Suppose we accept the following principles.
Morality describes what we’d do if we were fully rational and impartial.
If we were fully rational we’d regard all moments of existence as equal, independently of when they occur.
If we were fully impartial, we’d regard benefits for all beings as equally important intrinsically
If we were fully rational and impartial we’d only care about things that make beings better off.
Only desirable mental states make people better off.
These are sufficient to derive utilitarianism. If we should only care about mental states, care about all mental states equally, care about all people equally, and maximize desirable mental states, that is just utilitarianism.
Premise 1 was defended here.
Premises 2 and 3 were defended extensively by (Singer and Lazari-Radek, 2014). Premises 4 and 5 were defended in here and here.
Premise 2 seems to follow straightforwardly from rationality. If one is rational, they wouldn’t regard the time in which an event happens as significant to how good it is. We think it foolish, for example, to procrastinate, ignore one's pains on a future tuesday merely in virtue of it being tuesday, and in other ways care about the time in which particular actions take place.
(Williams, 1976, p.206-209) objects to this notion, writing
“The correct perspective on one's life is from now.”
Williams claims that it’s rational to do what we currently desire to do, regardless of whether it would harm us later. However, as (Singer and Lazari-Radek, 2014) potently object, this would lead to it being possible for one to make fully rational decisions that they predict they will regret, ones that artificially discount the future. This seems absurd. Similarly, if a person endures infinite suffering tomorrow to avoid a pinprick now, that seems clearly irrational.
Singer and Lazari-Radek go on to describe another view, according to which the end of one's life matters more, espoused by many. This argument usually involves appealing to the intuition that it’s worse for a life to start out good but then end bad than for the opposite to occur, even if the lives are equally good. They argue against this intuition, pointing out that one primary reason this seems the case is that a life that starts out good before turning bad will in general be a worse life. The people will, in their old age, be disappointed about all that they’ve lost. However, if we stipulate that the quality of life is exactly identical, it becomes harder to maintain.
Several other objections can be given to this view. One of them is that it results in strange moral implications of when people are born. Suppose that one is born with memories of the end of their life, but in the end of their life they lose their memories of earlier parts of their life. In that case, it seems like the earlier part of their life is more important, because in that part they remember life being unpleasant and appreciate the improvement. The point in time at which their life takes a turn for the better seems less important than facts about whether they remember the turn for the better, and that’s best explained by hedonism.
Additionally, according to the B theory of time, there is no objective present. Each point in time is a point on a four dimensional spacetime block--there is no objective now. This would mean that while some points causally precede others, there is no objectively real before than relationship. The phil papers survey shows that the B theory of time is the consensus view among philosophers about time. Thus, it’s not clear that the before than relationship is ontologically real.
Even if it is, it only seems to matter if it affects experience. Imagine a scenario in which the world in the year 4000 is exactly the same as the world in the year 5000. Consider a scenario in which a person is created in the year 4000, as a full 60 year old adult. They have memories of a previous life from before they were 60, but those memories were falsely implanted given that they did not exist prior to being created at 60. Prior to being created at 60, a philosophical zombie filled in for them.
Additionally, the person is created in the year 4000 as an infant and experiences the first 60 years of life, before disappearing and being replaced by a philosophical zombie. It seems intuitively that it’s more important for the 60 year old to have a good life. However, the 60 year old was created later in time, and is technically younger. This scenario is analogous to the 60 year old not having the first 60 years of its life, before going into cryogenic sleep, and then awakening having had its aging reversed at the age of 1.
Such scenarios show that the precise temporal point at which experiences happen doesn’t matter. Rather, the significant thing is how those experiences relate to other experiences. Yet that is a hedonistic consideration.
Premise 3 seems to follow straightforwardly from impartiality. From a fully impartial view, there is no reason to privilege the good of anyone over the good of any other.
(Chappell, 2011) argues for value holism, according to which the value of lives should be judged as a whole, rather than merely by adding up the value of each moment. He first argues that directional trends matter--a claim addressed above.
Next (p.7) he cites Kahneman’s research, finding people often will prefer additional pain as long as the end of some experience is good. People judge 60 seconds of very painful cold water followed by 30 seconds of less painful cold water to be less unpleasant than merely 60 seconds of very painful cold water. However, the fact that people do judge particular moments to be more unpleasant than other ones does not mean that those moments are in fact more unpleasant than the other ones. Additionally, if asked during the experience, people would clearly prefer to not have to undergo the extra 30 seconds.
Chappell responds to this (p.8), writing,
“Yet when making an overall judgment from ‘above the fray’, so to speak, the subjects express a conflicting preference, and merely noting the conflict does not tell us how to resolve it. As a general rule, we tend to privilege (reflective) global preferences over (momentary) local ones: such a hierarchy is, after all, essential for the exercise of self-control.”
