My Up To Date Case for Hedonism

A reply to Yetter Chappell

Richard Yetter Chappell inquired as to why people accept hedonism on a blog many years ago. About it he later said as follows

(2) Welfare hedonism. It's not as nuts as the above, but I don't really get the motivation for it, in light of the obvious psychological fact that we care about all sorts of stuff besides just our own (or even others') happiness.  I would have thought that the "default" view of wellbeing would be some kind of preferentism, and if you think (as I do) that some ultimate preferences are more reasonable than others, then you should shift to some kind of pluralist objectivism.  I can get thinking that there are certain defective preferences (to do objectively pointless things like count blades of grass) that don't contribute to your wellbeing.  I can't understand why anyone would think that every non-hedonistic preference (including for love, friendship, etc.) is defective in this way.

[98% confident that hedonism is false; 80% confident that it is nuts, in the technical sense of being "significantly less respectable -- or worthy of being taken seriously -- than it is currently generally regarded as being."]

Here is my up to date case for hedonism.

1 This seems to be common sense.  When we see someone being selfish, it seems to roughly track doing what makes them happy, even if it doesn’t make others happy.  Other criteria for morality include rights and virtue, but it seems strange to imagine an egoist would maximize their virtue, or minimize the risks of the violations of their rights.  If they did, they would spend all their time indoors, in a bunker, to minimize the risks of the violations of their rights, or immediately commit suicide, to prevent the possibility of anyone violating their rights.  It also seems strange to imagine an egoist who merely tries to be as virtuous as possible, despite the personal suffering caused.  When we analyze the concept of virtue, it seems clear that the motivation for virtue ethics is based on virtue being good for others, or good in some other abstract sense, rather than good for the virtuous agent.  

One might object, claiming that the commonsense notion of having a good life is about desire fulfillment or possessing things on an objective list of good things.  Such views will be explored more later.  These are the only other viable candidates for things that make a person well off.  

2 When combined with the other arguments, we conclude that what a self-interested person would do should be maximized generally.  However, it would be extremely strange to maximize the other criteria for morality.  Virtually no one is a consequentialist, who cares about maximizing virtue, or rights protection.  This limits the account of what fundamentally matters to those described above. 

3 We can imagine a situation with an agent who has little more than mental states, and it seems like things can be good or bad for them.  Imagine a sentient plant, that feels immense agony.  It seems reasonable to say that the agony they experience is bad for them and that if they were rational and self-interested they would try to end their agony.  However, in this imagined case, the plant cannot move and all its agony is the byproduct of natural features.  Given that its misery is the result of its genetic formation, it seems strange to say its rights are being violated, and given its causal impotence, it seems unclear how it could have virtue.  Yet it seems despite that it could still have interests.  

We can consider a parallel case of a robot that does not experience hedonic value or hedonic disvalue.  Even though this robot acts exactly like us, it would not matter absent the ability to feel hedonic value or suffering.  These two intuitions combine to form the view that beings matter if and only if they can experience hedonic value. This serves as strong evidence for utilitarianism.  

One could object that rights, virtue, or other non-hedonistic experiences are an emergent property of hedonic value, such that one only gains them when they can experience hedonic value.  However, this is deeply implausible.  This would require strong emergence.  As Chalmers (2006) explains, strong emergence involves emergent properties that are not merely reducible to interactions of the weaker properties.  For example, chairs are reducible to atoms, given that we need nothing more to explain the properties of a chair than knowing the ways that atoms function.  They are purely the result of atoms functioning.  However, strongly emergent properties are not reducible to weaker properties.  Chalmers argues that there is only one thing in the universe that is strongly emergent; consciousness.  Whether or not this is true, it does prove the broader principle that strong emergence is prima facie unlikely.  Rights are clearly not reducible to hedonic value; no amount of hedonic value magically turns into a right.  This renders this claim deeply implausible.  

Some like (Bar-Yam, 2004) argue that strong emergence is not unique to consciousness and is not an intolerable consequence of a theory.  However, this view is no serious threat to the reluctance to embrace strong emergence in the context of ethics.  Bar-Yam argues that the strongly emergent properties are, in some sense, properties of the collection of lower levels things.  However, no such explanation is available in the context of morality.  Rights, virtue, and objective list-based properties are not in any way baked into lower level hedonic states.   Additionally, even if we can theoretically accommodate strong emergence, in philosophy, much like in physics, an explanation that posits simpler entities is theoretically better.  

There’s additionally a problem with explaining why this relationship obtains.  Why would it be, if there were non-hedonic values, that pleasure is a necessary and sufficient condition for being morally significant.  The non-hedonist can’t just assert this relationship; there must be some justification, yet no obvious justification seems to present itself.  

4 Hedonism seems to unify the things that we care about for ourselves while remaining very simple.  If someone is taking an action to benefit themselves, we generally take them to be acting rationally if that action brings about hedonic value for them.  When deciding upon what food to eat, we act based on what food will bring us the most hedonic value.  It seems strange to imagine any other criterion for deciding upon food, hobbies, or relationships.  We generally think someone is acting reasonably if they were in a romantic relationship, given the joy it brings to them, but if someone spent their days picking grass, we would see them as likely making a mistake, particularly if it brought them no hedonic value.  Additionally, the rights that we care about are generally conducive to utility, we care about the right not to be punched by strangers, but not the right to not be talked to by strangers, because only the first right is conducive to utility.  Additionally, we care about beauty only if it's experienced, a beautiful unobserved galaxy would not be desirable.  Even respect for our wishes after our death is something we only care about if it increases utility.  We don’t think that we should light a candle on the grave of a person who’s been dead for 2000 years, even if they had a desire during life for the candle on their grave to be lit.  

One could object that the same is true of other theories of well-being, like desire or objective list theory.  This response works relatively well for desire theory, but not for objective list theory.  When deciding what food to eat or whether to enter into a relationship, we don’t generally consider whether it would advance goods on our objective list.  In nearly all everyday decisions, objective list theory won’t differ considerably from hedonism.  

As Moen (2016, p.279) notes

“Can hedonists explain why pluralists’ suggested intrinsic values tend to be hedonic instrumental values? I think we can, and that we can do so in a way that adds further strength to the hedonist position. To see how, recall that in the previous section, we saw that in cases in which pleasures are instrumentally very disvaluable, it is easy to deny their intrinsic value, and in cases where pleasures are instrumentally very valuable, it is easy to deny their intrinsic disvalue—even though, upon reflection, we become aware of the fact that in making such judgments, we conflate instrumental and intrinsic value. Hedonists might suggest, moreover, that we conflate instrumental and intrinsic value in other cases as well. Perhaps, when something has a significant instrumental value, and we are constantly reminded of its value, we easily come to think that it is valuable in and of itself, not just valuable in virtue of its relations.29

“If two things occur together repeatedly, we tend to lump them together mentally. If you see a certain person and, simultaneously, experience a certain feeling—and this happens again and again—you are likely to start associating the person with that feeling. This has an obvious learning benefit: In reacting to our surroundings, it helps us stay clear of dangers. The next time you see the man who once tried to harm you, you do not need to embark on an elaborate reasoning process about the ways in which he might harm you again; instead, you immediately think “Bad man!” and run away. Such a mechanism is also of help in reacting to inanimate objects. If you have gotten sick by eating a certain kind of mushroom, say, chances are that the next time you see, smell, or taste a mushroom of the same kind, you will feel aversion. Using a similar explanatory model, it might be suggested that we associate with intrinsic value and disvalue things that repeatedly have been vital in bringing about intrinsic value and disvalue.”

The simplicity point is defended by many, with perhaps the most thorough analysis being by (Nelson, 2020).  Hedonism requires positing that only one thing makes people better off, which is a relatively ubiquitous property of our mental states.  This is simpler than, for example, objective list theory, which has to posit a variety of different things that make people better off.  

5 As Sinhababu (2012) argues, we reach the belief in pleasure’s goodness via the process of phenomenal introspection, whereby we think about our experiences and determine what they’re like.  This is widely regarded as being reliable, organisms that were able to form accurate beliefs about their mental states are more likely to reproduce, and psychologists and biologists generally regard it as being reliable.  

One could object that this only allows us to glean knowledge about natural properties.  However, through introspection we can glean knowledge about what an experience is like.  If part of what an experience is like involves its hedonic valence, then it would be detectable.  Much like we can ascertain whether we’re in pain, confused, or whether one experience contains more brightness than another experience, we can similarly ascertain whether our experiences are desirable or not.  When one is in intense pain, they can be directly acquainted with the badness of their experience.  

One might object that the belief we gain is that suffering is bad, but not that it’s bad independently of our desires.  This response is not successful.  First, when we reflect on pain that we’re not thinking about or pain that we don’t want to end, we can still appreciate its badness.  For example, I can realize that the pain I had while dreaming was bad, even though I didn’t desire for it to end in my muddled dream state.  Similarly, I can recognize that hunger is bad, even if I’m not currently consciously thinking about the hunger enough for the thought that I’d like it to stop to cross my mind.  

Second, when we reflect on the nature of pain, we derive facts about the experience.  Thinking about what it’s like to stub one's toe allows them to realize that it’s bad--and the badness of the associated experience is independent of their desires. 

One might object that this belief can be evolutionarily debunked--belief that pain is worth avoiding would aid survival, even if it weren’t truth tracking.  Such an account runs into several problems.  

First, as Sinhababu points out, we’d expect evolution to make us reliable judges of our conscious experience.  Belief in the badness of pain resists debunking because it’s formed through a mechanism that would evolve to be reliable.  Much like beliefs about vision aren’t debunkable, neither are beliefs about our mental states, given that beings who can form accurate beliefs about their mental states are more likely to survive.  

Second, as Bramble (2017) points out, evolution just requires that pain isn’t desired, it doesn’t require the moral belief that the world would be better if you didn’t suffer.  Given this, there is no way to debunk normative beliefs about the badness of pain.  

Third, there’s a problem of inverted qualia.  As Hewitt (2008) notes, it seems eminently possible to imagine a being who sees red as blue and blue as red, without having much of a functional change.  However, it seems like undesirability rigidly designates pain, such that you couldn’t have a being with an identical qualitative experience of pain, who seeks out and desires pain.  This means that the badness and correlated undesiredness of pain is a necessary feature, not subject to evolutionary change.  

One could object that there are many people like sadists who do, in fact, desire pain.  However, when sadists are in pain, the experience they gain is one they find pleasurable.  This is not a counterexample to the rule, so much as one that shows that experiences can have many features in common with pain, while lacking its intrinsic badness.  A decent analogy here would be food--eating the same food at different times will produce different results, even with the same general taste.  If one finds a food disgusting, their experience of eating it will be bad.  Traditionally painful experiences are similar in this regard--closely related experiences can actually be desirable.  

Fourth, evolution can’t debunk the direct acquaintance we have with the badness of pain, any more than it could debunk the belief that we’re conscious.  Much like I have direct access to the fact that I’m conscious, I similarly have direct access to the badness of pain.  After I stub my toe my conviction is much greater that the pain was bad than it is in the external world.  

Fifth, it’s plausible that beings couldn’t be radically deluded about the quality of their hedonic experiences, in much the same way they can’t be deluded about whether or not they’re conscious.  It seems hard to imagine an entity could have an experience of suffering but want more of it.  

Sixth, there’s a problem of irreducible complexity.  Pain only serves an evolutionary advantage if it’s not desired when experienced.  Thus, the experience evolving by itself would do no good.  Similarly, a mutation that makes a being not want to be in pain would do no good, unless it already feels pain.  Both of those require the other one to be useful, so neither would be likely to emerge by themselves.  However, only the intrinsic badness of pain which beings have direct acquaintance with can explain these two emerging together.  

6 Mackie (1977) has argued that moral facts are too strange to exist as part of the fabric of the universe.  After all, it’s hard to understand how some facts could count in favor of or count against particular actions.  There’s been a vast amount of ink poured discussing Mackie’s argument -- how persuasive one finds the basic idea behind them will vary depending on the listener.  However, if one finds the argument from queerness as Mackie calls it, which claims that moral facts are too queer to be part of the fundamental fabric of the universe, to disqualify other moral facts, hedonism has a particularly powerful rejoinder.  If there are any moral facts that aren’t objectionably queer, those moral facts are no doubt the hedonic ones -- those which dictate the goodness of pleasure and the badness of pain.  

There are several ways the the hedonic facts resist the charge of being objectionably queer.  The first one is that our mental states are already very queer.  If one assessed the odds that a universe made up of particles and waves, matter and energy, could sustain the smorgasbord of truly bizarre mental states that exist -- that some mental states were normative would be one of the least surprising facts.  If we start with the fundamental strangeness that there’s any consciousness at all -- somehow generated by neurons -- and then we combine that with the bizarreness of the following mental states: color qualia -- particularly when we consider that there are color qualia that no human will ever see but that non-human animals have seen, psychidellic experiences, the intrinsic motivation that comes with the experience of desire, the strangeness of taste qualia, and the fact that there are literal entire dimensions that we will never experience.  

Once we become accustomed to these mental states, it’s very easy to no longer appreciate just how strange they are.  Yet if we imagine what the mental states that we haven’t experienced must be like -- for example the experience of a bat using nociception or of experiencing four dimensional objects, it becomes clear just how miraculous and bizarre our conscious experiences are.  Thus, if something as strange as value were to lurk anywhere in the universe, the obvious place for it to be would be part of experience, alongside its equally strange brethren.  

Yet there’s another account of why normative qualia wouldn’t be objectionably strange -- namely, that the supposedly strange feature of qualia, their normativity, is something that we commonly accept.  Every time a person makes a decision on account of something they know, they are treating their mental states as normative -- they take particular facts or experiences of which they’re aware to count either for or against an act.  

Take one simple example -- when one puts their hand on a hot stove, they pull away rapidly.  Something about the feeling of the stove seems to urge that one remove their hand from the stove -- immediately!!  

Indeed, anti-realists commonly accept that desires have reason giving force.  However, if desires -- a type of mental states -- can have reason giving force, there seems no reason in principle that valenced qualia can’t have reason giving force.  

Street (2008) provides a constructivist account of reasons -- arguing we evolved to have a feeling of ‘to be doneness’.  When one’s hand is on a hot stove, however, not only do they have a feeling of ‘to be avoidedness’ but that feeling seems to be fitting.  Were they fully rational, that feeling wouldn’t go away.  That’s because it’s a substantive property of some mental states -- including the one experienced when one’s hand is on a hot stove -- that they are simply worth avoiding.  

Let’s take stock.  So far we’ve established that hedonism is intuitively prima facie plausible, it’s extremely simple, beings matter if and only if they have the capacity for hedonic value, other theories need to posit strong emergence which exists virtually nowhere else in the universe, hedonism unifies the things we care about such as knowledge, friendship, and virtue, we have a reliable mechanism for identifying the goodness of pleasure, unlike the goodness of other things, there’s a plausible evolutionary explanation of the goodness of pleasure unlike other things, it is necessary to explain what pleasure even is, only hedonic value seems to have desire independent relevance, consciousness seems intuitively to be all that matters, hedonism explains why one can’t be harmed or benefited after death, pleasure is the most obvious value, experiences seem valuable if and only if they produce pleasure--other theories have to posit other strange things that make people better off, and when the hedonic values are sufficiently great, they dominate all other considerations.  This close correspondence only holds in other domains where there’s a necessary supervenience relationship.  

7 An additional argument can be made for the goodness of hedonic value.  A definition along the lines of “good experiences,” is the only way to explain what happiness is, as Hewitt (2008) argues.  It’s not merely a desired experience, given that we can desire bad experiences, for example, one who thinks they deserve to suffer could desire experiencing suffering.  Additionally, if we are hungry, but never think about it, and wish it would stop, it seems that our hunger is still causing us to suffer, even though we never actually desire for it to stop.  The non hedonist could accept this, but argue that it’s not sufficient to prove that happiness is desirable.  It merely proves that we perceive happiness as desirable mental states, not that the mental states are in fact desirable.  However, if the only way we can explain what happiness truly is is by reference to its desirability, this would count in favor of hedonism.  Other accounts require that we are systematically deluded about the contents of our mental experiences.  

As Massin (2017, p.325) notes

Here are two initial motivations in favor of the ATP. The first is that in the standard psy-chologist picture, painfulness and pains’ badness end up being phenomenologically redun-dant. The badness of a pain is not presented as an additional property, on top of its being apain. Insofar as phenomenology is a good guide to the nature of pain, the distinction between the pain-making property of pains and the value of pain does not capture any genuine difference:

“Premise 1: Our typical experiences of pains present us with pains as they are.  (Experiences of pains are not systematically misleading.)

“Premise 2: Our typical experiences of pains present us with painfulness – the prop-erty, whatever it is, in virtue of which pains are pains. (Pains are experienced as such, not as smells or sounds.)

“Premise 3: Our typical experiences of pains present us with pains as being bad. Pains feel bad.

“Premise 4: Our typical experiences of pains do not present us with the badness of pains as distinct from, and additional to, their painfulness. Pains are not experienced as being painful and, on top of that, bad.

“Conclusion: Pains’ badness is not distinct from painfulness.”

Massin then provides a second justification for holding that badness is intrinsic to the experience of pain; Massin argues that this explains how pain encompasses such a wide range of sensations.  Stubbing one's toe, eating disgusting food, and having a sharp blade cut one's flesh is all painful and they all feel bad, seemingly in the same sense.  In this case, I use pain expansively, in the way Bentham used it, when declaring that the utilitarian maxim was maximizing the balance of pleasure over pain.  

8 Only hedonic value seems to possess desire independent relevance.  In the cases that will be discussed with preferential accounts, it seems clear that agents are acting irrationally, even if they’re acting in accordance with their desires.  A person who doesn’t care about their suffering on future Tuesdays is being irrational.  However, this does not apply to rights.  A person who waives their right to their house and gives their house to someone is not being irrational.  A person who gives a friend a house key, allowing them to come into their house without their consent is similarly not acting irrationally.  Rights seem to be waivable.  hedonic value does not. 

9 One intuition capable of motivating this is that consciousness is all that matters. As Sidgwick pointed out, a universe devoid of sentience could not possess value. The notion that for something to be good it must be experienced is a deeply intuitive one. Consciousness seems to be the only mechanism by which we become acquainted with value.

One might object that, while consciousness is required for things to possess any value, the value doesn’t have to be proportional to its effect on consciousness. This is true. However, if B can’t be had without A, that at least counts in favor of the view that A and B are the same. Additionally, the consciousness based intuitions that I have seem to point to consciousness being the only thing that matters. It seems strange to imagine that I could be made worse off by something that doesn’t affect my conscious experiences at all.

10 hedonism seems to be the simplest way of ruling out posthumous harm. Absent hedonism, things can be bad for a person after they die. This is, however, implausible. It would be strange to suggest that dead people can benefit or be harmed.  Bramble (2016) fleshed out the view in greater detail.

11, pleasure seems to be the thing that is most obviously good. Many people like (Parfit, 2011) provide intuitions to argue that things can have desire independent relevance. All of the examples that are given are examples of one not caring about their pleasures.

Parfit gives the example of a person with future Tuesday indifference—one who doesn’t care about their suffering if it occurs on a future Tuesday. Thus, they’d be willing to experience horrific suffering on Tuesday rather than a pinprick on Monday. Parfit also provides the agony argument—a person who does not desire avoiding future agony would be acting foolishly. The example that I find most persuasive is side of the body pulled out of a hat indifference. This person at the start of a day pulls out either left or right out of a hat at random. For the duration of the day, they are indifferent to their suffering that occurs on the part of their body that they pulled out of a hat.

If they pull out left they are indifferent to suffering that occurs on the left side of their body. If they pull out right, the opposite. This person at the start of a day pulls out right. They are then given the option of having the right side of their body burned with a hot iron or having a pinprick on the left side of their body. They choose to be burned with a hot iron. This seems clearly irrational.

One might object that it wouldn’t be if they didn’t truly desire avoiding being burned with a hot iron on the right side of their body. However, they still have identical qualia to what any of us would experience if we were burned with a hot iron on one side of our body. This person merely has no preference for avoiding that type of pain. We can even stipulate that when they’re burned with the hot iron on the right side of their body they are hypnotized to think that they pulled left out of the hat, such that they’re experience is identical to what it would have been if they had, in fact, pulled left out of the hat. This choice seems clearly irrational, despite them acting in accordance with their desires.

However, cases like this almost exclusively appeal to hedonic experiences. One who is indifferent to being plugged into the experience machine would not seem to be irrational. Thus, the case for desire independent relevance for well-being is far more robust.

12 Other theories seem to have trouble accounting for the fact that experiences that don’t produce pleasure are not valuable, but ones that do are valuable.

Beginning with preference views, which say that preference fulfillment is what makes people well off, and preferences being thwarted makes people worse off, scenarios like the ones described above show that preference views can hold that people are benefited by things that decrease the quality of their mental experiences. In the case before, the one who experiences but does not desire avoiding agony, is indifferent to future Tuesdays, or is indifferent to suffering that occurs on the right side of their body, has no desire to avoid these sufferings. However, it still seems like it’s bad to torture people on Future Tuesday’s, despite their indifference to it.

It might be objected that one has to desire the experience of pleasure and avoidance of suffering. This is, however, false. As Parfit showed, people are frequently indifferent to their suffering. Sinners who believe they’ll be condemned to hell frequently go on sinning, despite it being bad for the quality of their experiences. I’ve certainly had times when I was experiencing something harmful but didn’t want it to stop for reasons of stubbornness. Additionally, these views are willing to account for higher order desires. One who wants to help their friend even at their own expense would not be acting irrationally. Thus, these views are willing to accommodate placing extra importance on higher order desires. If one has a higher order desire which renders them overall indifferent to experiences of pain, these views would be unable to condemn them.

An additional point is worth making. Very often people experience unpleasantness but they don’t have any particular desire for it to stop. I might be hungry but not focusing on my hunger. Thus, I have no unfulfilled desire for my hunger to stop. In this case, it’s not clear how desire theories make sense of this.

They might hold that what matters is the desires that I would have about things if I focused on them. This, however, runs into issues. If I focused deeply on any world tragedy, I would have a desire for it to stop. However, it seems strange to say that it is bad for me that a tsunami hits some far away place, to the extent that it doesn’t distress me.

One who committed a heinous crime before developing a concern for others and developing retributivist intuitions may hold that they deserve to suffer. Thus, they have no desire for their misery to cease. However, it still seems intuitive that their misery is bad for them. This is a real world case in which people have no desire for the cessation of their agony.

A final point is worth making. There is no conceptual relationship between suffering and one desiring for it to stop. A desire is something that one aims for. While the nature of suffering provides people a reason to desire its cessation, there is no necessary relation between suffering and desiring for it to stop. Given that one is a reaction and one is an experience, it is hard to see why they would necessarily be linked.

One might simply define suffering as experiences that people desire the end of. However, this definition has several problems. First, it seems to run afoul of common usage and intuitions about several of the aforementioned cases. The retributivist who believes he deserves to be in pain and is burned with a hot iron is clearly suffering. The same is true of the other examples given. The person with no desire to avoid being in pain on Future Tuesdays is still clearly suffering when they’re burned with a hot iron on Tuesday’s, while being hypnotized to believe that it’s Monday.

Second, people can conceivably experience self loathing, wherein they don’t value their own happiness. A depressed person may not care about being happy. However, it would be strange to suggest that being happy doesn’t produce pleasure for them.

Third, one can imagine a person with an addiction. They may have no desire to gain pleasure from an experience, though it would still be pleasurable.

