Today, I chatted with
about various disagreements that we had about topics. Here, I’ll discuss some of them briefly.At the beginning, we discussed objective list theory briefly. Richard has previously suggested that hedonism is a crazy view, such that he doesn’t understand why anyone is a hedonist. It just seems like too restrictive of a view. He is now convinced that it is, while not the best view, at least not a crazy view.
In arguing for the view, I gave three reasons why I think the view is attractive. First, I just don’t really have the objective list theory intuitions—they strike me as the types of intuitions that one might have absent adequate reflection, but that crumble when one adequately reflects, sort of like deontological intuitions. Second, I pointed out that, as utilitarians, we should think that most of the basic things which are claimed to give us non-instrumental reasons do not give us non-instrumental reasons; we both reject rights, for example, as well as various other deontic concepts. Thus, if we’re already rejecting most of these even though they accord with some intuitions, we should have a relatively high bar for accepting intuitions. Now, it’s incredibly obvious that pleasure is good and pain is bad—and, I think, if we have a high bar for other intuitions, we’ll just stick with those intuitions. Third, I argued that hedonism best accounts for lopsided lives cases—Richard has a solution, but I don’t think it works. Richard had interesting responses to those points—we disagreed about whether hedonism could preserve our robust intuitions about the intrinsic value of relationships.
We also argued a bit about whether it would be better to live forever as a mildly happy oyster or to live temporarily as a normal human. Interestingly, Richard agreed that it would be better to be an infinitely long-lived but mildly happy oyster than to be a merely supremely happy human; however, he thought that because there are non-hedonic goods, and that hedonic value caps out, human lives will be more valuable.
I raised a few worries for this view, which you can see in the video. One worry for this view is that it requires saying odd things about pain. Clearly, pain doesn’t cap out—if one was just repeatedly tortured, that would keep getting worse. But then if a life, or a civilization is mixed with pleasure and pain, then it seems initially like it would be infinitely bad, if it lasts infinitely long, because the pleasure caps out and the pain doesn’t.
In response, Richard argued that pleasure can compensate for pain. Thus, if a civilization had mostly happy people and one person in mild pain at each moment, its existence would be good. However, I pointed out that this implies that when one experiencing pleasure in a cave, the goodness of that depends on what people are doing in other causally disconnected pains (namely, whether they’re in pain). But this seems odd—causally disconnected others in caves can’t affect the value of my pleasure. Richard agreed this response seems a bit odd, but he’s inclined to reject the principle that I appealed to because it best explains double or nothing existence gambles. I argued that our intuitions about double or nothing existence gambles are the types of intuitions we should be prepared to reject.
We discussed many more things. Very worth watching if one is interested in these topics. Also, you can hear Richard describe his least utilitarian view.
Listening to the first 10 minutes, I wonder if it would be useful to drill down a bit more on what is meant by "intuition" here. Are there different types of intuition?
I remember reading some interesting work on this kind of thing:
- Max Deutch "The Myth of the intuitive" though not sure I agreed with it
- Williamson Philosophy of Philosophy
- Looks like there's a whole SEP on intuition.