This is true in general. However, some judgments can be unreliable. The judgment that extra pain makes an experience better seems very plausibly a result of biases, as people privilege the end of an experience over the beginning. The Kahneman research seems more like a debunking of the judgments Chappell appeals to.
Next, Chappell says (p.9)
“But for this to qualify as independent evidence of factual error, we must assume that subjects were interpreting ‘overall discomfort’ to mean ‘aggregate momentary discomfort’. This seems unlikely. It’s far more plausible to think that subjects were simply reiterating their holistic judgment that the longer trial was less unpleasant on the whole. So these considerations leave us at a dialectical impasse.”
Additionally, people are often unaware of their motivations and introspection is often unreliable (Schwitzgebel, 2008). We thus shouldn’t be overly deferential to people’s judgments of their own experience.
The principles Chappell appeals to are far less intuitive than the notion that previous events that are no longer causally efficacious cannot causally impact the goodness of a particular action. For example, if I spawned last Thursday with full memories, it would seem unintuitive that that undermines the value of future experiences, even if they serve the same functional role.
In the case given by Kahneman, imagine that one was brought into existence after the minute of pain, with full memories as if they’d experienced the minute of pain, despite never having done so. In that case, it seems like it would be better for them to endure no suffering, rather than to endure the extra 30 seconds of suffering. To accomodate this intuition, combined with value holism, one would have to say that one of the experiences somehow changes the badness of the other one, in a way not achieved if it were replaced by a memory that’s functionally isomorphic--at least when it comes to their evaluation of the other experience.
(McNaughton & Rawling, 2009) additionally argue against this view, while still maintaining a version of value holism, arguing that the value of a collection of experiences can produce more momentary experience than the value of each part of it. They give (p.361) the following analogy.
“An analogy might help in drawing the distinction between our position and Moore’s. One might think of a state of affairs as in a some ways like a work of art—say, Michelangelo’s David. (Moore discusses the value of a human arm,16 and our discussion here will draw on this to some extent.) On both our account and Moore’s, the value of David is significant. For Moore, however, it might well be that its entire value is its value as a whole. On this account of matters, any part taken in isolation (David’s nose, say) has zero value. We agree that any part taken in isolation has zero value—but we contend that this way of valuing the parts is simply irrelevant to the evaluation of the statue. Rather, the relevant value of David’s nose is the value of its contribution to the statue. Perhaps David’s hand contributes more than his nose, in which case the value of the former is more than the value of the latter.”
An additional worry with value holism is that it requires strong emergence--positing that the whole value of an experience is not reducible to its parts. Rather, its parts take on a fully different property when combined--a property that is not merely the collection of a variety of parts operating at lower levels. As (Chalmers, 2006) argues, we have no clear examples of strong emergence. The only potentially strongly emergent phenomena is consciousness, which means we have good reason to doubt any theory that posits strong emergence. If value holism requires positing a property that exists nowhere else in the universe--that makes it extraordinarily implausible.
(Alm, 2006) presents an additional objection to value holism--defending atomism, writing (p.312)
“Atomism is defined as the view that the moral value of any object is ultimately determined by simple features whose contribution to the value of an object is always the same, independently of context.” Over the course of the article, (p.312) “Three theses are defended, which together entail atomism: (1) All objects have their moral value ultimately in virtue of morally fundamental features; (2) If a feature is morally fundamental, then its contribution is always the same; (3) Morally fundamental features are simple.”
The first premise is relatively uncontroversial. There are certain basic features that confer moral significance. Nothing other than those features could, even in principle, confer value on a state of affairs.
The second premise is likewise obvious. For one feature to be significant in one case but not in another case, there would have to be some element of the feature that varies across cases. Yet it could only do so by the feature conferring moral worth only in some cases, which would mean it doesn’t vary across cases. The rule “donate to charity only if it maximizes well-being,” doesn’t vary across cases because the rule is always the same, even though its application varies from case to case.
The third premise defines simple features as ones not composed of simpler parts. Several reasons are given to think the fundamental features will be simple (p. 324-326).
We have general prima facie reason to expect explanations to be simple, for the general reason that simplicity is a theoretical virtue. A more complex account that has to posit more things is intrinsically less likely. In physics, for example, we take there to be a strong reason to reject complex features as fundamental, that operate on the levels of organisms, rather than fundamental physics.
Positing new properties gained when fundamental properties are combined involves immense metaphysical weirdness. It seems hard to imagine that pleasure would have no value, knowledge has no value, but pleasure and knowledge gain extra value when they combine--in virtue of no fact about either of them.