However, a similar problem is faced by the objective list theorist, which says that achieving a list of valuable things makes people better off, including hedonic value, interaction with others, and possibly other things.  The most plausible version is the one according to which pleasurable experiences are more valuable if they’re achieved by appreciating something that is, in fact, good. Thus, one’s hedonic value caused by the appreciation of a loved one is more valuable than their hedonic value if garnered by eating ice cream.

This view, however, runs into the following dilemma. Does pain alleviation caused by appreciation also bring about the same type of objective value. If the answer is no, this introduces a strange asymmetry. Suppose that one is experiencing a headache with 5 units of pain. Appreciating another person could either give them 5 units of pleasure to offset, or could eliminate the 5 units of pain. On the asymmetric account, it would be better to experience the 5 units of pleasure. This is implausible. Pleasure is not more valuable than comparable pain elimination, regardless of the source.

However, if we say the opposite, then one can benefit from something despite it producing no pleasure for them. Suppose a friend of mine writes a birthday card to me that is intended to be nice, but that says certain things that I find hurtful. However, knowing that my friend intended to help and be kind makes me not be offended, though I get no joy from reading the letter. My appreciation of my friend’s attempted kind gesture only serves to blunt the hurt it would have otherwise caused, but brings no joy. It would seem strange to suggest that I am made better off by reading this letter that doesn’t make me happy at all. However, on OLT, I am made better off. This is counterintuitive and runs afoul of Sidgwick’s principle that something can only benefit you if it brings you joy.

Additionally, we can add that reading the letter brings me a small amount of suffering. Suppose that reading the letter gives me a papercut that is a little bit painful. On OLT, I would still benefit from it. This already seems very counterintuitive. However, it can be made much more so.

Much like hedonist accounts hold that if I was given a pleasurable experience, before having my memory erased, such that I experienced it again, it would be good for me, OLT accounts would seem to have to hold that appreciating good things over and over again would be especially good. Thus, if I could be given the experience of appreciating my friends gesture, and reading the letter that gave me a papercut and that I didn’t enjoy reading 100^100^200 times the total value from this would exceed all of the value in the universe. This is deeply implausible. Experiencing 100^100^200 unenjoyable experiences and papercuts does not possess enough value to offset the badness of the holocaust an unfathomable number of times.

The Objective List Theorist may hold that there is some limit, such that one only benefits from an experience the first time they experience it. This, however, is either implausible or inadequate to avoid the objection. If they hold that the same type of experience cannot possess value beyond the first time it’s experienced, then it would make many things that Objective List Theorists believe are valuable not, in fact, valuable. If one is hanging out with their friends, OLT would hold that this is valuable, even if they’ve had previous similar experiences with their friends. If experiences are only valuable the first time, then this extra interaction would not be valuable.

They might hold that the same experience happening multiple times cannot generate Objective List based value. However, this is both no objection to the broader principle and is implausible. Suppose that the plot of groundhog day were true, and at the end of each day, it got reset and relived. This wouldn’t seem to eliminate the value of people being in love. Additionally, we can stipulate that each time they write the letter it’s different in subtle ways, such that the same experience is not, in fact, repeated.

Going back to the earlier point, even if the OLT is able to work out some account of why repeated experiences are not valuable that boxes out the repeated letters but includes the repeated friend interactions, we can add an additional stipulation. Each time the letter is written by a different person. Suppose this person is very popular and has 100^100^200 friends, each of whom writes the same general letter. In this case, the experience is not repeated. However, the conclusion is still deeply implausible.

The Objective List Theorist could finally reject some form of aggregation, and say that lots of small good things can’t add up to produce as much good as one single very good major thing like the goodness of the world. However, as I shall argue and as (Norcross, 1997) has argued, this is very implausible. The Objective List Theorist holds presumably that the experience of opening the letter produces more value than is avoided by preventing a dust speck from entering a person’s eyes. If, as I have argued, oodles of dust specks entering people’s eyes produces as much disvalue as lots of tortures, then many people opening letters that they don’t enjoy and getting pinpricks would be good enough to offset lots of tortures. This is implausible.

The Objective List Theorist could bite the bullet and argue that our intuitions relating to huge numbers are unreliable, as I shall argue. However, in the case I will give, I will argue we have lots of plausible independent reasons to accept the utilitarian conclusion. The OLT would be hard pressed to come up with a similarly adequate justification that appeals to principles as plausible as the ones that I gave.

The failures of our intuitions in certain cases relating to large numbers certainly cuts against the reliability of those intuitions. However, that doesn’t mean we can throw them out entirely.

Additionally, in this case, the counterintuitive result came merely from aggregating lots of cases of things that the OLT holds are good. The reason it seems unintuitive has more to do with the verdict about reading letters that one doesn’t enjoy and getting a paper cut being bad, rather than the aggregative intuitions.

Even if one is convinced that our intuitions relating to very big numbers are very unreliable, they should still rely on the intuition prior to aggregation. The intuition that one is made worse off by getting a paper cut from a letter they don’t enjoy reading, rather than better off, is fairly strong. Aggregation just made the point more salient.

The OLT might object that hedonism has the opposite implication which is just as unintuitive, namely that one should torture and kill lots of people to prevent someone from getting a papercut from a letter they don’t enjoy reading 100^100^200 times. This shall be defended later. Additionally, this just comes from aggregating a judgment about some action being bad. The OLT is the one who holds the counterintuitive judgment about the moral status of the action.

Another related worry arises for OLT of the type that’s been described earlier. Suppose that friend A gives me book A and friend B gives me book B. However, I get confused and think that friend B gave me book A and friend A gave me book B. As I’m reading book A I have a deep appreciation for friend B and as I’m reading book A I have a great appreciation for friend B. In this case, it would seem that this confusion doesn’t make me worse off. However, on OLT, it seems it would have to. Given that this confusion causes me to be mistaken about facts, such that when I think I’m appreciating some experience, I’m not truly experiencing the thing on my objective list that I think I am, it would prevent me from getting objective list value. This is implausible. It seems strange that there has to be a parity between appreciation from some event and that event actually existing for a person to be benefitted by that event.

A similar case raises a similar point. Suppose I mistakenly believe my friend did something which I appreciate, but I also don’t realize my friend did something else nice for me, which benefits me, which I don’t appreciate. For example, suppose my friend bakes me cookies, but I mistakenly think they baked me brownies. When I eat the brownies, my appreciation is based on a false assumption. Much like in the experience machine, my experience of appreciation is divorced from the actual facts of the world. However, this doesn’t make it less valuable.

The OLT might object, claiming that even if I’m wrong about the details, I’m still right about it being the type of thing for which I ought to appreciate them. Much like appreciating a friend would still have OL value, even if you are wrong about certain facts about them, if they still have the defining characteristics that cause you to appreciate them, mixing up the particular food that was baked would be an erroneous detail, not relevant to OL value.

However, we can modify the case. Suppose that friend A bakes me cookies, but I think friend B baked them. I appreciate friend B. Given that this is based on a false pretense, the OLT would have to hold that this lacks OL value. However, suppose additionally that ten years later friend B bakes me cookies, but I get confused and appreciate friend A. OLT would hold that these confusions leave me worse off. This is implausible.

The OLT might hold that what matters is the Parity between there being something that’s worth appreciating and someone appreciating it. On this view, it is irrelevant whether I am appreciating the thing that is actually good. If I am appreciating something and also there is something worth appreciating, I gain OL based value. However, this yields implausible conclusions.

Suppose that I am in the experience machine because my wife who cares about me greatly decided to put me into the experience machine. I did not know about this, but I would have consented. However, I was on the brink of death prior to being plugged in. I gain sufficient joy from being plugged in for it to benefit me on OLT. In this case, there is something to truly be appreciated in every good experience I have. However, it would be odd to suppose I gain OL based value every time I appreciate an imaginary person who exists merely in my mind.

Consider a final case. Suppose I am talking to a person at a costume party. I falsely believe them to be friend A. They are really friend B. I appreciate their contribution. This would seem to be valuable, despite the false pretense. Now suppose that they are in fact the brother of friend A who I don’t know (they’re not intending to be deceptive). This still seems valuable. Now let’s suppose that they’re a robot that is a copy of friend A but it is not conscious. It seems hard to hold that this would not be valuable but the others would.

Let’s say they were a copy of friend A who was half as sentient. Would the value be lower? These logistical questions seem to pose major hurdles for OLT.

Sidgwick held that good things have to be appreciated—an unobserved galaxy would not be better if it were beautiful than if it were ugly. Hedonism just extrapolates that trend. Much like it’s hard to compare two states of the world that aren’t observed by anyone, it’s similarly hard to compare two states of the world in which there are differences which no one is aware of. If no one experiences a difference between two states of the world, those states of the world aren’t morally different.

13 As (Pummer, 2017) argues, non hedonism cannot accommodate the following intuitions without accepting other absurd results (p. 277)

 “Enough Pain, Limited Well-Being (EPLW): Any life that contains no pleasure and at least finite amount of pain P cannot have an overall well-being score that exceeds finite limit L, no matter how much nonhedonic goodness it contain.”  

Pummer additionally writes (p.278-279) 

 “Again, EPLW states that any life that contains no pleasure and at least finite amount of pain P cannot have an overall well-being score that exceeds finite limit L, no matter how much nonhedonic goodness it contains. Pluralists can combine EPLW with: Enough Less Pain, Unlimited Well-Being (LPUW): Any life that contains any finite amount of pleasure and less than finite amount of pain P can have an overall well-being score that exceeds any finite limit L, if its nonhedonic goodness were increased sufficiently (while holding fixed the amount of pleasure in the life). In other words, if a life contains less than finite amount of pain P, then as this life’s amount of nonhedonic goodness approaches infinity (holding fixed the amount of pleasure in the life), so too does its overall well-being score. There is a problem with the pluralist’s attempt to accommodate EPLW by embracing LPUW. Consider two more lives, life C and life D. They both contain no pleasure and a lot of pain. However, life C contains just slightly less than amount of pain P, whereas life D contains exactly amount of pain P. Now suppose we can increase the nonhedonic goodness of either life to whatever degree we like, but whatever nonhedonic boost we provide for life C, we must provide an exactly similar nonhedonic boost for life D. The combination of EPLW and LPUW imply that by giving life C and life D equivalent arbitrarily large nonhedonic boosts, we make life C’s overall well-being score arbitrarily greater than life D’s. But this seems implausible. Given that life C and life D are exactly similar down to the very last detail, with the only exception being that life D contains an extra tiny drop of pain, it is very hard to believe they could differ so dramatically in terms of overall well-being. To deny this would be to accept hypersensitivity to very slight nonevaluative differences— that is, to accept that an arbitrarily large difference in overall well-being scores can supervene wholly on a very slight nonevaluative difference.”  

Pummer’s paper develops his thesis in extraordinary depth.  The basic intuition is that non-hedonist views have trouble with scenarios in which non-hedonic values are abundant, but there is no hedonic value.  Much like utilitarianism arguably has trouble with scenarios in which there’s lots of pleasure but little non-hedonic goods, non-utilitarianism runs into similar problems.  

It’s intuitive that making people a quadrillion times happier makes them much better off (at least billions of times better off), but it’s not intuitive at all that increasing non hedonic values in that way produces similar improvements in quality of life.  If a person gained omniscience while being horrendously tortured, those two actions in combination would make them much worse off.  

One might object that non-hedonic value maxes out at some point, while hedonic value doesn’t.  However, such a response fails.  There is no reason to think that non-hedonic value must max out.  While it may max out for humans, the same is true of hedonic value.  We could imagine some hypothetical entity that is able to have unfathomable amounts of knowledge and deep interpersonal relationships.  These only seem impossible on practical grounds--we have no principled reason to think that they’re metaphysically impossible.  A being with a sufficiently long life could have any amount of non-hedonic value.  

They could argue that non-hedonic value maxes out, even if the things that possess non-hedonic value don’t.  For example, no matter how much knowledge one has, it can’t produce an increase in well-being beyond a certain level.  Such a response fails.  

