Social Desirability Bias, Revisionism About Intuitions, And Hedonism
Our non-hedonist intuitions rest on a shaky foundation
Introduction
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I have, at various points, written roughly googolplex words arguing for hedonism about well-being, the doctrine that the only thing that makes a person’s life go well is pleasure and the only thing that makes a person’s life go poorly is suffering. The argument is worn out; if anyone has read all of the articles, they must be long dead by now. And yet despite this—despite having formed a library of Babel-esque combination of every sequence of words that can be said on the topic—I have more to say. Specifically, I will explain why the evidence commonly thought to favor non-hedonism is not very convincing. There are various decisive reasons not to trust our non-hedonistic intuitions.
A friend of mine had an argument for theism from the truth of objective list theory. He ended it with “Therefore, objective list theorists should STOP fornicating and START going to church.” Here, in contrast, I will explain why objective list theorists should STOP going to church and START fornicating.
There are lots of reasons people doubt hedonism. But most of those reasons are stupid. The main half-decent reason people doubt hedonism about well-being is that it’s unintuitive—it says, for example, that if all of your friends were just illusions, and if you were systematically wrong about everything, that wouldn’t be bad for you. But people find this very unintuitive. Now, as I’ve argued elsewhere, there are lots of good arguments for hedonism about well-being, so for the arguments against hedonism to succeed, there would have to be good reasons to trust these intuitions. But I think these intuitions are uniquely untrustworthy.
Social Desirability Bias
Social desirability bias denotes a tendency of people to inflate the value of things that sound good. Caplan describes it nicely here:
Example: If you ask people, “Should people help their mothers more?,” they’ll probably respond “yes.” Why? Because “helping mothers” sounds good. It sounds so good, in fact, that no matter how much help mothers receive, almost no one will ever openly advocate helping them less. That’s SDB for you.
Exactly the same applies if you ask people “Should government do more to help the sick?” People will probably say “yes” – no matter how much government already helps the sick. Why? Because “helping the sick” sounds good. If people were as logical as Steve Landsburg, they’d instantly protest, “X being good is a reason to do a lot of X – not a reason to do more X.” But these words sound terrible – so only courageous thinkers like Steve utter them. Psychologically normal humans say the words other people want to hear.
But it turns out that pretty much all the competing goods on the objective list are subject to much more social desirability bias than pleasure. Things other than pleasure sound better than pleasure. Imagine a person saying the following: “I love learning, so I read for hours a day.” You’d probably think well of this person. In contrast, if a person says “I love pleasure, so I masturbate for hours a day—it remains pleasurable for all this time,” you’d probably think poorly of them. This is so even if you have some reason to think that the masturbator is benefitted more than the obsessive reader.
Pleasure is thought to be sort of trivial and shallow. As a consequence, it doesn’t have the same positive ring to it. As a consequence of this, social desirability bias favors other goods over pleasure.
There’s an obvious objection at this point that I assume lots of people are thinking, namely, that our moral intuitions explain our beliefs about social desirability bias. The reason, for example, that being a Nazi is seen as socially undesirable is that being a Nazi is bad! When people do bad things, those things are seen as socially undesirable.
But I don’t think this explains the relevant data. I think that our intuitions about the goodness of pleasure are not the cause of but instead are partially explained by social desirability bias. Suppose a person says: “I value friendship more than any amount of joy,” or “I value knowledge more than any amount of pleasure.” This person seems sort of deep and profound—you don’t think badly of them. This is despite the fact that their position is totally crazy; obviously, some amount of pleasure is better than learning one new fact. So even when people have irrational goals, as long as their goals are non-hedonic, they sound good—as a consequence, it’s not just our moral intuitions that explain why things other than pleasure sound better than pleasure as a goal.
