Theron Pummer's Lopsided Lives Is One Of The Best Arguments For Hedonism

It's Very Persuasive

Hedonic utilitarians have done quite a good job exposing the problems with deontology and its many paradoxes. Yet they have in general done a worse job defending hedonism about value. Many of the articles one can find if they search for arguments for hedonism about value are relatively lackluster. I was recently quite happy to find an exception to this general rule in Pummer’s paper Lopsided Lives.

The basic argument is relatively simple: hedonism is the best at accounting for how well off people are who have lopsided lives. Those lives are lopsided in the sense that they have lots of non-hedonic value, but very little hedonic value.

Pummer explains “Contemplating a range of such hedonically lopsided lives might lead us to claim that any plausible theory of well-being must accommodate one or both of the following constraints. No Pleasure, No Well-Being (NPNW): Any life that contains no pleasure cannot have a positive overall well-being score, no matter how much nonhedonic goodness it contains. There is disagreement about the plausibility of NPNW.7 Whether or not NPNW is plausible, the following constraint seems more plausible: 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 contains. Agreeing that lives with certain hedonic features cannot have overall well-being scores that exceed finite limit L is not by itself committing to what limit L is, only that there is some such L. Hedonism clearly entails both NPNW and EPLW. To the extent that these constraints are plausible and cannot be accommodated by rival views of well-being, this is to hedonism’s advantage. Indeed, EPLW does seem plausible, and arguably pluralism is plausible only if it can accommodate it. But it is not necessarily the case that pluralism is plausible if it can accommodate EPLW, as it might turn out that pluralism can accommodate EPLW only if it entails claims which are themselves implausible. I will next explore whether pluralism can accommodate EPLW without incurring such further implausibility.”

Pummer goes on to present a series of clever arguments explaining why pluralist views about well-being can’t accommodate these intuitions while respecting certain minimal side constraints on theories, such as avoiding hypersensitivity, whereby very small changes in hedonic value result in infinite differences in overall well-being. Additionally, he argues that those who bite the bullet run into

“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.”

This is near impossible to deny. Those who are interested in defending hedonism should read this paper, as it’s remarkably persuasive. It is probably the most compelling defense of hedonism I’ve come across.