First, it runs into issues relating to past experiences.  Suppose you were almost omniscient, had 100^100 friends, and achieved everything else on the objective list, before your memory was wiped.  It would seem like this previous value wouldn’t undermine the value of happiness or knowledge during your life.  One could object that having extra knowledge after your memory is erased provides value, independently of past non-hedonic value.  However, if this were true, it would mean one would be better off if they frequently erased their memory and then relearned everything.  Such a result is implausible.  In fact, this would require holding that if a being was constantly miserable, but they constantly erased their memory, and was constantly relearning information, making new friends, and achieving non-hedonic value in other ways, they’d be very well off.  This, however, is wildly implausible and runs affoul of EPLW, as well as another principle that Pummer describes (p.289)

“Enough Pain at Each Time, Limited Well-Being (EPTLW): Any life that contains no pleasure and at least finite amount of pain P at each time cannot have an overall well-being score that exceeds finite limit L, no matter how much nonhedonic goodness it contains.”

Second, this is a suspicious result.  If objective list achievement only has value when it provides hedonic benefits, only matters for beings who have hedonic experiences, and maxes out around the point when it stops being hedonically useful, that is strong evidence for a reductionist account.  

Third, the amount of non-hedonic value doesn't have to be very great.  Imagine if the value from all the world’s knowledge is about as good as the disvalue of being waterboarded for a half hour.  On this account if a person gained all of the world’s knowledge, got waterboarded for a half hour, and then stopped existing, their life would be good.  This is clearly false.  

Fourth, this has the strange implication of entailing that beings with immense ability to experience hedonic value and immense non-hedonic value should functionally be hedonists.  Given that non-hedonic value maxes out and they can experience immense hedonic value, hedonic considerations should dominate.  

14 Explaining away the non-hedonist intuitions from hedonic starting points is relatively easy.  As Nelson (2020, p.83) notes “The Pro-Hedonist Hypothesis: BPH is true, and we tend to correctly assign positive intrinsic prudential value to pleasure. But we also tend to mistakenly assign positive intrinsic prudential value to other things, just in case they meet these three conditions: 

“(a) We observe them to be consistently conducive to net pleasure for people in general.

“(b) They are not categorically instrumental. 

“(c) They are not activities that are usually done for some external end.

“Our intrinsic prudential intuitions are the products of tacit inferences from features of the given scenarios plus these prior assignments of intrinsic value. (Mutatis mutandis for pain and negative intrinsic prudential value.)”  

Expanding upon (a), Nelson further points out (p.84) 

“Importantly, the pro-hedonist hypothesis does not predict that we will assign intrinsic prudential value to just anything that we observe to be consistently correlated with pleasure or pain for just anyone. Rather, it suggests that we assign such value only to things that we observe to be thusly correlated for people in general. Hence, for example, it does not predict that we will assign positive intrinsic prudential value to our own personal sources of pleasure when we know that our tastes are not widely shared. I consistently take great pleasure in listening to rather abrasive music; the pro-hedonist hypothesis does not predict that I will therefore come to believe that such music is good for people in itself.”

Expanding on (b), Nelson notes (ibid) 

“Furthermore, the pro-hedonist hypothesis says that we assign positive intrinsic prudential value only to things that are not categorically instrumental, i.e. not defined wholly or partially by their instrumental properties. Hence it does not predict that we will assign such value to things like food, which is by definition a means to bodily sustenance; medicine, which is by definition a means to physical health; and money, which is by definition a means to acquire goods and services.”  

Expanding on c, Nelson argues (p.84-85) 

“Finally, the pro-hedonist hypothesis says that we refrain from assigning positive intrinsic prudential value to activities that are usually done for some external end. The activities of eating, drinking, bathing, sex, and masturbation are almost universally associated with net pleasure, but the pro-hedonist hypothesis does not predict that we 85 will assign positive intrinsic prudential value to such activities, because we generally engage in them with some extrinsic goal in mind: nourishment in the case of food, cleanliness in the case of bathing, and net pleasure for all of the above.”

With this theoretical infrastructure in place, it is easy to explain away non-hedonic intuitions.  In fact, this is a remarkably good account of all the intuitions of things that are good other than pleasure, including virtue, friendship, desire fulfillment, love, and important knowledge.  

15 Hedonism opens up the possibility of measurement.  As Bradley (2015, p.20) notes

“The Possibility of Measurement Under most circumstances it is fairly easy to tell when someone is experiencing pleasure or pain, and even easier for one to tell that she herself is having such experiences. This suggests that if hedonism were true - if pleasure and pain were not merely among the constituents, but were the sole constituents, of well-being - there would be some prospect of measuring well-being, even if not very precisely.”  

This does favor hedonism.  While there’s no issue with being hard to measure, it seems like how well off someone is is measurable in principle.  

16 Bradley (2015, p.21) later notes

“Comparing Goods Hedonism seems to have other advantages as well. For example, suppose I am wondering whether reading a book or going for a run would be better for me. The hedonist says that the one that would be better for me is the one that would bring about more pleasure for me. If I would enjoy reading more than running, it would be prudent for me to read. So we have a relatively easy way, at least in principle, to compare the values of our options. Suppose, on the other hand, that there were two things that were intrinsically good for us: pleasure and knowledge, for example. Then we would need some way to compare the value of some pleasure with the value of some knowledge. This would be a very difficult task.”  

This favors the theory in a few distinct ways.  First, it conserves parsimony -- the person who denies hedonism must hold that there are multiple distinct things that are good, which are measured on the same scale, allowing them to be directly compared.  Second, it seems to match our commonsense way of deciding whether to make particular decisions -- when we decide whether to go on a run, we do it largely based on whether we think we’d enjoy it overall.  Third, it seems like we are able to make decisions about the things that make us well off and we do it frequently.  Hedonism explains why deciding whether to read a book or go on a jog is not a hugely complex process.  

17 Our belief in the goodness of pleasure is the type of moral view that is the least likely to be wrong given how simple it is.  While our moral intuitions may lead us astray in complex cases -- ones which involve a variety of different salient decision procedures, when we evaluate one very simple phenomena -- pleasure -- we’re the most likely to be right about that case.  This is for the same reason that one would be expected to be more accurate at answering simple, rather than complex, math problems.  

Additionally, we have direct access to our mental states.  This means we can be much more confident in facts about them than we can be in facts about the external world, in much the same way that we can be much more confident that we are seeing a wall that is red than we can that there is, in fact, a red wall.  

One thing about this argument is worth noting.  This argument, like many of the aforementioned arguments, does nothing to show that things other than pleasure aren’t good for a person; it merely shows that pleasure is good for a person.  However, if one successfully proves that 

1 Things other than pleasure aren’t good for a person

2 Pleasure is good for a person 

They’ll have successfully proven 

3 Only pleasure is goood for a person, which is hedonism.  

Thus, while this argument is, even if successful, not enough by itself to prove hedonism, it does get prove half of that which is needed for hedonism to be true.  

18 The primary reasons people reject hedonism are based on it being unintuitive -- there are a variety of cases in which hedonism delivers judgments that deviate from common sense, considerably.  However, we’d expect our intuitions to be often wrong.  As Sinhababu (2022) notes 

“Arguments from disagreement find widespread inconsistencies in human moral belief, showing that any process generating them is unreliable.15 Opinions about the permissibility of genocide serve as an example, differing dramatically throughout history.16 Consider the commands of the Old Testament’s divine lawgiver, in a book considered holy by most alive today: “You shall save alive nothing that breathes, but you shall utterly destroy them, the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, as the Lord your God has commanded.”17 Subsequent millennia saw countless societies proudly commit genocide. Even otherwise advanced societies of the mid-20th century thought it right to kill millions. Some hoped to kill millions more. Given how many human cultures thought it right to slaughter neighboring cultures and take their resources, we who regard genocide as impermissible may be in the historical minority. 

“Moral disagreement is similarly broad on many other important issues, including animal treatment, slavery, sexual morality, distributive justice, and gender roles. Disagreement extends to seemingly easy moral questions where error would lead to countless deaths—is genocide wrong? Any process generating most human moral judgments can’t be reliable, as it produces enough disagreement to entail widespread error and therefore unreliability.”

Thus, the fact that our moral intuitions sometimes diverge from hedonism isn’t evidence against hedonism -- given the dramatic record of human error, it’s what we’d expect if hedonism were correct.  This doesn’t mean that intuitions can’t be evidence -- if we have five different intuitions that all point in the same direction, if they’re all 60% accurate, the odds they’d converge on the wrong result is 1.024%, meaning that converging intuitions provide similarly strong evidence.  Similarly, intuitions governing very simple cases are also the types of intuitions that we’d expect to be reliable.  However, this means that the counterexamples to hedonism must meet a high bar -- they must resist debunking, converge, and be about relatively simple cases.  There do not seem to be any that are up for such a difficult task.  Thus, if one accepts the previous considerations favoring the goodness of pleasure and badness of pain, this arguments establishes that we need nothing else; this judgment is sufficient to explain all of the data of well-being. 

Non-Hedonically Harmful Molestation objection 

Non-hedonists could argue that hedonism doesn’t adequately explain the things that make people well off.  For example, if a person is molested while unconscious without their knowledge, this seems bad for them, even if they don’t find out about it.  

However, this intuition can also be explained as a case of caring about hedonic value maximizing heuristics.  A similar strategy to the one deployed by (Nelson, 2020) can be employed here.  In the case of all of the things that we think of as bad that don’t cause hedonic harm, all of them meet the following criteria.  

A They are usually harmful 

B They are usually done by people who we think are immoral 

C They are things which make society go best when discouraged 

Molestation meets these criteria perfectly; it is usually harmful, done by people we think are immoral, and make society go best when they’re discouraged. The same is true of rights violations like theft, torture for the greater good murder for the greater good, and every other alleged counterexample to the claim that a person is only harmed if it makes their conscious experience less pleasant,  It’s worth noting that if we take away the fulfillment of these criteria, but make the acts the same, the intuitions go away.  If, for example, if a molestation occurred by a being that looked roughly humanoid, but the being was not conscious and conducted the molestation as a result of being programmed to do so by entirely random processes, caused by a vastly improbable tornado that assembled it, and the person who was molested never found out about it, it doesn’t seem intuitively like the victim was made worse off.  

We can consider another case that has fewer real world components to get a clearer picture.  Suppose that it were the case that every second aliens molest every human googol times.  No human ever finds out about it.  Additionally suppose that aliens start out experiencing enormous amounts of agony, which is diminished every time they molest a human, such that if they molested no humans, their suffering would be greater than the sum total of suffering in human history.  However, if they molest humans googol times, they are able to have enjoyable mental states.  In this case, it seems that what the aliens are doing is justified.  No human ever finds out about it or is made hedonically worse off.  However, if this is bad for people, we must stipulate that not only are the aliens' actions bad, they’re by far the worst act in the history of the world.  

If we believed the aliens molestation was one one thousandth as immoral as a traditional molestation, and stipulate that there are as many molestations done by humans each as there are humans, we’d have to stipulate that the aliens molestation that causes no one’s experiences to be worse is 10^97 times worse than all sexual assaults done by humans.  Thus, if one could either prevent all sexual assaults done by humans or have a 1 in 10^97 chance of preventing the aliens actions. 

One might hold the intuition that the aliens' actions are still wrong.  However, it seems hard to hold that the aliens actions are the worst thing in the world by orders of magnitude--such that the holocaust is functionally a rounding error.  

If one holds the intuition that the aliens' actions are wrong, we can change the situation to make it even more counterintuitive.  Suppose the aliens are comprised fully of air.  Thus, when they molest people, they just swap out with the air in front of people.  Surely the air deriving sexual pleasure from entering us would not be the worst thing in the world.  

Objections to desire theory 

One could object that the things that it is rational for one to pursue is their own desires, rather than their own hedonic value.  However, this view seems mistaken.  The arguments in this section draw heavily on the criticisms of desire theory provided by Singer and de Lazari-Radek (2014, p.200-227).  It seems clear that there are some types of desires that are worth pursuing, and others that are not.  I shall argue that only the desires for hedonic value are worth pursuing.  

1 Imagine several cases of pursuers of their own desires.  

A A person who is a consistent anorexic, who has a preference for a thin figure, even if it results in them starving.  

B A person who desires to spend their days picking grass, and would prefer that to have more hedonic value.

C A person who has a strong preference for being in an abusive relationship, even if it minimizes their hedonic value.

D A person who is indifferent to suffering that occurs on the left side of their body.  They experience suffering exactly the same way and apprehend it as undesirable, BUT they have an arbitrary aversion to right side suffering infinitely greater than their aversion to left side suffering

It seems intuitively like these preference maximizers are being irrational.  These intuitions seem to be decisive.  

2 What should we do about a person with infinitely strong preferences?  Suppose someone has a strange view, that being within 50 feet of other humans is unfathomably morally wrong.  They would endure infinite torture rather than be within 50 feet of other humans.  It seems like having them be around other humans would still be less bad than inflicting infinite torture upon them.  Infinite preferences seem to pose a problem for preference utilitarianism.  

One could falsely object that such preferences are impossible.  However, this is false; if a person wouldn’t trade being within 50 feet of other humans for any other finite good, then their preference for staying 50 feet away from people is stronger than their preference for 

3 What about circular preferences?  I might prefer apples to bananas, bananas to oranges, but oranges to apples.  Blavatskyy (2002) cites empirical evidence finding that “Around 55% of subjects violate transitivity.”  One’s preferences are transitive only if them preferring A to B and B to C suffices to show that they prefer A to C.  Given that people’s preferences are not transitive, preferences are not something that can be maximized -- there’s no fact of the matter about how strong one’s preferences are in a wide range of cases. 

4 If preferences are not linked to mental states, then we can imagine strange cases where things that seem not to be good or bad for an agent, are good or bad for the agent according to preference utilitarianism.  For example, imagine a person who has a strong preference for their country winning the war, despite being trapped in an inescapable cave.  It seems strange that their side losing the war would be bad for them, despite them never finding out about it.  It also seems strange to imagine that Marx is made worse off by communism not being implemented after his death, or that Milton Friedman is made worse off by regulations that pass after his death.  It seems equally strange to imagine that slave owners were made worse off by racial equality occurring long after their death.  

5 Imagine a dead alien civilization who had a desire for there being no other wide scale civilizations.  If the civilization had enough people, preference views would imply that humanity would have an obligation to go extinct, to fulfill the preference of the alien civilization, despite none of them ever knowing that their preference was fulfilled.  

6 As (Spaid, 2020) argues, desire theories can’t explain the badness of depression.  He writes (p.23)

“To reiterate the simple statement of the problem, desire theories claim that a person is well-off to the extent that they are getting what they want. People who suffer from clinical depression want almost nothing, but the few desires they do have, such as to lie in bed and to avoid contact with others, are satisfied. The desire theory thus seems committed to saying that these depressed people are relatively well-off, or, at least, not badly off. But this seems wrong. Such depressed people are not well-off.”  

Spaid cites the hypothetical case of Jane to drive the point home (p.28-29)

“Jane: Jane is diagnosed with clinical depression, and understands that she is depressed. She also understands that an effective treatment for her depression is available. In other words, she understands that with treatment she would come to have the desires and the joys most non-depressed people have—in short, a normal life. Nevertheless, Jane refuses treatment for her current episode of depression, claiming that she does not care about the treatment outcome—she sees no point in regaining the desire to live because she believes nothing is worth doing.29”  

One might object that appeal to deeper desires can explain why this is not so.  However, as Spade explains (p.36)

“The problem with this response is that empirical evidence indicates that, in many cases, depression eliminates even these deeper desires. Of the criteria listed by the DSMV for a diagnosis of a major depressive episode, one of two criteria that must be met is “markedly diminished interest or pleasure in all, or almost all, activities most of the day, nearly every day”32 This suggests that depression involves a general loss of interest in things, rather than the loss of merely superficial desires. Not only is the depressed person unmotivated to shower or go to work, but they are also unmotivated to spend time with friends and family and engage in leisure activities they once enjoyed.33.”  

Spade adds (p.38)

“However, while it may be true that all depressed people continue to make evaluative judgments, there is evidence that, in some cases of depression, these judgments do not reflect the kind of deep desires which could explain why their life is not going well. Some depressed people say that nothing is worth doing, that there is no purpose or point in life, or that they feel empty.38 In an autobiographical account of his depression, author Andrew Solomon says that, in his depression, “...the meaninglessness of every enterprise and every emotion, the meaninglessness of life itself, becomes selfevident. The only feeling left in this loveless state is insignificance.”39 Computational neuroscientist Walter Pitts writes, “I have noticed in the last two or three years a growing tendency to a kind of melancholy apathy or depression. [Its] effect is to make the positive value seem to disappear from the world, so that nothing seems worth the effort of doing it, and whatever I do or what happens to me ceases to matter very greatly…”40 The evaluative judgments expressed in these claims appear to reflect either an absence of concerns altogether, or concerns of the wrong sort.”  

Spade provides objections to a series of other ways of attempting to rescue the desire theory.  He argues none of these are successful.  

One might object that we should look at peoples rational preferences, rather than the preferences that they in fact have.  However, this is circular.  When analyzing what a rational self-interested person would desire, merely saying their rational self interest is not helpful.  However, using this criterion explains why a consistent anorexic, grass picker, or one who desires being in an abusive relationship seems to harbor irrational preferences.  Similarly, preferences for states of the world after one dies seem irrational, for one cannot benefit from them if they are dead.  It’s hard to imagine a rational preference that is not linked back to hedonic value.  For one to hold this view they’d have to give a non hedonistic account of rational preferences.  

One might additionally argue that what matters is people's mental experience of having their preferences fulfilled.  Yet this seems not to be the case.  As Singer and de Lazari-Radek (2014) point out, citing Parfit, if a person had got addicted to a drug that was free, had no negative side effects, and that they had easy access to, their addiction wouldn’t seem to make them better off.  Each day they would have a preference for consuming the drug, rather than not consuming it, yet it seems hard to imagine that it would be good for them to consume the drug, assuming it does not make them happy at all.  

Additionally, imagine a case where, for most of a person's life, they have had a strong desire to die a democrat.  However, on their death they convert to become a conservative, knowing that their desire to be a registered democrat upon death has not been fulfilled.  It seems it would be good for them to register as a republican, if it made them happy, even if it reduced their overall preference fulfillment.  

One might object that this is a negative preference, rather than a positive one.  This person has no positive preference for the drug, merely a preference for not missing the drug.  Yet this seems hard to justify.  In this case of the drug, they would not be harmed by not consuming the drug, their desire would merely not be fulfilled.  It seems nonetheless like the drug would not benefit them.  

Conversely, it seems clear that other types of preferences are good to create.  Creating a preference for reading books that brings one immense joy is a good thing.  Preferences should be created if and only if they improve the hedonic value of the subject.  This refutes the negative preference objection.  If one had a strong preference for not going through a day without reading a book, and the books that they read brought them great joy, it would be good to create the preference, even if the preference were a negative preference.  

Objections to objective list theory 

One might adopt objective list theory, according to which what matters is fulfillment of a list of objectively good things, happiness, friendship, honor, health, and others.  This view runs into several issues -- along with all the issues previously described that plague all non-hedonic accounts.  

First, it’s difficult to give an adequate account of what makes something part of the objectively good list.  Hedonism is monist, saying that there’s only one type of thing that is good.  Objective list theories problematically say that there are a series of unconnected things that are good.  This is less parsimonious and fails to provide an adequate account of how things are good.  It seems a priori more plausible that there would be some good experiences than that there would be an unrelated bundle of good things that aren’t tied to experience.  

Second, objective list theories can’t account for why things are only good for sentient beings.  It seems conceivable that, on objective list theories, non-sentient beings could fulfill things on their objective list.  Objective list theories just say that things are good in virtue of being part of an objective list, however, there’s no necessary correlation between beings experiencing hedonic value or suffering and things being able to be part of the objective list.  

Third, objective list theories can’t account for why all the things that are on the objective list are generally conducive to hedonic value.  Virtue, friendship, love, and decency are generally conducive to hedonic value.  

Fourth, objective list theories are elitist (Crisp, 2001), holding that things can be good for people even if they neither want them nor derive any positive experience from them.  It’s counterintuitive that an unenjoyable experience that one doesn’t want can be good for them.  

Fifth, all of the things on the objective list only seem good if they’re generally conducive to hedonic value.  We might hold that knowledge is good, but it would be strange to suppose that arbitrary facts that benefit no one are good.  The world would not be a better place if we all had the information about whether the number of particles in the universe were even or odd.  Friendship might be good, but only if the friends are made mutually better off.  

Sixth, objective list theories would have trouble accounting for strange counterfactual alien scenarios.  We can imagine an alien civilization that derives primary satisfaction from producing helium.  This alien civilization reproduces asexually when helium is produced and only cares about knowledge to the extent that it maximizes helium.  This alien civilization finds friendship and love to be deeply unpleasant--strange deviant things that only bizarre subsets of the population care about.  These alien philosophers adopt an objective list theory where the only member of the objective list is helium maximization and see it as an absurd implication of hedonic views that they tolerate bizarre deviations from the good like love, friendship, and (non helium maximization related) knowledge.  

The aliens do not actively detest love or friendship, they merely find them far less good than helium maximization.  They view love and friendship the way one might view watching paint dry.  Alien Hume famously said that it is no better to prefer the destruction of all helium to the scratching of one's finger.  

It seems clear that, for these aliens, helium maximization is the thing that they should do.  They should not pursue friendship if they don’t want it.  Nor should they pursue love.  If we could convince the aliens that they had an obligation to maximize some non-helium related thing, it would be bad to do so, for they’d be far less happy.  

Perhaps you don’t share the helium intuition, thinking that this practice is so strange that it can’t be actually good.  However, if we think broadly, many of the things that we think are good are no less arbitrary than helium maximization.  Sex is good, yet deriving pleasure from sex is no stranger than deriving pleasure from helium.  Music is good, despite it being arbitrarily tuned noises.  Presumably listening to loud clanging would not be good, to the extent that it is not enjoyable.  It seems nearly impossible to give an account of music according to which it’s part of the objective list, but listening to frying pans clanging together is not.  

Debunking Account for Objective List Theory 

There’s a psychological phenomena that plausibly explains why people are attracted to objective list theory, despite it being false.  This is called the halo effect.   Nicolau, Mellinas, & Martín-Fuentes (2020) explain

“In the halo effect, the assessment of some attributes can affect other attributes because individuals cannot evaluate each attribute in isolation. In the previous example of the cleanliness attribute, the score obtained will not only depend on how objectively clean the hotel is but also on other external factors that people responsible for cleaning cannot control.”

Our assessment of various positive attributes is intricately linked.  Thus, we’d expect to conclude that, since pleasure correlates so strongly with the various things on the objective list, the other things on the objective list take on the desirability of pleasure, even if they don’t actually.  

Much like with Pavlov’s dogs, if every time we see an example of knowledge, friendship, or personal achievement, it ends up being good, we make thing it will always be good, even if it didn’t produce utility.  This would, however, be in error.  

Objections to the experience machine 

We might adopt the view that what matters morally is that one derives hedonic value from things that are truly good.  This would avoid the counterintuitive conclusion of utilitarianism that we should plug into the experience machine, where we would have a simulated life that we believe is real, with more hedonic value and it avoids Sidgwick’s objection that all the things that seem to be rights or virtues are hedonic value maximizing heuristics.  However, this view has a variety of issues.  