I also think that this explains a lot of our other non-utilitarian intuitions. There is some term that we get a significant negative association with—for example, murder. Then, philosophers stipulate that there’s some contrived, gerrymandered scenario where murder turns out for the best. But in this case, it’s a battle of abstract reason about good consequences against the extreme negative valence of the term “murder,” and often the valence wins out. Even if you stipulate that murder will have good outcomes, it still has the same intuitive, negative attachment as regular murder. This is a reason to favor the more abstract, intellectual intuitions, which all end up favoring utilitarianism.
In addition, when I reflect on the non-hedonistic intuitions, they do strike me as being the byproducts of social desirability bias. They strike me as sort of surface-level and shallow—I sort of have them at first, but when I think about what really matters, they go away. They strike me like the intuition “people should be nicer to their mothers,” clearly a byproduct, at least partially, of social desirability bias. Yet unlike the “you should be nice to your mother,” intuition, when I reflect on them, they do not seem justified.
Revisionism about intuitionism
Suppose you are, as you should be, a utilitarian. If you are not, this argument will not convince you, but I don’t think it’s worth talking about hedonism until people are already on board with utilitarianism. While it is true, and strongly favored by arguments, it is not as trivial to prove as, for example, the non-existence of rights.
But if you’re a utilitarian, you’ll accept that most of the basic features of morality that people believe in—rights, duties, the intrinsic value of virtue, special obligations, etc—are non-existent. But if you accept this, then your bar for accepting the existence of a basic feature of morality should be extremely high. If you know that at least 90% of the things in some category that people think exist don’t actually exist, then your bar for believing that something in that category exists should be very high. Some people may think non-hedonic intuitions meet this bar, but I don’t; we just have one basic intuition, and very often lots of good arguments against that intuition.
If utilitarianism is true, then there’s some way that we acquire lots of false moral beliefs. But if this is true, then we shouldn’t trust our non-hedonic intuitions much.
You might object that this would discredit hedonism too. Problem: that pain is bad is very obvious, much more so than other intuitions. The same is true of the intuition that at least most pleasure is valuable. Our bar should be high for intuitions, but it shouldn’t be so high to exclude the most obvious thing ever.
In addition, even if hedonism were true, we’d expect to have lots of non-hedonist intuitions. Even if our intuitions are right 90% of the time, we’d expect them to be wrong sometimes. As a consequence, having a few non-hedonic intuitions is to be expected on the hypothesis that hedonism is right, so it’s not really evidence against hedonism. In contrast, the litany of strong arguments for hedonism is good evidence for hedonism; you rarely find lots of good arguments for false things.
The more one begins to appreciate the relevance of psychological considerations (e.g. social desirability bias) to evaluating philosophical disputes, the more one can begin to appreciate that even the most a prioristic armchair philosophy cannot escape engagement with empirical considerations. I take it, given your interest in the dual process model of moral cognition, that this is something you may acknowledge in some domains, but I have yet to see you acknowledge in explicitly in metaethics.
Apply similar reasoning regarding social desirability bias to the moral realism/antirealism dispute: you get something surprisingly like my appeal to normative entanglement as one of the rhetorical framing devices that gives the misleading impression that moral realism is more appealing than it otherwise would be to many people, and that antirealism is less appealing that it otherwise would be to many people. Misleading framing can and does influence the way many people respond to philosophical questions, and social desirability is one among many other identifiable empirical factors relevant to how people respond to these sorts of questions.
This is one of the reasons why a direct appeal to one's linguistic competence in judging how nonphilosophers would respond to this or that philosophical question is not as easy as it might seem: any actual response is a behavioral and psychological event that must be understood to occur in contexts in which reputational and other social factors are in play. Judgments about how people would respond to questions are psychological hypotheses. And just as scientists can either do philosophy well, or ignore philosophy and do it poorly, so too are philosophers who wish to engage with claims about how nonphilosophers think or speak engaging in psychology, and they, too, can either explicitly engage with the empirical literature, or refuse to do so, and do very bad armchair psychology instead.
Bulldog: I believe in hedonism because I just feel like it’s right
Also bulldog: