This Is Ethics E-Book

Jussi Suikkanen

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: This is Philosophy
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 551

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

This is Ethics presents an accessible and engaging introduction to a variety of issues relating to contemporary moral philosophy.

• Covers a wide range of topics which are actively debated in contemporary moral philosophy
• Addresses the nature of happiness, well-being, and the meaning of life, the role of moral principles in moral thinking, moral motivation, and moral responsibility
• Covers timely ethical issues such as population growth and climate change
• Offers additional resources at https://thisisphilosoph.wordpress.com/ethics/
  
• Features extensive annotated bibliographies, summaries, and study questions for further investigation
• Written in an accessible, jargon-free manner using  helpful illustrative examples

Leseprobe

This Is Philosophy

Series editor: Steven D. Hales

Reading philosophy can be like trying to ride a bucking bronco – you hold on for dear life while “transcendental deduction” twists you to one side, “causa sui” throws you to the other, and a 300-word, 300-year-old sentence comes down on you like an iron-shod hoof the size of a dinner plate. This Is Philosophy is the riding academy that solves these problems. Each book in the series is written by an expert who knows how to gently guide students into the subject regardless of the reader's ability or previous level of knowledge. Their reader-friendly prose is designed to help students find their way into the fascinating, challenging ideas that compose philosophy without simply sticking the hapless novice on the back of the bronco, as so many texts do. All the books in the series provide ample pedagogical aids, including links to free online primary sources. When students are ready to take the next step in their philosophical education, This Is Philosophy is right there with them to help them along the way.

This Is Philosophy: An Introduction

Steven D. Hales

This Is Philosophy of Mind: An Introduction

Pete Mandik

This Is Ethics: An Introduction

Jussi Suikkanen

Forthcoming:

This Is Metaphysics: An Introduction

Kristopher McDaniel

This Is Epistemology: An Introduction

Clayton Littlejohn

This Is Philosophy of Religion: An Introduction

Neil Manson

This Is Modern Philosophy: An Introduction

Kurt Smith

This Is Political Philosophy: An Introduction

Alex Tuckness and Clark Wolf

This Is Bioethics: An Introduction

Udo Schuklenk

This edition first published 2015

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For Helena

Preface

This book is an introduction to philosophical investigation of morality. If this were an introduction to the philosophy of quantum mechanics, the first part of this book would need to tell you what quantum mechanics is. Fortunately, when it comes to morality, we can start philosophizing more directly. You already have your own views about what is right and wrong. Hopefully, you think that burning newborn babies just for the sake of it would be wrong and that it is right to help your friends when they are in need. Like most people, you also care about doing the right thing and you blame other people for acting wrongly. You have had moral disagreements with other people: you have perhaps debated the rights and wrongs of practices such as abortion, suicide, torture, using drugs, and eating meat. This means that you already know quite a lot about the subject matter of this book. This book is not intended to preach to you on these issues, which you have probably figured out yourself.

If you already understand so much about ethics, why should you spend even more time reading about it from this book? As mentioned, it's not even going to give you all the right answers. Fortunately, there are plenty of good reasons for reading this introduction to moral philosophy. Here are the main ones. First of all, the subject matter of moral philosophy matters to each one of us in a very personal and concrete way. A large part of moral philosophy tries to understand how you can live a good life and how you should treat other people. Even if philosophy might not be able to give you conclusive answers to these questions in the new situations you face, it can definitely help you to investigate them more clearly and thoroughly. If you study ethics carefully, you will have better conceptual resources and argumentative skills for thinking about how you ought to live. In this way, studying ethics can make a real difference to your life.

There are also other good reasons for studying ethics. If you read moral philosophy with an open mind, this can alleviate at least some of the worries you might have about whether anything really matters in the first place. Many people today are skeptical about morality. It is fashionable to say that it's all just a matter of opinion and that “might makes right.” Philosophers have recognized how hard defending these skeptical views really is. Philosophy can thus also make you more confident about moral standards. Hopefully, by the end of this book you will also grant that there is reason to study ethics just for its own sake. Moral philosophy has attracted some of the greatest minds throughout human history and the work done in this area is often fascinating and brilliant. Yet much of the best research in moral philosophy is also fairly difficult due to the complex nature of the subject matter. One aim of this book is to give you the tools you will need for studying academic moral philosophy further.

This book is divided into four parts. Each part will consider a set of basic questions in moral philosophy. The first part is about what makes your life go better. Consider important life choices such as whether to raise a family or pursue a career in media or health care. When we make these kinds of choices, we often think about what we enjoy and what makes us happy. We might also think about how we could live a good or a meaningful life. The first part of this book is about these basic concepts (pleasure, happiness, well-being, and the meaning of life) which we all use to make important decisions in our lives. It asks what these things are and how important they are ultimately.

