I see qualitative hedonism as recoiling from the implications of true utilitarianism. If you don't carve out a special distinction for beautiful things and high-status behaviour - if you force them to account for themselves on their own merits - then baser pleasures win. Specifically, they win in the short and long term but not the medium term. If you're looking to have as pleasurable a day as possible, do drugs. If you're looking to have as pleasurable a life as possible, contemplate sunsets and whatnot. If you're looking to have as pleasurable a universe as possible, tile it with computer chips simulating countless tiny minds experiencing nothing but euphoria.
OK, the last part probably isn't what Mill had in mind, but I do think baser pleasures tend to win in the long-term at a society-wide level (and are justified in doing so from a quantitative hedonistic standpoint).
You mention in a comment:
> But my understanding was that qualitative hedonists think that it's not about the activity--they'd bite the bullet on the experience machine, for example.
Because the entire philosophy is basically an excuse to avoid biting a bullet, I'd guess that in practice qualitative hedonists wouldn't bite very many bullets. Would they be OK with tiling the universes with a mind happily contemplating the exact same piece of music, over and over? Probably not.
Philosophically I'm not fond of this, but in practice given that I think the singularity may well happen in our lifetimes I am against biting bullets for the most part. There is plenty of room in the universe for everyone to win so let's make that happen rather than murder everyone in order to produce more happiness-chips.
No objections & the definition of pleasure is elegant.
As with many things, I think people who make a high/low distinction are unconsciously preachy and motivated by factors that aren't relevant. An example of this would be that they correctly intuit that 'lower' pleasures (eg eating especially tasty fat/sugar derivatives, lying around getting stoned, pursuing a lot of orgasms) can actually lead more easily to misery in the longer term.
I'm always wary of the moral judgements inherent in classifying something as better or worse in and of itself.
The reason that TikTok is a lower pleasure than Dostoevski isn't that the TikTok addict is getting a less valuable hedonistic experience.
This essay is also a good argument for more honest and clearer thinking about pleasure.
I think qualitative hedonism is probably best understood as a kind of (poorly described) hybrid objective list view with a pleasure requirement: "higher pleasures" = pleasure taken in higher activities. These aren't better "in virtue of their sensation" (i.e. qua pleasures), but rather, in virtue of their *objects*.
That seems a coherent view, even if you ultimately reject it.
If you think that the worthwhileness of an experience supervenes on something other than the worthwhileness of the mental state, then that would be a perfectly fine and coherent view. But my understanding was that qualitative hedonists think that it's not about the activity--they'd bite the bullet on the experience machine, for example.
The view that you've described seems perfectly coherent, just not what I understood qualitative hedonism to mean. (Btw, I asked my IRB, and they said this comment was fine)!
Hard to ask Mill now, but my best guess is that he'd rather be a Socrates dissatisfied than a passive receptacle of satisfied-Socratic-like experiences, with no actual activity-of-thinking going on. (But yeah, it's a highly disputable interpretive question.)
That said, I think even an experience-machine-friendly variant of the view makes sense. Just interpret it as being about the value of the *apparent* object of the experience. We can separately evaluate the (sensory) *pleasantness* and the (attitudinal) *nobility* of an experience, and give more weight to the latter.
I think that thinking is a mental activity, so Mill would probably say that you'd have to do actual thinking for it to be a higher pleasure.
I think that pleasure just picks out the experiences that are non-instrumentally valuable in virtue of the experience itself (which would include the apparent object) so this view just seems to be false by definition.
Well, okay, if you're just defining pleasure that way for technical purposes, then I'd say that since the macroexperience of hiking up a mountain (with the various aches and tiredness as important components) has non-instumental value, it's a sort of pleasure on your definition. That's not normally how we use "pleasure" in English, of course, and I'm not sure what's gained over just saying that the hike has non-instrumental value, but the non-hedonist can play your game. Now, instead of an argument over whether pleasure (+avoidance of suffering) is the only thing with non-instrumental value, we're having the same argument over what kinds of experiences are pleasures.
I've given several reasons to think that this best captures what pleasure is. As I say, people may have disagreements over how pleasurable various experiences are, but those are not deep moral disagreements any more than the disagreement about whether one gets more pleasure, on average, from music or food is.
I don't think I'm disagreeing with you about how pleasurable various experiences are, which I fully agree wouldn't be a deep moral disagreement. I'm disagreeing with you about what range of experiences have non-instrumental positive valence. I think there are many such experiences (over shorter and longer time scales), many of which diverge very far from what gets called "pleasure" in natural language.
On the other hand, if "pleasure" as a technical term simply *means* everything sharing the property of having non-instrumental positive valence, then this strikes me as abandoning the task of arguing for hedonism, and instead neutralizing the distinction between hedonist and non-hedonist consequentialisms into an apparent tautology.