The previous objections to objective list theories still apply.  Additionally, there are compelling counterexamples.  Suppose one gained infinite joy from picking grass.  Surely picking grass would make them better off.  Additionally, suppose that a person was in a simulated torture chamber.  Surely that would be bad for them.  Unless there’s some fundamental asymmetry between happiness and suffering, the same principle would apply to happiness.  A simulated experience of happiness would still be a good thing.  Additionally, it’s unclear how this would account for composite experiences of happiness from two different things.  Suppose that someone gains happiness by the combination of gaining deep knowledge and engaging in some strange sexual act.  Would the happiness they got from that act be morally relevant?  If so, then if there is at least some good act relating to any “impure” pleasure they get, such as knowledge acquisition or careful introspection, then that act would be morally good.  Additionally, suppose that one was in the experience machine, but exercised wisdom and virtue.  Then would their happiness be good for them?  This shows the logistical troubles with such a view.  

If we say that happiness is not at all good, absent being in the real world, then it would be morally neutral to make people already in the experience machine achieve far less happiness than they would otherwise.  This is a very counterintuitive view.  Additionally, if we accept this view, we would have to accept one of two other conclusions.  If the suffering of the people in the experience machine is morally bad, but their happiness is not morally good, giving them five million units of happiness and one unit of suffering would be morally bad, because it brings about something bad, but nothing good.  This is a very difficult pill to swallow.  However, if neither their happiness nor their suffering is morally relevant, then it would be morally neutral to cause them to suffer immensely (aside from issues of consent).  

This broader point can be illustrated with an example.  Imagine a twin earth, identical to our own, but where no one had a preference for not being in the experience machine.  To them, only their mental experiences of things matter.  It makes no difference, to them, whether they are in the experience machine or not.  It seems that in this world, there would  be nothing wrong with plugging into the experience machine.  The only reason plugging into the experience machine seems objectionable is because most people have a preference for not plugging into the experience machine, and find the thought distressing.  

Additional objections can be given to the experience machine (Singer and Lazari-Radek, 2014).  Several factors count against our intuitions about the experience machine.  First, there is widespread status quo bias.  As Singer and Lazari-Radek explain (p. 257)

“Felipe De Brigard decided to test whether the status quo bias does make a difference to our willingness to enter the experience machine. He asked people to imagine that they are already connected to an experience machine, and now face the choice of remaining connected, or going back to live in reality. Participants in the experiment were randomly offered one of three different vignettes: in the neutral vignette, you are simply told that you can go back to reality, but not given any information about what reality will be like for you. In the negative vignette, you are told that in reality you are a prisoner in a maximum-security prison, and in the positive vignette you are told that in reality you are a multi-millionaire artist living in Monaco. Of participants given the neutral vignette, almost half (46 per cent) said that they would prefer to stay plugged into the experience machine. Among those given the negative vignette, that figure rose to 87 per cent. Most remarkably, of those given the positive vignette, exactly half preferred to stay connected to the machine, rather than return to reality as a multi-millionaire artist living in Monaco.23”.  

Weijers (2014) likewise found that when status quo bias, other case-specific confusion, and biases relating to one being the person plugging in--rather than a stranger--were eliminated, most people advised the stranger to plug in.   This strongly counts against the conclusion that we have an intrinsic preference for reality.  

Additionally, there is a strong evolutionary reason for organisms to have a preference for actually doing things in the real world, rather than wireheading.  If the point of pleasure is to encourage activities, then having pleasure be preferred to those activities would prove evolutionarily counterproductive.  

(Bramble, 2016) in his paper titled “The Experience Machine,” provides several more objections to the experience machine.  First Bramble notes that the important question isn’t whether one would in fact plug in, but whether it seems intuitive that one should plug in, from the standpoint of self interest.  There are instances of things that would make a person well off, but that they wouldn’t end up doing.  Second, Bramble notes that there could be irrational biasing factors, like status quo bias, revulsion to having wires in one’s skull, and more.  Third, it’s hard to have purely well-being based intuition about the case, given that plugging in would make a person no longer able to interact with their loved ones.  

Fourth, Bramble argues for the robust possibility of a debunking account, wherein a person’s intuitions about the case don’t track the truth.  Bramble notes (p.140) we might find “the prospect of plugging in scary, repulsive, or alien, and our emotional response here is clouding or contaminating our intuition concerning well-being.”

Bramble continues, writing

“A further possibility is suggested by Matthew Silverstein.30 According to Silverstein, ‘[o]ur [well-being] intuitions tend to ref lect our desires and preferences’, and we have been conditioned to have a strong ‘desire to remain connected to the real world, to track reality’. 31 Why have we been conditioned to have this desire? Roughly, it is because having this desire tends to lead one to happiness, and desires that tend to lead one to happiness thereby get stronger. 

“At the same time, desires that tend to lead one away from happiness thereby get weaker, and the desire for happiness itself is among these latter desires. Over time, then, our desire for happiness itself gets weaker, and along with it (since our intuitions reflect our desires) our pro-hedonism intuitions.

“Roger Crisp suggests a further explanation of the intuition that (1) is true. He says that wanting or caring about authenticity in relationships would likely have boosted the reproductive fitness of early humans. He writes: 

‘Valuing honesty, transparency, genuineness, and so on, has a clear pay-off: it fends off deception, and thereby assists understanding of the world, which itself issues in a clear evolutionary advantage.’32”

Bramble raises some worries for this account, writing (p.141),

“First, it would be helpful if these authors were to explain exactly what the process is by which our well-being intuitions are affected by the desires, values, dispositions, or beliefs in question. Suppose Silverstein is right that we are likely to arrive at a powerful desire for contact with reality via the processes he describes. How does this desire in turn lead to our having a pre-theoretical feeling that contact with reality is intrinsically good, not only for oneself, but for people more generally? Or suppose Crisp is right that valuing authenticity, or wanting to really achieve things (as opposed merely to enjoying the fruit of one’s achievements), tended to boost the fitness of early humans. How does this valuing or desiring lead one in turn to feel (again, at a pre-theoretical level) that authenticity and accomplishment are good for those who possess them? What is the process?”

The process is not an especially mysterious one.  We know that normative ideas are intertwined, such that if there’s a strong negative reaction to a particular act or character feature, it will produce negative judgments in similar cases.  As Schaich Borg, Lieberman & Kiehl (2008) note, disgust reactions can cause related moral judgments.  Similarly, De Martino et al (2006) notes that emotional reactions, heuristics, and biases can all change moral judgments.  

Next, Bramble questions which well-being intuitions we can rely on, given that the arguments previously described establish some of them as debunkable. The previous arguments, however, do not totally rule out the intuition, merely undermine its reliability.  Careful reflection on the nature of what really matters can lead to reliable judgments about well-being.  This chapter has previously described evolutionarily how some of our judgments about the matter can be reliable.  

Finally, Bramble claims that there are people who don’t have the beliefs or desires cited previously, who nonetheless find plugging in to be unintuitive.  Several points are worth noting.  First, one is often not introspectively aware of the underlying cause of their action (Nisbett and Bellows, 1977), (Nisbett and Wilson, 1977), and (Schwitzgebel, 2008).  Thus, even if one is not aware of the motivation described, that doesn’t mean they don’t have the motivation.  Second, there would have to be some other motivation for not plugging in that Bramble would need to appeal to, and that motivation would plausibly be debunkable.  Third, a related cluster of cases shows that a preference for the real is plausibly underlying this, leading to, for example, a desire not to be in the matrix.   

A final point that can be made is that the preference for the real can be explained on a utilitarian account; preferring the real tends to maximize hedonic value.  In cases where it does not, this intuition seems to fade.  It is counterintuitive to think that there would be something wrong about plugging into a virtual reality game, for a short time, because that is something we have familiarity with, and tends to maximize hedonic value.  

Knowledge Isn’t Intrinsically Valuable 

Additionally, let’s consider plausible candidates for things that may be worth putting on the objective list.  One might hold that knowledge is worth putting on the objective list (Rice, 2013).  However, when we consider the knowledge that could be a plausible candidate for being worth putting on the objective list, it becomes clear that the underlying motivation is hedonic.  

Imagine if a person could gain omniscience and be brutally tortured to death.  They wouldn’t be well off.  However, if knowledge makes a person well off, then being omniscient would grant infinite knowledge, so they would be well off.  Thus, knowledge does not intrinsically make a person better off if they’re miserable.  Similarly if there was a conscious AI that was miserable all the time that possessed all of the knowledge on wikipedia, it would not be well off, despite its enormous knowledge.  

There are many types of knowledge that don’t seem to make people well off.  For example, I would not be better off if I knew whether the number of mosquitos in the universe was even or odd, the current temperature in Kelvin of the sun, the age of a random woman in the middle of Florida named Linda who I’ve never met, the height of the eiffel tower, or the melting point of gold.  However, there is lots of knowledge that does make me better off, such as the solution to the hard problem of consciousness, the correct view of normative ethics, the correct view of meta-ethics, the correct answers to questions on tests that I take in class, which political candidate is better, and what the best charity is.  If we survey the previous cases, it seems clear that there’s a strong correlation between knowledge appearing to be the type of knowledge that makes a person better off and it tending to produce hedonic benefit.  Thus, hedonism provides the best explanation of why the types of knowledge that make people better off occupy the particular narrow range that they do.  Additionally, there are many examples of knowledge that seem to make a person worse off that, once again, correspond with the types of knowledge that produce hedonic harm.  

Suppose that there is some person who I hold in high regard who thinks that I’m idiotic.  This knowledge wouldn’t seem to make me better off.  Similarly, if it turned out that five years ago a tiny amount of fecal matter found its way into my food when I was eating at a restaurant that ended up not causing me any harm, that knowledge wouldn’t seem to make me better off.  

Against the Sadistic Pleasure Objection

The objective list theorist could argue against hedonism based on bad sources of pleasure.  For example, even if a crowd of jeering spectators derived immense pleasure from one person being tortured, it would still be bad to torture the person.  

However, hedonism is able to accommodate the intuition against bad pleasures.  Every pleasure that we think of as a bad pleasure is not conducive to hedonic value generally.  Sadistically torturing people does not generally maximize hedonic value.  

Additionally, this principle has compelling counter-examples.  We can consider a man called Tim.  Tim derives immense satisfaction from watching scenes that appear to depict tortures.  Tim would never torture anyone and abhors violence.  In fact, he sometimes feels guilty about his strange desires and donates vast amounts of money to charities.  Tim also makes sure that the content that he watches that depicts people being tortured does not actually involve people being tortured.  Tim spends hours searching for content that looks like people being tortured but has no actual people being tortured.  Additionally, we can suppose that this is the highlight of Tim’s life.  He enjoys it so much that, without it his life would be miserable.  Despite suffering clinical depression, Tim finds the experiences so enjoyable that he regards his life as generally good.  It seems in this case, Tim is truly made better off by the joy he derives from this sadistic content.  

However, suppose additionally that, despite Tim’s incredibly careful selection process, Tim is deceived by an evil demon, who manipulates the laws of physics to make people actually be brutally tortured, despite any reasonable observer concluding that no one was truly being tortured. It seems that in this case, while the person who is tortured is made worse off by the torture, Tim is made better off by it.  All else equal, it seems that making Tim enjoy viewing the torture less (assuming he’d view the same amount of torture) is bad.  

Imagine another case of an alien civilization who views the suffering of humans.  This alien civilization starts in a state of vast agony, yet becomes less miserable each time they watch a human suffer.  If they view all human suffering their overall hedonic state drops to zero, when it starts off significantly worse than being boiled alive.  Again, it seems like the aliens' sadism is not a bad thing.  

If we think that enjoying the suffering of others is actively bad, independent of the suffering of others, then it would be morally good to make the aliens unable to see suffering.  This is deeply implausible.  

Additionally, if we think that sadistic pleasure is morally bad then if there were 100^100 aliens who derived immense sadistic pleasure from viewing the holocaust, we would have to say that the primary harms of the holocaust came from them bringing the aliens pleasure.  This is implausible.  If this were true then if one could either shut off the screens to make the aliens unable to view the holocaust and derive sadistic pleasure from it or could directly end the holocaust, it would be better to shut off the aliens' screens, letting the holocaust continue.  This is implausible.  