The second part of this book is about how we should treat other people. The area of moral philosophy which investigates this question is called “normative ethics.” In normative ethics, philosophers investigate ethical theories which attempt to capture systematically what is right and wrong. Should you do what is best for you, or what is best for everyone? Should you do what a virtuous person would do in your situation, or act in a way you could want everyone to act in it? These are some of the questions that will be investigated. This part will also consider how complicated morality is. Is what is right and wrong so messy that it can't be captured with a simple set of basic principles?

The third part of this book will focus on more theoretical questions about morality. It considers whether what is right and wrong depends on what moral principles we accept or on what God commands us to do. It also investigates whether actions can be objectively right and wrong and whether right and wrong can be investigated scientifically. The last chapter of this part will also attempt to understand how morality moves us. Why is it that when someone sincerely says that eating meat is wrong, you would expect them not to eat meat? This question leads us to examine a theory according to which moral claims express our personal attitudes.

The concluding part of this book explores two more concrete ethical questions. The first of these concerns moral responsibility: when is it appropriate to praise and blame other people for what they do? For example, if everything we do is determined by the laws of nature, is it still all right to be angry if someone cheats on you? After all, in this case they couldn't help it. The very last chapter describes how philosophers have approached one of the most pressing ethical problems of our times. At the moment, the number of people living in the world is increasing rapidly and we also know that the world is getting warmer because we continue to emit greenhouse gases. Many people are worried that because of this the lives of future people will be much worse than ours. What are our obligations toward future generations in this situation? Should we make any sacrifices to help them?

The most important ideas covered in each chapter will be summarized at the end of the chapter. These summaries will also include study questions, which will both test how well you have understood the philosophical ideas and ask you to evaluate the discussed views and arguments. Hopefully you will also get a chance to discuss these questions with other people at a seminar or a reading group. Furthermore, each chapter contains an annotated bibliography, which should help you to find further material to read on the topics you are interested in.

The text also contains hyperlinks. They mainly guide you to online sources which explain the basic concepts and theories in more detail. They also link to podcasts and videos in which famous philosophers talk about the discussed views. Some links contain more information about the examples used in this book and some are just for entertainment (please do not let these links distract you when you go through the material for the first time).

A few words are needed about notation. Bold letters are used for two purposes. All hyperlinks are in bold. If you are using a paper copy of the book, there is always an endnote in the text after these links that gives you the address of the linked web site. In addition, all technical terms are in bold. These terms are explained within the text, but you can also find them in the glossary which is at the end of this book. Italics are used for emphasis and book titles. Finally, quotation marks (“ ”) are used for two purposes. They are used for both ordinary quotations and for when words are mentioned but not used (this latter use of the quotation marks will be explained in Chapter 7).

This book has been divided into core material and additional material. If you are reading the book for the first time and you have not studied any philosophy before, you should read the core materials first. They constitute the main bulk of the book. The additional material can be found in the sections marked with an asterisk (*) both in the bibliography and the book itself. These sections will introduce you to more sophisticated views, arguments, and objections in the given area. They are both important and much discussed in contemporary moral philosophy, but also often are slightly more technical and not always absolutely necessary for understanding the basic crux of the topic in question. These additional materials are explained in a way that should still be accessible if you use a bit more time and effort on the arguments.

The order in which the main elements of moral philosophy have been presented in this book is natural. It is easiest to start from thinking about your own life since the question of how to live well is a reasonably simple one. After you have thought about this question it is much easier to consider other people and how you should treat them. Once you have considered these basic questions in moral philosophy, you will tend to start to think about the status of morality from a more general, theoretical perspective. You should then finally be able to use all the new resources you have acquired throughout the book for thinking about some of the most important concrete ethical problems we face.

Some people will prefer a different route around moral philosophy, because they think that we must tackle the theoretical worries about morality first. If you are worried about the possibility of moral knowledge, you could equally well start from the metaethical material in Part Three. It should address some of the fundamental worries you might have. If these chapters convince you that it makes sense to talk and think about moral questions, then you could go on to study normative ethics (Part Two) and questions about the good life (Part One) next. This would allow you to leave the more concrete questions about moral responsibility, population growth, and climate change to last. If you are building a lecture course around this book, you should split each chapter into at least two lectures. Just to take few examples: you could spend one lecture on happiness and one on well-being (Chapter 2), one on consequentialism and one on Kantian ethics (Chapter 4), and so on. This should allow you to go into a bit more detail regarding the basic material presented in this book.

