Hello Fellow Hedonists,
Read this post by Matthew Pianalto commenting on this research by Felipe de Brigard which first appeared on the experimental philosophy blog. I found this study fascinating.
I take it that a psychological hedonist might claim (I'm not a psychological hedonist, but I have argued this in other places) that Nozick, and those who agree, are hedonists who are making mistakes: they are misinformed or irrational. Thus this data (alone) doesn't show that psychological hedonism is false.
Philosophers, such as Nozick, also argue that the fact that we don't prefer the experience machine or 'immoral' lifestyles is evidence that there is more to well-being than the experiences of welfare subjects. That is, philosophers presuppose desire accounts of well-being.
This is all fine and good, but if you accept a desire account of well-being, you need to explain miswanting. According to mental state accounts of well-being, you miswant when you want something that, unbeknownst to you, is going to make you miserable. According to simple preference satisfaction views, the things that make you miserable are good simply in virtue of the fact that you wanted them. You might attempt to accommodate this concern by invoking an informed preference satisfaction account of well-being.
Even if you accept an informed preference satisfaction account of well-being, you need to explain what makes good fortune good (this is, after all, the' hap' in happiness and the 'daimon' in eudaimonia). Often, we don't want this or that, and we don't know it is good for us, but it still turns out to be good for us insofar as we are ultimately glad this or that happened. One might claim the best way to explain this phenomenon is by appealing to a mental state account of well-being (you might also think of this in terms of post facto or retrospective desire satisfaction).
You might also claim that we might want stuff that is bad for us even when we are perfectly informed, in which case we ought to want other stuff (even if we don't want to). If it turns out that some informed people sometimes still prefer reality to the experience machine, we still might say they want wrong (or they're irrational) even though they got all the facts straight, so to speak. Here, I imagine you would need posit some sort of non-instrumental, substantive view of rationality (a la Kant).*
From a purely dialectical point of view, I take it that if you subscribe to a mental state account of well-being, such as hedonism (personally, I prefer enjoyment accounts), you will argue Nozick is begging the question: if you don't already accept desire accounts of well-being you won't be persuaded by the experience machine intuition pump.
In the end, it might turn out the folk implicitly or explicitly accept non-hedonic accounts of well-being, in which case I am tempted to say they have something besides well-being in mind. At this point, it might be a good idea to simply distinguish hedonistic, subjective accounts of well-being, from non-hedonistic, 'objective' accounts of well-being instead of Chisholming endlessly about whether well-being is essentially one or the other according to the folk or philosophers. In other words, operationalize, baby!
Excelsior!
C.L.Sosis
*You might even believe that rational norms are determined by what is in fact (statistically) normal, thus, you can use the results of experimental philosophy to determine what the norms are (by determining what is normal) and what you should do, from a rational point of view, in these hypothetical scenarios (according to the norms).
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