Quining Qualitative Hedonism

Higher order pleasures are incoherent on the best view of pleasure

Some people are qualitative hedonists. They claim that, rather than just caring about the amount of pleasure caused by some mental state, we should care about whether it is a higher pleasure or a lower one. Higher pleasures are, for example, those as a result of love and wisdom, while lower pleasures are baser, simpler, and more mundane—for example sexual pleasure or pleasure that one gets from eating tasty food.

Mill famously declared that it is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied. The reason for this is that the experiences that Socrates has are allegedly higher and thus more valuable than those had by swine. This view is, I think, not even false—it’s literally incoherent.

This will, I think, follow trivially from my view of what pleasure is. I think that a mental state is pleasurable proportional to how non-instrumentally valuable it is. There are just some mental states that are worth seeking out—the experience of love, friendship, and eating pie. Why think this? Well, there are a few reasons.

1. It seems very intuitive—to me at least. Pleasure doesn’t seem to be anything else beyond just a description of the mental states that, in virtue of their sensation, make them non-instrumentally valuable.

2. This property seems shared by all and only pleasures. All pleasures seem to feel good—it would be bizarre to say “that pleasure felt terrible.” If something is X if and only if it is Y, then X is the definition of Y.

3. It’s a very parsimonious account—it just says that what the pleasures have in common is that they feel good.

4. There seems to be nothing else that the pleasures have in common. What unites the pleasurable experience of eating cake, reading a book, hanging out with family, hugging someone, going on a rollercoaster, getting a massage, and all the other pleasures other than that they feel good?

But if we adopt this account then what makes something pleasurable is that, by virtue of the intrinsic quality of its experience, it is worth pursuing. Pleasures are pleasurable proportional to how intrinsically worth pursuing the experiences are. Thus, by definition, an experience’s intrinsic value can’t be anything other than how pleasurable it is—it can’t be a function of higher pleasures.

This is a surprising conclusion. It sure does seem that qualitative hedonism is a distinct position. But I think that this is an illusion and it becomes clear that this is so when we try to picture what it says. If we adopt the account of pleasure that I’ve sketched out, how can the worthwhileness of an experience supervene on anything other than how pleasurable it is, when the pleasurableness is just a function of how worthwhile the experience is intrinsically?

One might claim that there is a clear mental distinction between the higher and lower pleasures. Believers in qualitative hedonism, for example, will be more likely to think that reading a book is better than eating tasty food, while quantitative hedonism will say the opposite. I think that much of the apparent coherence of qualitative hedonism comes from the fact that it seems to offer distinct pronouncements from quantitative hedonism.

But I think that this can be explained just by disagreements about how pleasurable an experience is. My account of the distinction between quantitative hedonists and qualitative ones would be that qualitative hedonists tend to think that, for example, knowledge, love, reading, and all the other supposedly higher-order pleasures are more pleasurable than quantitative hedonists would. But this is not a deep dispute or one that invokes higher and lower-order pleasures—it’s no more of a deep moral dispute than one about whether in general people’s experience of eating food is more pleasurable than their experience of music.

Thus, I think that the primary distinction between qualitative hedonists and quantitative ones is dispositional—qualitative ones think that the pleasures that we associate with being high are more pleasurable, while quantitative hedonists think the opposite. But this is not a deep moral dispute—it’s just a dispute about which kinds of experiences feel better.

In case my argument hasn’t been clear, let me spell it out.

1. How pleasurable an experience is is a function of its non-instrumental intrinsic worthwhileness.

2. Qualitative hedonists say that how pleasurable an experience is is a function of something other than how pleasurable it is.

Therefore, qualitative hedonism is false.

Objections?