Acknowledgments

I first want to thank Kirk Surgener and three anonymous referees from Wiley-Blackwell for valuable comments and corrections on earlier drafts of this manuscript. Much of this book is based on discussions I've had with other philosophers. For this reason, I would like to thank the following people:

at the

University of Helsinki

(

http://www.helsinki.fi/philosophy/

), Antti Kauppinen, Teemu Toppinen, Pilvi Toppinen, Pekka Mäkelä, Mikko Salmela, Jaakko Kuorikoski, Raimo Tuomela, Timo Airaksinen, Gabriel Sandu, Panu Raatikainen, Maria Lasonen-Aarnio, Petri Ylikoski, Al Mele, Piers Rawling, Jens Timmermann, and many others;

at the

University of Reading

(

http://www.reading.ac.uk/phil/

), Brad Hooker, Philip Stratton-Lake, Jonathan Dancy, Bart Streumer, John Cottingham, Max de Gaynesford, David Oderberg, Emma Borg, Galen Strawson, Alex Gregory, Guy Fletcher, Debbie Roberts, Fiona Woollard, Bryan Weaver, Jeppe Andersen, Constantine Sandis, Daniel Whiting, Anna Bergqvist, and many others;

at

UNC, Chapel Hill

(

http://philosophy.unc.edu/

), Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, Sven Nyholm, Caj Strandberg, Joshua Knobe, Ben Bramble, Susan Wolf, Dorit Bar-On, Thomas Hill Jr., and many others;

at

Oxford

(

http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/

), Jonas Olson, Krister Bykvist, John Broome, Daniel Star, Ralph Wedgwood, Joseph Raz, Roger Crisp, Nicholas Southwood, Matthew Liao, Simon Rippon, and many others;

at the

University of Leeds

(

http://www.leeds.ac.uk/arts/info/20048/philosophy/

), Pekka Väyrynen, Gerald Lang, Daniel Elstein, John Divers, Robbie Williams, Chris Megone, Ulrike Heuer, Rob Lawlor, Jamie Dow, Georgia Testa, and many others;

at the

University of Birmingham

(

www.birmingham.ac.uk/philosophy/

), Alex Miller, Nikk Effingham, Al Wilson, Darragh Byrne, Iain Law, Heather Widdows, Joss Walker, Jeremy Williams, Kirk Surgener, Lisa Bortolotti, Tom Sorell, and many others;

and finally, at the

Pea Soup blog

(

http://peasoup.typepad.com/

), Doug Portmore, Ben Bradley, Campbell Brown, Chris Heathwood, Dan Boisvert, David Shoemaker, David Sobel, Jamie Dreier, Jimmy Lenman, Mark Schroeder, Mark van Roojen, Robert Johnson, and many, many others.

Without talking to you and learning from you, this book could not have been written. I'd also like to thank everyone else who has philosophized with me at various conferences and talks, and finally my mother and father for all their support.

Part OneWhat's in Our Interests?

1Pleasure

1.1

Even if some people (usually parents and administrators) seem to think so, studying ethics doesn't necessarily improve the quality of your life or make you a better person. It will, however, give you useful resources for thinking about some of the most important things in life more clearly. If you get your head around these tools and apply them in real life, this can make a real difference to how you will live. Philosophical tools can help you to make important decisions in life and even sometimes to become a better person. In this sense, ethics isn't just an abstract and theoretical academic discipline. It isn't just about talking a lot about nothing.

1.2

The two main practical questions philosophers have thought about are how you should treat other people and what goals you should have in order to live well yourself. It is easier to begin from the second question, which concerns your own life only. When you think about how to live well, you don't have to take other people into account, at least to begin with. All you need to ask yourself is: how can I make my own life go better? This will be the main focus of Part One of this book. The second part will then consider what kind of constraints morality sets on you when you pursue your own good. What are the things that it would be wrong to do when you consider not only your own life but also the lives of others?

1.3

So let's start from the question of how you can make your life go better. Consider the following kinds of concrete questions:

Should you pursue a career in journalism or health care?

Should you practice an instrument or play computer games?

Should you study hard or hang out with friends?

Should you have passionate affairs or a stable relationship?

Should you travel or volunteer?

How you answer these questions will, in many ways, decide what your life will turn out to be like. Get the answers right and you will prosper. Approaching these questions can be daunting because it's not immediately obvious how you could even begin to tackle them. What is it that you should be thinking about when you are trying to decide?

1.4

The first two chapters of this book will offer you philosophical tools for finding answers to these basic questions about how you should live. They are some of the first philosophical questions which philosophers started to think about thousands of years ago. The main ethical works of Plato and Aristotle, the founding fathers of philosophy who lived in Ancient Greece, are entitled The Republic and Nicomachean Ethics respectively.1 These famous books, which were written about 2500 years ago, both consider the question of how to live a good life. Following Plato and Aristotle, it is natural to approach the previous questions by considering the following kinds of things:

what you would enjoy;

what would make you happy;

what would improve your life; and

what would make your life more meaningful.

Studying philosophy can clarify what you should be focusing on when you make important life choices by using these natural standards. It can also help you to weigh how important pleasure, happiness, well-being, and a meaningful life are. This chapter will focus on pleasure and how important it is. The next chapter will then discuss happiness, well-being, and the meaning of life.2 The topics of these chapters are then directly relevant for how we are to live.