Ah, I understand your thinking so much better from that sentence. You're arguing non-tautologically for experientialism against views like objective list theory, but you don't think distinctions within experientialism are important enough to employ a narrower concept of "pleasure" (and thereby "hedonism") that's closer to natural language usage, and instead it's just as well that we call all forms of experientialism hedonist as a definitionally equivalent term. Have I got it?
What do you make of van der Deijl's conception of pleasure? My own view is pretty similar to his, although I might emphasize different plural values to different degrees.
Okay, then I guess you might call me a hedonist, even if I find that label very strange. Am I still a hedonist even though I believe that remorse for a wrong act (within proportion) clearly has non-instrumental positive valence? Would you call that remorse a form of pleasure?
A year of doing nothing but drugs (with some planning) would definitely be more pleasurable than whatever else you could do, just because of our brain's biology. But there are many ways to spend a year that are more intrinsically worthwhile. Thus feeling good is not equivalent to intrinsic worthwhileness. You also never really argue for this in the post. In your list of reasons for why a mental state is pleasurable proportional to how non-instrumentally valuable it is, 2-4 say that all and only pleasures feel good, and 1 is just a restatement of the equivalence. There's never an argument for the equivalence value=pleasure itself. We agree that intrinsic worthwhileness is the only thing that matters, I just think that pleasure (feeling good) and intrinsic worthwhileness come apart sometimes.
Goodness is just intrinsic worthwhileness. So a feeling being good and intrinsically worthwhile can't come apart. I obviously disagree that doing just drugs for a year would be more pleasurable than other things.
Pleasure means positively valenced emotion, like the sun on your skin or quiet contentment. It's clear that people can feel positively valenced emotions from experiences that aren't good and aren't intrinsically worthwhile (which I agree are the same thing). You're saying that this feeling then isn't good by definition. But it's still pleasure! In the normal sense, it still 'feels good'. Sure, the feeling itself isn't 'good' in that it's not intrinsically worthwhile. But it still feels good. There's a big difference between a feeling being good in the third-person sense and the first-person sense.
It seems you're committed either to the idea that someone who enjoys beating children is enjoying an intrinsically worthwhile experience, or that the positively valenced mental states that this activity brings about are somehow unreal.
I see qualitative hedonism as recoiling from the implications of true utilitarianism. If you don't carve out a special distinction for beautiful things and high-status behaviour - if you force them to account for themselves on their own merits - then baser pleasures win. Specifically, they win in the short and long term but not the medium term. If you're looking to have as pleasurable a day as possible, do drugs. If you're looking to have as pleasurable a life as possible, contemplate sunsets and whatnot. If you're looking to have as pleasurable a universe as possible, tile it with computer chips simulating countless tiny minds experiencing nothing but euphoria.
OK, the last part probably isn't what Mill had in mind, but I do think baser pleasures tend to win in the long-term at a society-wide level (and are justified in doing so from a quantitative hedonistic standpoint).
You mention in a comment:
> But my understanding was that qualitative hedonists think that it's not about the activity--they'd bite the bullet on the experience machine, for example.
Because the entire philosophy is basically an excuse to avoid biting a bullet, I'd guess that in practice qualitative hedonists wouldn't bite very many bullets. Would they be OK with tiling the universes with a mind happily contemplating the exact same piece of music, over and over? Probably not.
Philosophically I'm not fond of this, but in practice given that I think the singularity may well happen in our lifetimes I am against biting bullets for the most part. There is plenty of room in the universe for everyone to win so let's make that happen rather than murder everyone in order to produce more happiness-chips.
No objections & the definition of pleasure is elegant.
As with many things, I think people who make a high/low distinction are unconsciously preachy and motivated by factors that aren't relevant. An example of this would be that they correctly intuit that 'lower' pleasures (eg eating especially tasty fat/sugar derivatives, lying around getting stoned, pursuing a lot of orgasms) can actually lead more easily to misery in the longer term.
I'm always wary of the moral judgements inherent in classifying something as better or worse in and of itself.
The reason that TikTok is a lower pleasure than Dostoevski isn't that the TikTok addict is getting a less valuable hedonistic experience.
This essay is also a good argument for more honest and clearer thinking about pleasure.
I think qualitative hedonism is probably best understood as a kind of (poorly described) hybrid objective list view with a pleasure requirement: "higher pleasures" = pleasure taken in higher activities. These aren't better "in virtue of their sensation" (i.e. qua pleasures), but rather, in virtue of their *objects*.
That seems a coherent view, even if you ultimately reject it.
If you think that the worthwhileness of an experience supervenes on something other than the worthwhileness of the mental state, then that would be a perfectly fine and coherent view. But my understanding was that qualitative hedonists think that it's not about the activity--they'd bite the bullet on the experience machine, for example.
