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Aug 20, 2023Liked by Bentham's Bulldog

This is good.

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Can hedonism be quantified? I don't think so.

The view that it can originates from those silly "Happiest Country" polls where say, Denmark gets 89 points and Finland only gets 87. When you dig down into the data you find that the questions are not linked to happiness at all, but to satisfaction with various aspects of life, particularly those that are controlled by government. I think that this is a flawed attempt to create a calculus of hedonism by analogy with the numerical methods of economics.

Logic has a symbolic language. It works very well. Based on this, Bertrand Russell tried to extend it throughout philosophy. He failed. Too many of the most basic concepts are relative. There are very few moral facts.

At the same time I can see how it can be exciting to test your breadth and depth of knowledge by exploring the unfathomable, and then testing your conclusions in debate with expert adversaries.

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Thanks for sharing this! My thought about what makes for a good life is a whole lot simpler. Let me know if you ever want to hear about it. ;)

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author

I'd be happy to here!

I'd also be curious about the argument that I make here.

Finally, I wasn't characterizing what a good life is, so much as a life that is good for the one who lives it. A bad person might have a life that is good for them.

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I read about half of this post, but I realized that it will take a considerable amount of time to understand and consider your argument. It's a bit late for that tonight. But from what I read, I felt like this might offer some insights on the problem of evil? What do you think?

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Good to know that I can discard objective list theory. Next time anyone tells me that I'm too reclusive and should hang out with peopleoids much more often I'll shut them up with your argument.

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You said, "So there are good reasons to think that, whether one experiences the pleasure and pain simultaneously or not, any amount of pain can be offset by some amount of pleasure."

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author

I agree that this makes a solution to the POE easier--you can generate a solution as long as you show that the badness of evils are conducive to a greater good.

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I'm not sure if it makes sense to make this cleavage between objective list goods and pleasure: receiving the goods on that list is inherently a form of pleasure. And I also don't understand the case about having lots of objective list goods and immense agony being bad: if you're getting lots of agony, I don't think there is anything that can offset that, that's not particular to objective list theory.

But even if they are a sort of pleasure, the goods in the objective list are clearly of a different kind than the things commonly thought of as pleasure, such as eating good food or sex. Knowledge, friendship, and so on, are clearly higher, superior, such that if I'm forced to press either a button wiping out the lower pleasures, or one wiping out the higher pleasures, I wipe out the lower ones.

I don't know if this still makes me a hedonist, since hedonism has a connotation of being partial to the lower pleasures, but I understand the technical definition of hedonism is probably different.

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Right so there are various versions of the combined view which says that knowledge that gives you pleasure and friendship that give you pleasure are the only good kinds. I address several versions in the article. Your view sounds like it would imply hypersensitivity.

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I just saw that in the tradeoff of dust specks versus torture, you actually endorse the torture. I wrote an entire article holding up the opposite view:

There Is No Utility

https://squarecircle.substack.com/p/there-is-no-utility

It's not the only thing addressed, but the tl; dr about that part is that if I were a being with a googolplex eyes and I had to choose to get either a dust speck in all those eyes all at the same time or be tortured for 50 years, I obviously pick the dust specks. I don't think any amount of non-pain can add up to pain (a dust speck in your eye is not pain, I experienced it recently), and I argue why in the article.

Hell, I would take even a googolplex pinpricks rather than the torture, because those would be one and done, while the 50 years of torture will effectively end my life.

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You think no amount of non-pain can add up to pain? So being bored for 100,000 years isn't as bad as a toe stub? I argue that many dust specks are worse than torture here. https://benthams.substack.com/p/utilitarianism-wins-outright-part-336

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I think pain and suffering are not the same thing, so I think I meant suffering. Monotony and repetition can definitely create suffering, but I saw you pick torture over dust specks in that article, which is what I specifically argued against in mine.

Aside from the thought experiment of whether you would pick the experience of feeling a googolplex dust specks or being tortured for 50 years, there is also the democratic argument:

There is no way a googolplex people would vote to torture someone for 50 years to avoid getting a dust speck in their eye, and there is also no way you could convince them otherwise. Because it's just not any meaningful inconvenience to them, no matter what the calculus says.

Same as if you asked them to instead give one dollar each: oh, a googolplex dollars is too much to spend on one guy! says the calculus. But when you have a googolplex people, a googolplex dollars is insignificant as a fraction of the total economy, which is the sort of thing you should be looking at if you want to do math on this problem.

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author

In the article, I didn't just assume it, I gave arguments for it.

The democratic argument seems wrong--voters could be wrong.

I think 50 years of torture is less bad than a googolplex years of very mild irritation for reasons I lay out in the article!

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usually like your arguments but to my untrained mind this article and hedonic utilitarianism generally are flawed. at the base there seems to be a blank slatist notion of this 1:1 pleasure to good relationship that increases linearly to infinity. there are many ways this seems incongruent with biology and moral intuitions, probably the most obvious being that eventually once the technology gets there to prevent suffering/overstimulation etc, under this model it would seem necessary that everyone be hooked into perpetual pleasure machines that saturate brains with heroin like effects in perpetuity. depending on your priors, it may be necessary to force people into this arrangement. i think a more productive conception of utility would be based on edification rather than pleasure.

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author

I bite the bullet on the experience machine. https://benthams.substack.com/p/why-the-experience-machine-is-evidence

Not sure how this violates biology--hypotheticals can be as unrealistic as we want https://benthams.substack.com/p/how-to-deal-with-thought-experiment

Note that in this article, I didn't assume hedonism, I instead argued for it.

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another interesting article, thanks for linking! i agree with the point argued there, but it seems to miss the point i was making. its not that “reality” has intrinsic value, as i implied i think that an experience machine that works towards edification would be good. also i think the experience machine hypothetical probably doesn’t go far enough. given your priors, surely one should work on biological technology to devolve all sentient beings into self replicating pleasure receptors, since all other functions are potential liabilities in the pursuit of maximum pleasure? in terms of biology, “violates” may be too strong but have you ever taken very powerful mind altering substances like opiates? extremely powerful pleasure experiences are compelling but they have a sickening, mind consuming quality to them. i think pleasure isnt like some linear line on a graph that can increase to infinity and good increases 1:1 with it, at some point the utility of pleasure hits a ceiling and ultimately decreases as the mind becomes delirious, is consumed and ultimately destroyed. so edification seems like a better metric at least for animals above a certain high threshold of sentience. i also think it resolves some other classic hedonic utilitarian quandaries like imagine a person experiencing massive suffering permanently but who lives on resolutely, determined not to die. per your priors you would presumably end their life if you could. but if edification is the goal, that resolution displays a high degree of edification and thus certainly not subject to involuntary euthanasia

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Pleasure is just good experiences. So if some experiences has a sickening quality that makes them ruin people's lives, they are certainly not conducive to pleasure in the long run. What you're saying about how pleasure works may be true as a descriptive fact, but surely we can imagine beings that can experience tons of pleasure.

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but thats a circular definition given we’re essentially debating the definition of good

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We're not debating the definition of good. We're debating the account of which things are good. I think the only things are good are good mental states--as in, mental states that are worth pursuing on account of the way they feel.

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right, thats what i mean. you can’t just define pleasure as good by definition, because im objecting on the basis that i think theres a better set of mental states.

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There are two kinds of pleasure. One is physical and bestial. The other is mental and sublime. Some humans attempt to maximise their utility through sensual pleasure. The rest of us spend most of our time maximising our mental pleasure.

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my objection also applies to “mental pleasure”. the machine would still be objectionable if it force fed us an accelerated collection of the most sublime novels, poetry, essays etc.

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Yeah I know weekends with family can be hell.

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