Three Questions about Pleasure

1.5

When you consider the connection between pleasure and living a good life, you should follow Aristotle3 and distinguish between three sets of different questions. These are:

What are the sources of pleasures? What gives you pleasure?

What is it to experience pleasure? What does pleasure consist of?

How important is pleasure? Should you pursue pleasure?

These questions can be illustrated with a simple example. Ann is suffering from the common cold. In this case, we also can ask the previous three questions. How did Ann get the cold? This is a question about the causal origin of her cold. An answer to it might tell a story about how Ann met people who were already suffering from the cold or a story about how viruses move from one body to another.

1.6

The second question would in this case focus on what it is for Ann to suffer from the cold. In virtue of what does Ann count as a person who is suffering from the cold? This question is not about Ann's symptoms. It is rather about the nature of her disease. The correct answer to it would tell a story about upper respiratory tract infections which are usually caused by hundreds of different species of viruses.

1.7

The final question about Ann's cold is about how bad it is for Ann to have the disease. This is an evaluative question about good and bad.4 The answers to it should tell Ann how much effort she should use to try to avoid getting the cold. You can then ask exactly the same questions about pleasure. What are the things that give you pleasure? What constitutes experiencing pleasure? And, how important is it to experience pleasure?

1.8

The correct answers to these questions might well depend on one another. Views about the nature of pleasure have significant consequences for how valuable pleasure is. However, we should at least attempt to treat these questions separately. As Descartes advised us, we should pursue clarity in philosophy by dividing philosophical problems into smaller parts that can be considered separately.5

1.9

Philosophers are rarely interested in the sources of pleasure because you don't need philosophy to tell you what gives you or other people pleasure. We all know what gives us pleasure personally. You probably get pleasure from eating ice cream, seeing friends, sunbathing, and so on. You are also aware that other people do not enjoy the same things as you. They might get pleasure from lifting weights or dancing samba. Different people thus get pleasure from different things.

1.10

The best way to tell what gives other people pleasure is to ask them. This is why it is the job of the psychologists and social scientists rather than philosophers to tell us what the sources of pleasure are. The empirical study of the sources of pleasure has already revealed many interesting facts6 Scientists now know that about 25% of people have tongues with a higher density of receptors (Bloom, 2010, pp. 27–29). Because of this, they are called supertasters.7 If you are a supertaster, then everything will taste more intense to you. There are things that many other people find pleasant (such as whiskey, beer, black coffee, hot spices, sprouts, cabbage, and grapefruit) which the supertasters find unpleasant. So, if you don't like these things, then you probably are a supertaster.

1.11

It is not news that different people find different foods pleasant. We have always known this. However, that different foods systematically taste unpleasant for people who have more receptors in their tongues is interesting and something you can't know from the armchair. You need science to reveal this interesting fact about the sources of pleasure.

1.12

There are also many interesting questions about how you should investigate what the sources of pleasure are. Should you ask people or scan their brains when they are engaged in various activities? Moral philosophers should at least be aware of what the causal origins of pleasure are. Such information will be relevant when you try to answer questions about the nature of pleasure and its importance.

What Is Pleasure?

1.13

Sometimes the simplest questions are the most difficult to answer. One such question is: What is pleasure? Many philosophers have assumed that this question has an obvious answer. This has led them to state their answers too rashly. More recently, this question has become a focus of intense philosophical speculation (Katz, 20068; Crisp, 2006, pp. 103–111). This section will consider three basic views about what pleasure is.

1.14

You have already experienced pleasure. You have hugged your parents, eaten ice cream, and taken a bubbly bath. You are therefore personally acquainted with pleasure in the same way as you are also acquainted with your friends. This matters because whatever this chapter ends up saying about pleasure should fit what you all already know about positive experiences.

1.15

We also use many other words such as “joy,” “enjoyment,” and “delight” for pleasure. All these words refer to the experiences which you have when you feel good and happy. The flip side of these pleasant experiences are the negative experiences of pain and suffering. We have them when we feel sad and unhappy. Psychologists use the terms positive affect and negative affect9 for pleasures and pains in this broad sense. In virtue of what, then, does an experience count as a pleasure?

The Sensation View

1.16

According to the sensation view, pleasure is a simple sensation of its own kind. This answer was defended by David Hume and Jeremy Bentham (Hume, 1739–1740, book II, I.i; Bentham, 1789, ch. 4).10 Consider other simple experiences like hearing the C note played on piano. There is something it is like to have this experience. This experience is unique, because it doesn't feel like any other experience. It is also difficult say how this experience is different.

1.17

The sensation view says the same thing about pleasure. According to this view, all you can say about pleasure is that it is a warm fuzzy feeling.11 People who accept this view therefore think that pleasure is a simple and unanalyzable experience which doesn't feel like any other experience.

