The Objective List Just Got A Whole Lot Longer

The objective list must be thousands of pages

Note: in this article I’ll use pluralist and objective list theorist roughly interchangeably, even though there are subtle differences.

One thing that favors hedonism is how simple it is. Hedonism says that there’s one type of good thing and that thing is good feelings. There’s a robust fact about how good something feels — and that fact is one and the same as the moral fact about how much reason we have to promote that feeling. Nothing complex or mysterious there.

The objective list theorist wants to claim to have simplicity akin to hedonism, albeit perhaps not as simple. Yetter Chappell, for example, declares

Should hedonists think it more likely that there are fewer pleasures in the world, since that would entail fewer items of value?  Presumably not. Alternatively, once we have admitted a certain type of thing into our ontology, we may not need to worry too much about how many instances (or “tokens”) of that type exist.

If this latter understanding is correct, then pluralists could likewise argue that we have already admitted the property of being a welfare value into our ontology, so whether we attribute it to just one type of thing or to many types does not ultimately change our ontological commitments. Whatever our theory of welfare, we are all committed to the exact same array of natural and normative properties. We just dispute which natural properties the normative ones are attached to.

We’ll examine this argument more in a moment — whether positing more things, as the pluralist does, is an objectionable affront to parsimony. But even if you think that the pluralist is none the worse for positing various objective goods — knowledge, friendship, achievements, and so on — there is a different way in which the pluralist has gravely sacrificed simplicity. They have introduced vast, almost incalculable complexity, complexity that makes the theory so excessively byzantine that it is the death knell of pluralism, giving us decisive reason to abandon it. This would be so even if there were no other objections to pluralism, which there very clearly are.

It’s worth taking a step back and examining the concept of simplicity. As I’ve noted before, there are various functions to model simplicity: Nyquist’s function, Fisher information, The Hartley function, Shannon information, Kolmogorov complexity. But all of them have something to do with the shortest program in which one could convey all of the information of a system — the shortest computer program one could write to simulate the thing in question.

However, there is a slight caveat when it comes to theories of well-being — the computer program would have to have a look-up table for various mental states. This is because the complexity of various mental states may be far less great than the complexity of their neural correlates. It’s easier to run a program to measure the number of copper, silicon, nickel, sodium, and phosphorous that exists than it is to measure conscious states, but it would be bizarre that the theory that posits that we should maximize copper, silicon, nickel, sodium, and phosphorous is simpler than the one that posits we should maximize the conscious experience of light. This is particularly true if we accept dualism — which we should — because the conscious facts will be some of the basic facts of reality, not reducible to or explainable in terms of any other facts.

Thus, while the hedonist function isn’t the simplest thing in the world, it just has to latch on to a basic feature of the world — pleasure — and then maximize that feature. It thus is not excessively complicated in terms of what it fundamentally posits.

But when we turn to pluralism we get a problem of epic proportions. On top of positing base facts about desirability, the pluralist has to posit a formula for calculating the desirable things. This is simple in the case of hedonism — we have this simple mental state called pleasure, and we’re just supposed to maximize it. But in the case of the objective list theory, this is a huge problem.

Let’s first assume the objective list theorist thinks that friendship is intrinsically good. Well, if there are facts of the matter about how much better off one is made by friendship, the objective list theorist has to posit some formula for calculating the worthwhileness of friendship. But this blows a whole in the façade of simplicity — the formula for calculating how good friendship is will not be a simple formula.

Ask yourself, are there necessary and sufficient conditions for measuring how close of a friend someone is? For the objective list theorist to hold the very plausible claim that better friendships produce more objective list-based value, they have to think that there’s some formula that is part of the fundamental fabric of the moral universe that determines how good of a friend someone is, the way there is for pleasure. But this requires unfathomable complexity — even if (doubtfully) there is a formula for determining how good of a friend someone is, the objective list theorist has to posit that this is built in as part of moral reality.

They have to posit as brute a moral formula that, when given the inputs of how much time one spends with someone, how much affection is felt, and so on, spits out a precise friendship score in order to determine how much objective list value is generated.

This is far too complex to be done by any human. It’s a task that would prove difficult for god. So positing it as being built into the moral fabric makes it so that you can no longer claim your theory is simple.

This problem is arguably made even worse when it comes to other things on the objective list. If the objective list theorist thinks knowledge is objectively good, presumably they think that only some types of knowledge are good — knowing the number of mosquito bites had by people named Anderson in 1998 would not seem objectively good. Thus, the objective list theorist has to posit a way of calculating worthwhile knowledge — a way that isn’t just the formula for figuring out how much knowledge has — and a way to calculate how worthwhile the knowledge is. This is not an easy task.

And the objective list theorist has to do this for each additional thing on their list. They often like to posit lots of things — friends, knowledge, romantic relationships, achievements, and more — so the theory has vast, unimaginable complexity.

Thus, the hedonist theory crushes the objective list theory in terms of simplicity. Even if we think that positing extra good things doesn’t sacrifice simplicity, the hedonist doesn’t need to posit some unbelievably complex method for calculating the value of the things that they think are good, unlike the objective list theorist.

This allows us to see one reason why, contra Yetter Chappell, hedonism and other monistic theories like desire theory end up being far simpler than objective list theory. But we can also meet the challenge directly; using this understanding of simplicity, we can explain why positing extra value atoms sacrifices simplicity, while positing extra pleasant mental states doesn’t.

What we care about when calculating about simplicity is the complexity of the base facts of the universe — the facts that would have to be posited to simulate the world. In the case of extra mental states, those are broadly reducible to (probably) simple psychophysical laws. They’re not extra things that need to be posited — they’re just a result of the laws.

But in the case of extra value atoms — for example, positing the goodness of friendship, love, knowledge, and so on — they’re extra things that need to be built into the grounds of reality. Thus, they add complexity because they’re additional posits, while new mental states don’t.

The basic problem is this: the hedonist thinks that it’s very easy to write a program to explain what’s worth maximizing after one knows all the particles positions and all the psychophysical facts. The objective list theorist thinks this program is near unwritable in its unfathomable complexity. This is yet another huge problem for objective list theory.

The objective list theory is almost particularist in how unimaginably complex it is. This gives us very, very good reasons to abandon it. Seeming right a bit more often is not worth a theory more complex than pretty much any scientific theory ever posited. The true morality would not require more than doubling the complexity of our model of reality.