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.
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.
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.
This is good.
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.
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. ;)
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.
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.