1.18

This view fits with the idea that there are different sources of pleasure. You can have the sensation of pleasure because you are eating chocolate, whereas perhaps your friend gets that same sensation from playing with dogs instead. This view also leaves room for important differences between different experiences of pleasure. The pleasure you get from eating chocolate can be shorter and be more intense than the pleasure your friend gets from playing with dogs. More intense and long-lasting pleasures are presumably more valuable than shorter and less intense pleasures.

The Attitude View

1.19

The previous view has an obvious problem, which has led many people to adopt a more complex theory called the attitude view (Brentano,121981 [1929]). The motivation for this view is that many pleasures are not simple sensations but rather more complex attitudes.

1.20

You can be pleased about your friend's new job or take pleasure in using your new phone. The main distinguishing feature of these more complex pleasures is that they are not merely bodily sensations but rather experiences that have complex content. They are pleasures about how things are. The previous simple view is unable to make sense of these pleasures.

1.21

If you like the simple view, you could respond that when we talk about these more complex pleasures we really are talking about the causes of the relevant, simple, pleasure sensations. When you are pleased about your friend getting a job, this would only mean that her getting the job is causing you to have the simple sensation of pleasure. This idea does not work, though. What causes you to experience pleasure is not always the same thing as what you are pleased about. That something bad happens to someone you know can cause you to be pleased about how things are in your own life. If your neighbor hadn't lost his job, you perhaps would not be so pleased about your own job. Despite this, it is not true that what causes you to experience the pleasure (your neighbor's misfortune) is what your pleasure is about (your own job).

1.22

A better theory of pleasure needs to make sense of the fact that you can be pleased about things and take pleasure in doing things. The attitude view does this by saying that an experience of pleasure is a special attitude toward thoughts, objects, and activities. The attitude represents the relevant thoughts and objects in a certain positive way. When you are pleased about your team winning, you represent the thought that your team has won in a way that feels a certain good way.

1.23

Consider the attitude of fear. Instead of just being afraid, you are usually afraid of things. You can be afraid of snakes or that you will lose your job. Feeling fear consists in part of having a certain sensation – there is something it is like to be afraid. Despite this, fear is not just a sensation. It is an attitude toward things that are the objects of fear. Having this attitude toward things represents them in a way that feels a certain negative way.

1.24

According to this model, pleasure is likewise an attitude that represents things in a way that feels good. It is possible for different people to have different attitudes toward the same thing – you can be afraid of a horror film while you friend takes pleasure in it. These are different attitudes because they do not feel the same.

The Desire View

1.25

The previous two views are problematic in the same way (Sidgwick, 1907, p. 127).13 Consider different pleasures: the pleasure of having sex, the pleasure of eating a nice meal, the pleasure of dancing, and the pleasure of talking to friends. The previous views assume that all these pleasures feel the same.

1.26

The sensation view assumes that different things cause us to have a unique positive sensation which always feels the same. The attitude view claims that different pleasures are attitudes toward different things and that these attitudes always feel the same. There is always a unified positive tone to what it feels like to represent the relevant objects in the relevant way.

1.27

You might wonder why the previous two views need to assume that pleasures are either sensations or attitudes that feel in a certain unique positive way. The reason for this assumption is that both these views use how pleasures feel to explain what makes a certain state of mind a pleasure. They use the distinct positive tone of pleasures to explain what is supposed to make a pleasure a pleasure.

1.28

The main problem of these views, then, is that not all pleasures feel the same. When you consider what it feels like to have sex and what it feels like to talk to your friends, these experiences feel very different and yet both these experiences are pleasures.

1.29

According to the desire view, in all cases of pleasure there is first some more basic experience of its own, be it the experience of having sex or talking to your friends. These experiences are not pleasures as such, but they are experiences which you desire to have for their own sake when you have them (Sidgwick, 1907, p. 127;14 Kagan, 1992, p. 170; Sumner, 1996, p. 90; Feldman, 2004 (Feldman calls his theory “attitudinal theory” of pleasure and his view combines the elements of the attitudinal and desire theories as described here). This desire toward the relevant experience makes all these experiences pleasures. In other words, the fact that you desire to have an experience when you are having it explains why this experience is a pleasure.

1.30

This view avoids the problems of the previous views. It can explain what is common to all pleasures without assuming that all pleasures feel the same. This is because it does not feel the same to desire different experiences. It can also tell us why we want to have pleasant experiences. If to experience pleasure is to have an experience you want to have, how could you fail to want to experience pleasure? So, the fact that you want to have pleasant experiences is just a trivial truth based on the nature of pleasure on this view.

1.31

The defenders of the other two views have used an analogy for responding to the objection that not all pleasures feel the same (Kagan, 1992, 172–175). Consider the loudness15 of sounds. We can rank sounds by how loud they are. Yet you can compare how loud different sounds are even when these sounds have nothing else in common. They can have different timbre, pitch, and so forth. In addition to loudness itself, there is nothing in common between the sound of a guitar and the sound of a saxophone.

1.32

Pleasantness might likewise be a dimension on which experiences vary. Like the case of loudness, perhaps there is nothing in common between equally pleasant experiences of sex and talking to your friends other than their pleasantness. Do you think that this analogy works? Here's just one reason to worry that it doesn't. When it comes to different sounds like the sound of a guitar and the sound of a saxophone, there is a genuine single dimension of loudness in experience on which they vary and you can put a finger on what that dimension is. It is hard to put into words, but if you think about it, there is a genuine similarity between loud sounds. In contrast, it is more difficult to find a genuine similarity in very different kinds of pleasant experiences. For example, not all very pleasant experiences are very intense experiences. Because of this difference, trying to understand pleasantness of experiences using the analogy of loudness of sounds doesn't seem to be very illuminating. It's not easy to put a finger on what that unique dimension of pleasantness would be like in all your experiences.

1.33

We should recognize, however, that the desire view also has its own problems. There are experiences which you desire to have for their own sake even if they are not pleasant. Imagine a person who has never experienced pain16 (Crisp, 2006, p. 107). She could desire to continue to have her first experience of pain for its own sake just because it is a new experience. According to the desire view, this experience of pain would therefore be a pleasure. This must be wrong.

Physiology of Pleasure*

1.34

The previous views are three ways to understand what pleasure is. Which one of these theories is correct is a controversial and interesting philosophical question. At this point, you might wonder why this question about what pleasure is can't simply be answered by considering what is going on in our brains when we experience pleasure. Why can't the philosophical question about the nature of pleasure be answered by considering the physiology17 of pleasure?

1.35

The physiology of pleasure18 can be summed up like this. When you experience pleasure, your body releases chemicals called endorphins and enkephalins.19 They belong to the opioids group, which also includes heroin. Your brain has receptor cells that are sensitive to these chemicals. These receptor cells are located in a region deep in your brain called the ventral pallidum.20 Some of the receptor cells are also in an area just behind your eyes called the orbitofrontal cortex.21 When you experience pleasure, there are a lot neurons firing in these areas of your brain.

1.36

You could suggest that pleasure is just the physical event of neurons firing in the relevant regions of the brain. This simple view used to be popular in the philosophy of mind.22 The problem is that views like this seem unable to capture the fact that experiencing a pleasure feels like something. Even if we knew everything there was to know about what happens in the brain of a person who is having a pleasant experience, it seems that this doesn't amount to understanding very much about pleasure. For that, you have to experience pleasure yourself and you have to know what role pleasure plays in people's lives.

1.37

This is why many philosophers believe that there must be something more to pleasure than merely certain neurons firing in your brain. The previous views about pleasure attempt to capture what this additional element is. Of course, they too face similar challenges. If a crucial element of pleasure is the way it feels, then in understanding pleasure it may not be very helpful just to know that pleasures are the experiences we want to have. This means that the philosophical views, too, need to have a more informative story to tell about how pleasures feel.

Value of Pleasure

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Let us then consider how good pleasure is. Is pleasure so important that you need to think about the amount of pleasure you will experience when you make important decisions in your life? When you ask this question, you must first decide what kind of value you are interested in. A single joke can be both funny and insulting. Such a joke has a lot of comedy value but little moral value.

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This section is only interested in the prudential value of pleasure. Prudential value is a technical term. When philosophers consider the prudential value of pleasure, they are interested in whether having pleasant experiences makes your life go better. Is having these experiences in your interests and good for you? It is also important to keep in mind that some things have intrinsic prudential value whereas other things have only instrumental prudential value (and some have both).23

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The things that have merely instrumental value do not make your life go better in themselves. They only help you to get other things that improve your life. Money is like this. Having it in itself is not that great, but it does help you to get other things that are good for you.

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Intrinsic prudential goods are, in contrast, fundamental elements of living a good life. Many people, for example, think that having close personal relationships is a constituent of a good life in itself. You do not want to have such relationships merely because having them enables you to have some other goods. Having close personal relationships itself improves your life.

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The question then is whether pleasure has intrinsic prudential value. Does having pleasant experiences make your life go better in itself? There are three answers to this question. Hedonism24 claims that only pleasure is good for you. Pluralism agrees that pleasures make your life go better, but it adds that other things can do so too. Pessimism, in contrast, argues that pleasure cannot make your life go better at all.

Hedonism

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As we saw above, pleasures are either attitudes that feel a certain positive way or experiences which you desire to have when you have them. It seems plausible that such attitudes and experiences are an important element of living a good life. Likewise, all pains either feel a certain negative way or they are experiences which you do not want to have. Having these experiences obviously makes your life go worse.

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However, hedonists add that only pleasures can make your life go better and only pains can make your life worse. Nothing else matters. Consider having friends and family, being healthy, knowing things, and seeing beautiful works of art. According to hedonists, these goods cannot make your life go better as such. They can only improve your life insofar as you can get pleasure from them.