One might object that deriving pleasure from sadism is morally neutral, neither good nor bad.  However, in the scenarios both posited, it seems obvious that the world is better because the aliens enjoy suffering enough to not be as miserable as beings being boiled alive.  If the only way for the aliens to relieve their unfathomable agony was to torture one person this seems justified.  

We can imagine another case of a person, Wyatt, who takes immense satisfaction in eating meat because he knows that the animal suffered.  He feels deeply guilty about this fact, but cannot enjoy eating meat unless he knows that the animal suffered.  Wyatt continues to eat meat, but donates to charities that help animals because he feels guilty.  In this case, it seems that Wyatt enjoying the meat, assuming it won’t cause him to eat any more meat, is not a bad thing.  To the extent that Wyatt enjoys meat because he knows about the suffering, and others enjoy meat that causes enormous suffering, but don’t care whether or not they know about the suffering, it’s hard to see how Wyatt’s meat enjoyment is any worse than any of ours.  Much like there seems to be no morally relevant difference between a person who tortures other because they like when others suffer and one who likes the taste of people after they’ve been tortured, there’s no difference between one who enjoys the suffering of animals that they eat and one who merely enjoys the taste of the animals.  

If Wyatt is morally no different from the rest of people when he eats meat, then either Wyatt’s sadistic meat eating is morally good or the joy that most people get from eating meat is morally neutral.  However, this is deeply implausible.  If meat tasted less good, but people ate the same amount of meat, that would be a worse world.  If sadistic pleasure can be good, then enough sadistic pleasure can outweigh the badness of torture.  

Additionally, there are many cases where people enjoy the suffering of others, which are not found objectionable.  If the parents of a murder victim derive satisfaction from knowing that the murderer is rotting in prison, it wouldn’t be desirable to deprive them of that satisfaction.  

Additionally, we can imagine a world exactly like our own, except humans would never be happy in their lives unless they, upon their sixth birthday, slap someone in the face and revel in the enjoyment.  In this case, all of their enjoyment is coming from the fact that they slapped someone, but it wouldn't be good to condemn everyone to never being happy.  

Additionally, we can imagine a scenario where every person will be given an extra year of happy life by torturing one person.  In this case, their happy life is only existing because of the torture, but this case seems clearly justified.  

There’s the additional problem of determining which pleasures are sadistic. One might conclude that pleasure is vicious if one derives pleasure from the knowledge that some act is immoral.  However, this seems to run into counterexamples.  

 Consider the following cases.  

1. A utilitarian beats up someone who has sexually abused their child--despite believing that doing so is morally wrong.  They derive schadenfreude from doing so.  Part of the schadenfreude they get comes from knowing that they’re doing something morally wrong--treating someone badly the way the person treated their child badly.  

2. A person derives no pleasure from knowing that purchasing child pornography is morally wrong.  They would prefer it if it weren’t morally wrong.  Despite that, they derive pleasure from child pornography.  

This account would seem to say that the first form of pleasure is vicious while the second one is not.  This is implausible.  

One might say that a pleasure is vicious if one derives it from some immoral activity that they know to be immoral.  However, this runs into issues of its own.  For one it is circular.  Suppose that some immoral act like torture gives lots of happiness to lots of people, such that the overall hedonic value in the world increases.  Whether that pleasure is vicious will depend on whether that act is immoral, yet whether the act is immoral will depend on whether the pleasure is vicious.  Thus, this is circular.  Additionally, it can’t account for lots of cases.  

1. Suppose that one derives pleasure from eating meat, but they think eating meat is morally wrong.  This account would say that this pleasure is vicious, and it would be better if they didn’t like eating meat.  This is not plausible.  

2. This also gets the wrong result about the Schadenfreude case given above.  

3. Suppose that one is a utilitarian.  They think it would be morally wrong to go on a vacation instead of donating to charity.  This account would hold that their happiness on the trip would be vicious and either not good or bad.  

4. This would also hold that a person who is employed by some immoral industry (E.G. weapons manufacturing) would have all of their pleasure experienced while on the job be vicious, and thus not good for the world.  

5. Suppose someone steals a pain killer from someone else who they know needs it a bit more.  On this account, unless there’s a strange asymmetry between sadistic pleasure and sadistic pain avoidance, the world would be better if they don’t get much relief from the painkillers.  

This account also runs into problems based on the time in which people find out that particular acts are immoral.  Suppose that someone purchases meat despite knowing it to be immoral, or that one is a kleptomaniac and steals something.  They then become convinced that the act of acquiring the goods--either the stolen product or the meat--was immoral.  However, they can’t return them so they decide to use the product or eat the food.  This account would seem to say that their happiness is vicious.  This is implausible.  

Additionally, cases of sadism seem to create an incentive for ignorance.  If an instance of pleasure is only vicious if the people experiencing it derive pleasure from knowing that their acts are bad, that makes them morally better if they know fewer things.  This is implausible--the true morality should not punish knowledge and reward ignorance of the wrongness of one's actions.  

What if one purchases meat and then becomes convinced that the act is immoral.  Would that retroactively make the pleasure they get from the meat vicious--such that it doesn’t make the world better?  

Our anti-sadism intuition comes from the fact that sadism is not conducive to hedonic value.  However, if it were conducive to hedonic value, it would be justified.  In the cases like Schadenfreude, where we derive joy from the suffering of others in ways that make things go best, we don’t find it counterintuitive.  

Additionally, it’s hard to give an account of why sadistic pleasure doesn’t make a person better off.  Positing it just as a brute fact is not satisfactory.  Yet it’s unclear why the causal origin of a pleasure determines whether it benefits someone.  One account may be that it’s bad to derive benefit from something bad.  However, this is clearly false.  If I study the holocaust and use my knowledge of the holocaust to learn important lessons which make both my life and the world better, this clearly wouldn’t be a bad thing.  Thus, the challenge is to provide an account of why sadistic pleasure is bad that doesn’t spill over to other things that are clearly not bad.  

We also have a plausible psychological debunking argument of the belief that sadistic pleasure is not good.  As has been noted by many, including Shivers (1998) and Rowley, & Ramasamy (2016) there’s a psychological phenomenon known as the horn effect, whereby people tend to group negative traits together.  For example, they assume that because someone is mean to animals, they must be mean to humans as well.  

Given that there’s a psychological bias to hold that negative traits cluster together, even when they don’t really cluster together, even were sadistic pleasures intrinsically good we’d expect to have the belief that they weren’t intrinsically good.  Thus, the fact that sadistic pleasures appear bad is not good evidence that they’re not good, because it’s roughly equally likely on each hypothesis.  

Thus, we have a decisive defeater of the sadistic pleasure’s not being good (or even being bad!) view.  It is both subject to an extremely forceful debunking arguemnt, and it is undercut by many more overlapping, far more forceful intuitions.  It is additionally not possible to give a coherent account of what a sadistic pleasure is, or even why it’s not good.  

Against the version of objective list theory that says that what matters is appreciating the good 

The objective list theorist could argue that what matters is deriving pleasure from appreciating the good.  Thus, in the case of deriving unrelated pleasure from good things, this wouldn’t increase well-being because, the pleasure is not related to appreciation of the good.  On this account, the formula for determining how much one is benefited by an event is the following.  

Well-being (which describes that which is non instrumentally good for an individual) from event Q  = Pleasure + (Pleasure x objective list based value of Q).  Thus, the value of pleasure from being in love or from friendship are greater than the value of pleasure from things like eating ice-cream.  To illustrate, eating ice cream produces well-being of P, where P is the raw pleasure of the experience, because eating ice cream is not part of the objective list.  Thus, for eating ice cream (W is well-being, P is pleasure, O is objective list based value) W= P + P x 0= P.  This view, however, runs into issues.  

1 Suppose that the value of having a deep conversation with someone has an objective list fulfillment value of 1 and brings a great deal of pleasure.  If this were true then having the epiphany while mulling over the ideas with someone will be twice as valuable as having the epiphany while not mulling over the ideas.  It seems strange to think that whether the epiphany was a result of talking with the other person is relevant to how good the epiphany is. 

2 There seem to be troubles with disentangling what types of pleasures are generated by appreciating someone else.  Suppose that every time a person interacts with another they begin laughing uncontrollably.  In this case, is their happiness fulfilling the objective list. 

3 It seems to result in equal pleasures and pains not offsetting.  Suppose that everytime I see someone I get a headache, such that the overall quality of interacting with them is neutral.  The pleasure precisely cancels out the badness of the headache.  In this case, it seems strange to say that it's actively good to interact with them.  However, on an OLT account, it seems it would be, because the pain's badness is left unchanged by the interaction, but the pleasure's goodness increases because I'm interacting with another person.

4 This seems to run into strange conclusions relating to a modified utility monster.  Suppose that there’s a being who derives a trillion times as much pleasure from all experiences as the average human.  Additionally, suppose that the mini utility monster has the property of universal experiencing, where, after they die they will have all experiences that they did not have in life.  For example, if the modified utility monster eats chocolate ice-cream and then immediately dies, after death it would have every possible experience, except those of eating the precise type of ice-cream.  However, if the mini modified monster dies without ever being in love, then in the afterlife it will derive pleasure from the experience of being in love, but will check “being in love” off its objective list.  Suppose we think that the objective list based value of being in love is 1, such that half of the benefits of being in love come from the happiness of it, and half of them come from the intrinsic value of love.  Now, we have the option of sacrificing a billion people to allow the utility monster to find love.  In this case, being in love will not change the composition of the utility monster's experiences.  Every positive experience that the utility monster has from being in love will be an experience that they will be deprived of when they die.  However, on objective list theories, the value of the utility monster being truly in love with an actual person is twice as good as the value of having the experience of being in love, but not actually being in love with a real person.  Thus, the objective list theory would entail that it would be good to sacrifice a billion people to cause the utility monster to find love, even though the utility monster’s subjective experience will be fully unchanged.  This is deeply implausible.  

5 We can create a newly modified utility monster.  This utility monster experiences far more net hedonic value than all humans combined.  This utility monster does not have all experiences after its death.  However, this utility monster is a hedonist.  It’s view is that love is only instrumentally valuable.  Thus, when it is in love, it is not appreciating the love for its own sake--it’s only appreciating the pleasure it gets from being in love.  Thus, on objective list theories, the hedonic value it gets from being in love is no more valuable than the  the hedonic value it gets from eating ice-cream, because it is not getting pleasure from appreciating things that are truly good.  

Suppose additionally that one has the option to sacrifice a billion people to convince the utility monster to be an objective list theorist.  The utility monster is currently in love, and the hedonic value it gets from being in love is greater than the sum total of hedonic value for the aforementioned billion people.  On objective list theories, it seems that sacrificing a billion people to change the mind of the utility monster would be good, for it would raise the value of the pleasure by causing it to be experienced as a result of appreciation of love, even though the total amount of hedonic value doesn’t change.  In fact, we can even suppose that becoming convinced of the objective list theory causes the utility monster to become distraught, bringing about half as much suffering as the pleasure they get from being in love.  Nonetheless, objective list theories seem to hold that sacrificing a billion people to make its hedonic state worse, but to convince it of objective list theory would be good, because the extra value of the appreciation of love outweighs both the deaths of a billion people and the decrease in hedonic value from the utility monster becoming distraught over being convinced of objective list theory.  This is similarly deeply implausible.  

6 Suppose that Jim and Mary are married.  Jim is out of town, but is going to watch a movie.  Mary is also going to watch a movie.  However, the next day Jim shall return, and they shall watch a movie together.  Consider the following happiness distributions of movies.  

Movie A brings Jim 10 units of happiness and Mary 10

Movie B brings Jim 150 units of happiness and Mary 1 

Movie C brings Jim 1 units of happiness and Mary 150 

While watching the movies, both Jim and Mary appreciate the presence of the other and bond over the movies, such that watching the movies with the other increases their enjoyment of the movie by 5 units of each.  It seems intuitive that the optimal arrangement would be for Jim to watch movie B while out of town, Mary to watch movie C when Jim is out of town, and then they together watch movie A.  However, objective list theorists cannot accommodate this intuition.  

Suppose that an objective list theorist says that, in this case, the objective list based value of watching the movie with their Spouse has value of .5, such that two thirds of the value of watching the movie comes from the pleasure it brings, and one third comes from the value of watching it with their spouse.  On this account the total value of watching the intuitive arrangement, where Mary watches Movie C by herself, Jim watches Movie B by himself, and them watching movie A together is 150+150+ 1.5 x ((10+5)(2))= 345.  However, if Jim watches B by Himself, Mary watches movie A by herself, and they watch movie C together, the total value would be 150 + 10 + 1.5(155+6)= 394.  Thus, on this account the world is better if Jim and Mary watch together a movie that only one of them enjoys very much, rather than each watching independently the movie that they individually enjoy, and together the movie that they both enjoy.  This is deeply implausible.  

One might object that the well-being they get from watching the movie is not truly a Movie result of appreciating the other.  However, it is hard to draw a distinction between this and other cases.  Suppose that Jim and Mary hold hands during the movie and take great comfort in the presence of the other.  The extra value they get from watching the movie seems to be derived clearly by the appreciation of the other.  Additionally, suppose that when they watch the movie with the other, the only enjoyment they get from the movie relates to focusing on the other.  When they watch the movie with the other they ignore the movie, and simply focus on each other, deriving precisely the same amount of pleasure from it as they would have from watching the movie.  In this case, it still seems like it would be better to watch A together, and each separately enjoy their preferred movie between B and C.  

7 Suppose that Tim and Sue are planning to have a date.  Tim is a big fan of the philosopher Derek Parfit, who advocates for objective list theories.  Parfit is planning to give a talk on Thursday arguing for objective list theory.  Tim is currently a hedonist but thinks it’s very likely that Parfit will convince him that hedonism is false, and objective list theory is correct.  Tim and Sue can either have their date on Wednesday or Friday.  Suppose additionally that being convinced of objective list theory would not increase Tim’s happiness at all.  However, if he became convinced of objective list theory, the happiness he’d get from his interactions with Sue would come from appreciating his relationship with her as being part of the objective list, rather than merely as a tool for increasing mutual happiness.  It seems an objective list theorist would think it rather important that the date is scheduled for Friday, because it increases the value of the date.  If Tim becomes an objective list theorist, the value of the date would increase dramatically (its value would approximately double).  In fact, on objective list theorists' accounts, it seems that convincing hedonists of objective list theory would be extremely important, and dramatically increase the value of their lives.  This is deeply implausible.  Peter Singer’s marriage is no less valuable for him being a hedonist about value.  

8 Suppose we adopt a particular account of consciousness, according to which one’s experience of an object or event is wholly produced by their brain, and does not truly observe the external world.  Instead, the brain receives inputs from the external world and hallucinates a conscious experience that best makes sense of the inputs.  Regardless of the plausibility of this account of consciousness, it seems that objective list theory would hold that it would have significant normative implications.  If one’s experience of being in love with their wife is truly a mental image generated entirely by their brain in a way that makes sense of the signals it’s receiving from the external world, then when one appreciates their loved one, they’re truly only appreciating the joy they get from the mental hallucination.  On objective list theories, this would seem to dramatically undercut the value of all things, for being in love is truly just a mental hallucination that roughly tracks what’s going on in the external world.  However, this is implausible.  Whether or not we are directly observing things as they are, or our brains are making up the world that we see, in a way that roughly mirrors the real world but is understandable to us should not undercut the value of being in love.  

To clarify the case, suppose that when one sees someone with whom they’re in love, the only inputs from the person that they’re truly seeing as they actually are in the real world are a series of photons.  The rest of the person is hallucinated by their mind, in a way that roughly tracks what the other person is actually doing, but is not totally identical.  If this is true, then consciousness is very much like the experience machine, with our mind creating an experience machine-esque experience in ways that roughly track what’s happening in the real world.  

One might object that the well-being we’d experience if this were the case would still fulfill our objective list because it roughly tracks the real world.  Thus, it is close enough to actual perception of the good things for it to count as appreciating the good.  However, this reply runs into several problems.  

First, the objective list theory holds that even if events roughly track what is going on in the real world, as long as they’re not in the real world, they don’t possess the value.  Objective list theorists would presumably object placing one in a modified experience machine, where their actual self is replaced by a robot version of themself, which acts exactly like they would actually act but is not conscious and placing their actual self in an experience machine, where their experiences are identical to what they would be in the real world.  Even if the experience machine caused one to experience a life exactly like the one they were living prior to being in the experience machine, and replaced them with a robot twin who acted like them, such that the world they hallucinated tracked perfectly the life they were previously living, an objective list theorist would presumably find that objectionable.  

Additionally, we can modify the case slightly.  Suppose that the version of the world that they hallucinated was subtly different from the actual world.  For example, in the actual world their wife is relatively physically unattractive.  However, their hallucination of the actual world perceives their wife as being very attractive.  Additionally, the version of the world that they hallucinate has the loudness of often fail to track their true loudness.  Suppose their wife speaks with many decibels, such that direct perception of the world would hear their wife being very loud.  However, the version of reality that their brain hallucinates has their wife appear quieter than she actually is.  In this case, the reality that they’re experiencing does not truly track the external world.  However, this still does not seem to have any significant normative implications.  The objective list theorist, if they hold that they still gain non-hedonic value from true love under this theory of consciousness but don’t gain non-hedonic value from true love in the experience machine, would have to suppose that there’s some threshold at which one’s hallucinations become enough like reality that they gain value from their objective list.  This, however, seems implausible.  A schizophrenic who believes their neighbor is an angel sent by god who they’re in love with does not gain value in proportion to how realistic their view is.  

To illustrate this point more, suppose that my true self is a million miles away.  I am a brain in a vat, but I experience everything exactly as it would affect me if I were actually generated by the brain inside the body that I experience being part of, and the choices I make have exactly the same effects as they would if I were actually generated by the brain inside the body I experience being a part of.  This case is exactly like the case of my actual self, except the thing generating my subjective experience is merely located out of my body and far away.  This doesn’t seem to possess any significant normative implications.  

Now suppose we accept epiphenomenalism--the view that consciousness is causally inert.  Thus, while I’m still the brain in the far away vat, my thoughts don’t cause events.  Instead, it’s the brain waves in the body that I feel like I’m part of that both generate my thoughts and the actions that the body takes.  Surely epiphenomenalism wouldn’t undercut the value of objective list fulfillment.  However, in conjunction these make it so that I’m a discombobulated brain millions of miles away that’s merely experiencing what life would be like inside my body, but that is causally unconnected from my body.  The objective list theory holds that being a causally inert consciousness is not enough to undercut the value of love, but being a causally inert consciousness a galaxy away, whose experiences are projected information sent by observing brain waves does undercut the value of true love.  This is deeply implausible.

It seems like if we accept 

1 Having the true source of our consciousness be far away is morally irrelevant 

2 Having the true source of our consciousness be causally inert is morally irrelevant 

We’d also accept that having the true source of our consciousness far away and causally inert is morally irrelevant.  However, this undercuts the view that switching out a person for a robot copy of themself in a world comprised entirely of robots, such that they don’t realize that they’re interacting with non sentient robots, and their loved ones in the real world don’t realize they’ve been replaced by a robot, but the total composition of their experiences does not change, is morally bad.  However, this case is fundamentally identical to the aforementioned case.  In both cases their consciousness does not causally interact with the world, but they receive information as if they causally interact with the world.  Additionally, in both cases the source of their consciousness is very far away and is receiving inputs identical to the information they’d receive in the real world, but they’re not truly receiving information from the real world.  The only difference between the two cases is that in the robot world the information is being transferred by robots, but in the other world it’s being transferred by faster than light technology that projects information to their brain, which is located very far away. 

9 It seems that objective list theories would have to hold that, if one had the ability to cause imaginary friends had by four-year-olds to exist, it would be extremely good to do so, even if the overall composition of their mental states is neutral, because it would make the relationships that the four-year-olds had with them morally good.  This holds even though the stipulated imaginary friends would disappear the moment that small children grow out of them and experience no well-being or suffering.  However, this is implausible -- it does not seem like a tragedy that imaginary friends that small children interact with do not exist.  

10 These views also violate the following intuitively plausible constraint. 

Pleasure and Non-Hedonic Dominance: For any two lives, if one life contains both more pleasure and more non-hedonic goods than the other life, that life is better.  

This violates it in the following way.  Suppose that the only two goods on the objective list are knowledge and pleasure and pleasure from knowledge is twice as good.  Suppose that, to dramatically simplify things, the relevant feature in regards to knowledge is the number of facts one knows.  Person 1 knows 10,000 facts and has 8,000 units of pleasure.  Person 2 knows 5,000 facts and has 6,000 units of pleasure.  However, all of person 2’s pleasure comes from their acquisition of facts (they are an avid reader of the dictionary and encyclopedia!), while non of person A’s pleasure comes from their acquisition of facts.  Person 1 would have 8,000 units of well-being, while person 2 would have 12,000 units of pleasure.  

11 This leaves one open to the type of Hypersensitivity described earlier by Pummer (2017).  Suppose we adopt, for example, the account that says pleasure is better if it comes from knowledge.  Well, then two lives where one has no knowledge and the other knows exactly one fact and derives all their pleasure from that one fact could differ in overall well-being by any arbitrarily large amount, despite only having arbitrarily small differences in non-hedonic values and identical levels of well-being.  

In the case of friendship, this would mean that, if a hypothetical agent got unfathomable pleasure from hanging with their friend, making them closer to their friend by some arbitrarily small amount could improve the value of the world’s lives by some arbitrarily large amount -- far more than doubling everybody else’s pleasure.  It could do this even if making the person a closer friend made them a bit less happy.  

12 The more plausible versions of this account will probably hold that if your pleasure comes from greater amounts of goods on the objective list then they’re especially valuable.  For example, if you derive pleasure from a deeper friendship, that multiplies that value of the pleasure by more than it would have if you’d derived the same amount of pleasure from a less deep friendship.  However, this violates the following modification of Pummer’s EPLW

SPEPLW: (Some pleasure, enough pain, limited well-being) Any life that contains any arbitrarily small amount of pleasure and at least finite amount of pain P cannot have an overall well-being score that exceeds finite limit L, no matter how much nonhedonic goodness it contains.  After all, arbitrarily large amounts of nonhedonic goods could act as an arbitrarily large multiplier -- no matter how small the amount of pleasure is.  

This can be seen easily with the example of knowledge.  If having more knowledge increases the multiplier, then if a person was in immense agony, constantly tortured, but received a tiny amount of pleasure from having an infinite amount of knowledge, they’d be unfathomably well off.  This is, however, implausible.  

13 This gets a really wrong result when it comes to simultaneous experience of both pleasure and pain.  Suppose a person simultaneously experiences some vast amount of pleasure from a source that’s on the objective list and some far greater amount of pain.  Suppose the multiplier is 2 times.  Suppose additionally that they experience 2 billion units of pain, and 1.5 billion units of pleasure from friendship.  Additionally suppose that vicious torture causes overall about 100 million units of pain.  Thus, their mental states, considered in isolation, are far worse than that of a person being tortured.  The objective-list theorist who adopts the multiplier view has to think that this person is very well off -- for their pleasure is multiplied to be greater than the pain.  However, the notion that a person is well off who every second has experiences that are hedonically far worse than torture, is totally absurd.

Conclusion

Chappell is puzzled by why there are so many hedonists. Frankly, I’m puzzled by why there are so many non-hedonists. It’s always seemed obvious to me, and it has huge numbers of compelling supporting arguments.