The view that you've described seems perfectly coherent, just not what I understood qualitative hedonism to mean. (Btw, I asked my IRB, and they said this comment was fine)!
Hard to ask Mill now, but my best guess is that he'd rather be a Socrates dissatisfied than a passive receptacle of satisfied-Socratic-like experiences, with no actual activity-of-thinking going on. (But yeah, it's a highly disputable interpretive question.)
That said, I think even an experience-machine-friendly variant of the view makes sense. Just interpret it as being about the value of the *apparent* object of the experience. We can separately evaluate the (sensory) *pleasantness* and the (attitudinal) *nobility* of an experience, and give more weight to the latter.
I think that thinking is a mental activity, so Mill would probably say that you'd have to do actual thinking for it to be a higher pleasure.
I think that pleasure just picks out the experiences that are non-instrumentally valuable in virtue of the experience itself (which would include the apparent object) so this view just seems to be false by definition.
Well, okay, if you're just defining pleasure that way for technical purposes, then I'd say that since the macroexperience of hiking up a mountain (with the various aches and tiredness as important components) has non-instumental value, it's a sort of pleasure on your definition. That's not normally how we use "pleasure" in English, of course, and I'm not sure what's gained over just saying that the hike has non-instrumental value, but the non-hedonist can play your game. Now, instead of an argument over whether pleasure (+avoidance of suffering) is the only thing with non-instrumental value, we're having the same argument over what kinds of experiences are pleasures.
I've given several reasons to think that this best captures what pleasure is. As I say, people may have disagreements over how pleasurable various experiences are, but those are not deep moral disagreements any more than the disagreement about whether one gets more pleasure, on average, from music or food is.
I don't think I'm disagreeing with you about how pleasurable various experiences are, which I fully agree wouldn't be a deep moral disagreement. I'm disagreeing with you about what range of experiences have non-instrumental positive valence. I think there are many such experiences (over shorter and longer time scales), many of which diverge very far from what gets called "pleasure" in natural language.
On the other hand, if "pleasure" as a technical term simply *means* everything sharing the property of having non-instrumental positive valence, then this strikes me as abandoning the task of arguing for hedonism, and instead neutralizing the distinction between hedonist and non-hedonist consequentialisms into an apparent tautology.
Pleasure is just the experiences that contain feelings that are good--so one could be a non-experientialist and deny hedonism.
Ah, I understand your thinking so much better from that sentence. You're arguing non-tautologically for experientialism against views like objective list theory, but you don't think distinctions within experientialism are important enough to employ a narrower concept of "pleasure" (and thereby "hedonism") that's closer to natural language usage, and instead it's just as well that we call all forms of experientialism hedonist as a definitionally equivalent term. Have I got it?
What do you make of van der Deijl's conception of pleasure? My own view is pretty similar to his, although I might emphasize different plural values to different degrees.
file:///C:/Users/pc/Downloads/REPUB_105841-OA.pdf
Yes.
Okay, then I guess you might call me a hedonist, even if I find that label very strange. Am I still a hedonist even though I believe that remorse for a wrong act (within proportion) clearly has non-instrumental positive valence? Would you call that remorse a form of pleasure?
A year of doing nothing but drugs (with some planning) would definitely be more pleasurable than whatever else you could do, just because of our brain's biology. But there are many ways to spend a year that are more intrinsically worthwhile. Thus feeling good is not equivalent to intrinsic worthwhileness. You also never really argue for this in the post. In your list of reasons for why a mental state is pleasurable proportional to how non-instrumentally valuable it is, 2-4 say that all and only pleasures feel good, and 1 is just a restatement of the equivalence. There's never an argument for the equivalence value=pleasure itself. We agree that intrinsic worthwhileness is the only thing that matters, I just think that pleasure (feeling good) and intrinsic worthwhileness come apart sometimes.
Goodness is just intrinsic worthwhileness. So a feeling being good and intrinsically worthwhile can't come apart. I obviously disagree that doing just drugs for a year would be more pleasurable than other things.
Pleasure means positively valenced emotion, like the sun on your skin or quiet contentment. It's clear that people can feel positively valenced emotions from experiences that aren't good and aren't intrinsically worthwhile (which I agree are the same thing). You're saying that this feeling then isn't good by definition. But it's still pleasure! In the normal sense, it still 'feels good'. Sure, the feeling itself isn't 'good' in that it's not intrinsically worthwhile. But it still feels good. There's a big difference between a feeling being good in the third-person sense and the first-person sense.
It seems you're committed either to the idea that someone who enjoys beating children is enjoying an intrinsically worthwhile experience, or that the positively valenced mental states that this activity brings about are somehow unreal.
It would be intrinsically good in virtue of the experience, though maybe it would be bad because it comes from a bad source, depending on one's view.