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Hedonism has a number of advantages (Shafer-Landau, 2010, ch. 1). It can explain why there are many different kinds of good lives. According to hedonism, this is because different things give different people pleasurable experiences. Hedonism also fits the idea that you know best what would improve your life. Hedonists argue that this is because you know best what gives you pleasure. There are, in addition, two even stronger reasons to accept hedonism.

Argument in Favor of Hedonism 1: Discernible Differences    

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Many people believe that only things that you can notice can make your life go better. Whatever improves your life must make a discernible difference to your life from your own perspective.

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Derek Parfit25 invented a famous example to illustrate this (Parfit, 1984, p. 494). Imagine that you meet a stranger on the train. He tells you that he is seriously ill. Naturally, you want this stranger to get better, but, sadly, you will never hear what happens to him. The stranger will either get better or he won't, but you will never know which. What happens to the stranger after you leave the train makes no difference to what your life will look like from your own perspective.

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Many people think that in this situation, what happens to the stranger later on cannot influence how well your life is going. According to them, only things that affect how things seem to you can make your life go better or worse. Hedonism nicely fits this idea. It says that only pleasures and pains can make your life go better or worse. These clearly are things that you can notice. Hedonism does not, therefore, leave room for things that could improve your life without you noticing them. Many people find hedonism convincing for this reason.

Argument in Favor of Hedonism 2: Motivation    

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Many philosophers believe that nothing can make your life go better unless it is something that motivates you. If you then also think that we are all biologically hardwired to pursue pleasure, we get a powerful argument for hedonism. We can find traces of parts of this argument again from Bentham: “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do” (Bentham, 1789, ch. 1).26

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This quote nicely illustrates the popular view that pleasures and pains motivate you to pursue the sources of pleasure and to avoid the sources of pain. If you then also believe both that (i) what makes your life go better must be able to motive you and that (ii) nothing else than pleasures and pains moves you, you are forced to accept that only pleasures and pains have prudential value.

Higher Pleasures    

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There are thus many good arguments for hedonism. Before we move on, we need to discuss a famous objection to it and John Stuart Mill's equally famous response to this objection.

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As mentioned above, hedonists used to believe that there are differences between pleasures only on two dimensions: length of duration and intensity. This leads to a problem that can be illustrated by a choice between the life of Joseph Haydn and the life of an oyster (Crisp, 1997, p. 24).27 Haydn lived for 72 years and his life contained many intense pleasures. The oyster can only experience the most primitive mild pleasures. Imagine, then, a magic oyster whose life lasts for a million years. Would its life be better than Haydn's?

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According to the simple hedonist view, the life of this oyster would be better than Haydn's even though Haydn's pleasures are more intense than the oyster's. At some point, the length of the oyster's pleasures will compensate for the fact that its pleasures are less intense. So if the intensity and duration of the pleasures are the only dimensions on which pleasures vary, if you make the mild pleasures last long enough they will always outweigh short intense pleasures in value. Many people find this consequence unintuitive. They think that Haydn's life must be better than the oyster's life no matter how long the oyster lives. For this reason, we must find another dimension on which pleasures vary such that no matter how long the mild and trivial pleasures last they will never be as good as Haydn's pleasures.

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John Stuart Mill suggested that the previous problem can be avoided if you think that pleasures can be evaluated on a third qualitative dimension (Mill, 1861, ch. 2, paras 4–8).28 Thus, according to him, some pleasures are qualitatively higher than others, just as some pleasures are more intense than others. For example, you might think that the pleasure of reading a novel is qualitatively higher than the low pleasure of watching reality television. The higher a pleasure is qualitatively, the better it makes your life. This helped Mill to claim that the oyster's life will never be as good as Haydn's because Haydn's pleasures are qualitatively so much higher than the oyster's trivial lower pleasures.

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How do you know which experiences are higher pleasures? According to Mill, we must consider an experienced, competent, and sensitive person who is familiar with both types of pleasures and able to attain them both. If she “calmly and knowingly” chooses to have one pleasure over another, then that pleasure is a higher, more valuable pleasure. So, if this type of a special judge really chooses, after careful consideration, to compose music instead of just staying in the jacuzzi, then the former pleasure is qualitatively higher.

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Does this response solve the problem? Many people worry that it either fails to deal with the Haydn/oyster case or it gives up on hedonism. Remember that hedonism is the view that only pleasures can make your life go better. According to Mill, pleasures now vary on three dimensions: duration, intensity, and quality. The more an experience scores on these dimensions, the more pleasantness it has and thus the more value it also has. Haydn's pleasures are intense and qualitatively high but they last for only a short time. The oyster's pleasures are mild and qualitatively low but they last for a very long time. If we make the oyster's pleasures long enough, then it seems that the length of these pleasures should compensate for both their low intensity and their low quality so that the oyster's life once again becomes better than Haydn's.

