Why a Hedonist Might Not Plug Into the Experience Machine
We sometimes have instrumental reasons to care about things non-instrumentally
Parfit famously gave a case of argued that it can sometimes be rational to become irrational. Consider a few cases.
Parfit’s hitch-hiker: You’re stranded in the desert. Suppose that a person offers to bring you back to civilization only if you agree to pay him when you return. However, as a rational person, you won’t pay him when you return to civilization — after you’ve returned, you have no reason to pay him. Knowing this, he leaves you in the desert. Thus, you’d do best to guarantee your future irrationality.
(This case also comes from Parfit): Suppose that there’s a safe. A robber wants you to open the safe. He threatens to torture your family if you don’t open the safe. If you could make yourself irrational, that would eliminate his incentive to torture your family — you could make yourself guaranteed not to open the safe in any circumstance.
Parfit also describes the paradox of hedonism, wherein sometimes you get the best results by not directly aiming for pleasure. Rather than aiming for pleasure directly, one should aim for things like knowledge and friendship — that will be a better way of achieving pleasure.
Thus, because the best way to achieve pleasure is not to aim at it directly, we have reason to accept
(A) A rational hedonist would try to care about friends and virtue non-instrumentally.
One might think this is in conflict with
(B) The only reason friends and virtue are worth caring about to a rational hedonist is because they bring pleasure.
However, this is not so. To see this, consider the analogy of games. We may plausibly suppose that the reason to care about playing games is that it brings pleasure. Despite that, when playing a game, one shouldn’t be thinking about what brings them pleasure in the game. Instead, they’ll have more overall pleasure if they care about the game for its own sake while they’re playing it, even if the ultimate motivation is centered around pleasure. Thus, in chess, even if one knew E4 would increase their happiness more than some other move, it would plausibly be unwise for them to make that move. This is because they’ll have more happiness if they value playing the game itself, rather than merely seeing it, mid-game, as an instrument for happiness.
Thus, even if the ultimate motivation for caring about something is instrumental, we may make things go best by caring about it non-instrumentally.
We have an especially clear reason to think this is true with relationships. Even if you only ultimately value friendship for hedonic reasons, you’ll be a better friend and you’ll be happier if you care about your friend as a person. This would make a rational hedonist not want their friend to be replaced by a slightly better friend, for example.
Given that the experience machine (Grammarly tried to correct this to experience of machine) makes one no longer connected to their friends, we have reason to accept
(C) If one cares about friends and virtue non-instrumentally, from their values it follows that they shouldn’t plug into the experience machine.
Thus, we have reason to accept
(D) A rational hedonist who was successful in caring about friends and virtue non-instrumentally wouldn’t want to plug into the experience machine.