conative experiences (with their agentive phenomenology), such as exerting effort trying to move the desk to the living room; and perhaps other experiences.” But it’s very difficult to imagine these experiences without finding the smell of coffee pleasant, for example.
Sixth, non-hedonist experientialism holds (implausibly) that you could have an arbitrarily good life if the first 10,000 years was horrendous torture and then the next 100^100^100 years was filled with slightly unpleasant experiences. If experiences are intrinsically good, even unpleasant ones can be good.
Seventh, many non-hedonist experiences are clearly not good. Staring at a wall while deriving no pleasure clearly isn’t good. All the experiences that seem good are the ones that tend to promote pleasure, but this provides a powerful hedonistic debunking account.
3 A Bad Future
There is, however, a second divine-intervention scenario that I find particularly problematic for phenomenological hedonism. It’s another good news/bad news routine from God. This time, the bad news is that God looked into your future, and is letting you know that from here on out, your life will on the whole skew toward the unpleasant. There won’t be infernal torment or anything like that – you won’t be tortured either physically or psychologically. Nor will your life lack joy and fulfillment altogether. It’s just that, on the whole, your life is going to be slightly more unpleasant than pleasant – there will be more dissatisfaction than satisfaction, more bad mood than good mood, and so on. The good news, now, is that, if you want, God could zombify you right away and spare you this on-thewhole-mildly-disagreeable existence that awaits you. If you’re anything like me, you’d politely decline, holding on to dear life of the mind despite its affectively negative accent. However, if phenomenological hedonism is true, this is just a mistake we’d be making here, a spurt of all-too-human irrationality. The right choice is to embrace zombiehood to ensure that our net pleasure/displeasure distribution is null rather than slightly negative. Again, this seems like the wrong verdict to return. It seems on the contrary perfectly rational, in such circumstances, to choose a continued conscious existence. What this suggests, I think, is that experience as such is something that brings value to our life – over and above the character of our experience as pleasant or unpleasant
I won’t harp too much on this point because I’ve already written a post addressing pretty much this argument. But it’s worth noting that this will follow from every plausible account of welfare — on all of them, it would be good for you if you were zombified, assuming your future would be negative on that theory of welfare. Yet this seems no more unintuitive with hedonism than with other theories.
Conclusion
Kriegel didn’t have many particularly new objections (which is fine, particularly because the paper wasn’t mostly about hedonism). The vulcan objection is interesting though, I think, ultimately unpersuasive. Thus, I think that zombie considerations do count in favor of hedonism, albeit non-decisively.
-otherwise an infinitely long infinitely unpleasant experience would be better than a billion years of bliss-
Am I stupid in sensing that this is where utilitarianism ends up? I’m here in the first place because I’m rusty on moral philosophy, so bear that in mind if you think I am!
> Enters benthams.substack.com
> Something, including zombies has moral value if it has two of: desires, free will, consciousness
> Refuses to Elaborate
> Leaves