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In this situation, Mill seems to have to admit that something other than mere pleasantness makes Haydn's life better than the oyster's life. Mill himself sometimes wrote about how noble certain experiences are. This would allow him to say that Haydn's life is better because even if his life is less pleasant than the oyster's, it is better because it is a nobler life. The problem is that if you are a hedonist you can't say this, because, according to hedonism, only the pleasantness of our lives counts.

Pluralism about Prudential Value

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You probably agree that having pleasures and avoiding pains makes your life go better. If you are a pluralist, you think that other things can improve your life too. In addition to pleasures, getting what you want, having friends, and achieving things can make your life go better. Pluralism about prudential value29 is the view that many different things are good for you in themselves.

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Different versions of pluralism will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter. This section focuses on one influential argument in favor of pluralism, which is supposed to show that pleasures and pains can't be the only things that affect how good your life is. This argument was first presented by Robert Nozick in his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Nozick, 1974).30 It is based on a thought experiment of an experience machine.31

Nozick's Experience Machine Argument    

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Here is Nozick's influential argument in full:

Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Superduper neurophysiologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life, preprogramming your life's experiences?…Would you plug in? What else can matter to us, other than how would lives feel from the inside? (Nozick, 1974, pp. 42–43)

If you have seen The Matrix,32 you'll know what Nozick is imagining. If you haven't, you should, as it's a great sci-fi film (but skip the sequels that aren't as good).

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Here is the crux of Nozick's argument. In real life, you experience a mix of pleasures and pains. You are then promised a life which would contain more pleasant experiences. The only downside is that you would have to live this life in a computer simulation. Nozick claims that you would not want to plug yourself into the machine, because this wouldn't improve your life.

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According to hedonism, if you have more pleasant experiences in the machine, then your life will be better in it. Hedonists, after all, think that only pleasures and pains affect how good your life is, and yet most people say that they prefer to live in the real world. If you agree with this intuition, you should conclude that hedonism is mistaken. There are other things besides pleasures and pains that make a difference to how good your life is.

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Nozick himself concluded from this case that there are at least three other things that must matter as well. Firstly, he thought that we want to do things and not merely have the experiences of doing them. In the experience machine you can only have the experience of swimming, whereas in the real world you can actually swim.

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Secondly, Nozick believed that we want to be certain kinds of persons. Your life goes better the more courageous, kind, intelligent, witty, and loving you are. You can't realize these character traits in the machine. Finally, Nozick claimed that it matters to us that we are in actual contact with a deeper reality. You can have this contact in the real world. You can talk to real people and admire genuine works of art. In the experience machine you can only have simulated experiences, which are not the same.

Two Responses to Nozick    

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Although many people agree with Nozick's argument, it also has its problems. The first problem of the argument is that it assumes that our intuitions about the case are a reliable indication of what is good for us. There are empirical reasons to doubt this (De Brigard, 2010).33 One reason is that we have been shown to suffer from status quo bias.34 People have a strong preference for keeping things the way they are used to even if a change would be an improvement for them. The suggestion then is that this prevents you from seeing how good things would be for you in the experience machine.

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This first response has a serious problem. De Brigard is saying that our intuitions about what kind of life is good – and, more importantly, our intuitions about the experience machine – are flawed because they reflect the fact that we just happen to like the way things are now. Unfortunately, if this were true then we would be more generally prevented from knowing what things are good for us, including whether pleasures themselves make our lives go better. The worry is that if the hedonist uses the status quo bias to respond to the experience machine objection then she has no way left for arguing for her own view either. Anything she might say for hedonism too would be based on her flawed intuitions. Fortunately, the hedonist has a better response to the experience machine objection.

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Nozick's argument assumes that you could have equally pleasant experiences in the machine. This is the reason why hedonists have to accept that experientially slightly superior lives in the machine are better than lives in the real world. The problem for Nozick is that hedonists do not need to accept this idea (Feldman, 2004, p. 111).

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Take the desire theory of pleasure. According to this theory, an experience is a pleasure if you desire to have the experience when you are having it. Assume that you want to have genuine experiences rather than simulated experiences in the machine. You have this desire even if you can't tell the two types of experiences apart from the inside.

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According to the desire theory of pleasure, you could not in this situation have pleasures in the experience machine. You would probably believe in the machine that you were having pleasant experiences. This belief would be false, because you would not be having the genuine experiences that you want to have. This theory of pleasure thus enables the hedonists to explain why you would have fewer pleasures in the machine and why your life would therefore be worse in it.

Pessimism about the Value of Pleasure*

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If you agree with Nozick, then you think that both pleasures and other things can make your life go better. Pessimists about pleasure argue that this view is false because pleasures have no value at all. The best argument for this was offered by a fairly cryptic and strongly pessimistic German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer(Schopenhauer, 1844, book IV, sections 56–57).35

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