If Qualitative Hedonism is Coherent Then It Is False
It inherits the problems of objective list theory
Qualitative hedonists claim that there are higher and lower pleasures and that the higher pleasures are more valuable than the lower pleasures. The higher pleasures are those accessed as a result of deep, profound wisdom, or perhaps deep attachments—romantic ones and friendships, for example. In a previous article, I’ve argued that this is false, almost by definition, and barely coherent. Here, I’ll argue that, even if coherent, it has big problems of its own—similar to the problems for objective list theory. I’ve become a bit less confident in the incoherent charge since the last article—see the comments below the last article for an explanation of why.
Theron Pummer has a paper in which he presents the lopsided lives challenge for objective list theory. Objective list theory claims that there are multiple things that are good for a person that comprise a list—for example, friendship, love, pleasure, and achievements may be good.
Pummer argues that there are two key moral intuitions that any plausible moral theory must accommodate that objective list theory has trouble accommodating.
Enough Pain at Each Time, Limited Well-Being (EPTLW): If people are in unimaginably intense agony, no matter how much knowledge, friendship, and other non-pleasure based objective list theory stuff they have, their well-being—which denotes how well off they are—cannot increase indefinitely. So, for example, if a person knows 10^68 things, while each moment experiencing as much suffering as has been experienced in human history, it can’t be the case that they’re super well off. If a person is in horrific agony all the time, it can’t be the case that one can, without giving them any pleasure or reducing their agony at all, make how well off they are keep indefinitely increasing by just increasing the amount of objective list goods that they have.
Avoiding hypersensitivity: how well off a person is should not depend entirely on arbitrarily small changes in some factor. So, for example, learning one extra fact shouldn’t increase someone’s well-being by an arbitrarily large amount.
It’s surprisingly hard to meet both constraints, as Pummer argues, and various ways to avoid one of them cause the other to arise—Richard has a clever solution, but it has problems of its own. Let’s see some views that require violating one of the constraints.
Just add: this view says that you just add up the amounts of pleasure and objective list goods. But this violates EPTLW—if, for example, knowledge is one of the goods, this gets the result that a person who knows an arbitrarily large number of things, even if they’re horrifyingly tortured all the time, can have an excellent life.
Only count objective list goods if you’re above a certain threshold: this says that you should add the pleasure plus other objective list goods—but only if the pleasure surpasses a certain threshold. For example, one might think that you only count the objective list goods if one’s life contains more pleasure than pain. This avoids the EPTLW, but it runs headfirst into hypersensitivity. Suppose that there are two people named John and Fred. Their lives are identical—with one exception. John, at the end of his life, ate a slice of cake, which increased his pleasure by a bit. Thus, John had a net hedonic score of .00001, and Fred had a net hedonic score of -.0000001. Both know 100^100 important facts and have 10,000 super close friends. On this account, Fred would have a bad life—he doesn’t get to count any of the objective list goods, while John has an unimaginably good life, because he gets to count the unimaginable value from the objective list goods. Thus, this violates hypersensitivity—an arbitrarily large amount of well-being hinges entirely on minuscule changes in pleasure.
Shut up and multiply: on this view, when figuring out the value of some pleasure, one should look at the source of the pleasure, and count it for more if it came from an objective list source, depending on how valuable the objective list source was. For example, deeper friendship will give a more valuable objective list score than more trivial, fleeting friendship. This also implies hypersensitivity—suppose some person gets an arbitrarily large amount of pleasure from hanging out with their friend. This implies that their friend becoming a slightly closer friend, even in a way that doesn’t affect their pleasure at all, can increase their well-being score by an arbitrarily large amount. Thus, their friend having one more nice thought about them could increase the pleasure of the world more than ending disease, without affecting their pleasure at all.
But it seems that the lopsided lives challenge also applies to qualitative hedonism. Qualitative hedonism seems to count two different factors—how high the pleasure is and how much pleasure there is. But they seem hard to combine.
Maybe you just add them—but then if one is in unimaginable agony grasping the profoundest truths of the universe, if the truths’ profoundness increases indefinitely, then how well off they are would also increase indefinitely. Maybe you multiply them—but then you get hypersensitivity. If someone experiences enormous amounts of pleasure, causing it to be based on a more profound fact doesn’t seem to increase their welfare by an arbitrarily large amount. I think that if the lopsided lives argument sinks objective list theory, it will also sink qualitative hedonism.
Qualitative hedonism also has to sacrifice parsimony. It has to hold that the factors that influence how good a pleasure feels are things other than the raw feel. This makes it less simple—I’ve elaborated more on this charge here.
Finally, it’s plausible that some pleasure being from knowledge makes it higher. But if this is true, then it makes it so that one gets the paradox of Bradley. Suppose that someone’s well-being score is 1,000, their kid’s is 1001, and they get some pleasure from knowing that their kid has higher welfare. If this pleasure is higher pleasure, then it will increase their well-being score to 1002, but then they won’t get the boost anymore, because it won’t be true, meaning their pleasure decrease, resulting in paradox.
All in all, my credence in qualitative hedonism has gone down a lot. I think at first I just thought of it as regular hedonism with a few tweaks to make it a bit more intuitive, but upon reflection, I think it inherits most of the problems of objective list theory without a lot of the benefits. If you’re attracted to it, maybe just be an objective list theorist?
EPTLW strikes me as similar to all the highly emotive supposed counterexamples to consequentialism. On the one side, you've got limbic system triggering language like "unimaginably intense agony", and on the other you've got a boring old representation of a number whose size our empathy is utterly incapable of approaching. When I adjust for this bias, EPTLW is clearly false.