Hic Habitat Felicitas: When Should You Abandon Your Method?

When Should You Abandon Your Method?

Hello Fellow Hedonists,

According to traditional criteria, outlined by L.W Sumner in the book “Welfare, Happiness & Ethics” the best theory about the nature of well-being “is the one which is most faithful to our ordinary concept and our ordinary experience.” The relevant experience is “given by what we think or feel or know about well-being, both our own and that of others.” This theory must accommodate “the prodigious variety of our preanalytic convictions.” A good theory of well-being should offer truth conditions which “can support and systematize our intuitive assessments.” In a sense, such a theory is an “interpretation of our preanalytic convictions” thus, “the best interpretation is the one which makes the best sense of those convictions” (Sumner, pg 11). A theory of well-being that satisfies these criteria is descriptively adequate.[1]

There are many accounts of well-being that aim to satisfy these criteria. Despite this profuse variety--hedonism, present desire satisfaction, summative comprehensive desire satisfaction, global comprehensive desire satisfaction, informed desire satisfaction, authentic happiness and perfectionism to name a few--these accounts can be classified as either subjective or objective. Subjective theories of welfare "make our well-being logically dependent on our attitudes of favours and disfavor" whereas objective accounts "deny this dependency." (Sumner pg 38). In other words, subjectivist accounts of well-being claim that your well-being is a function of the structure and content of your subjective experiences. According to objectivist accounts of well-being, your well-being is not entirely the function of your subjective experiences.

Hedonism, for instance, is a subjective account of well-being. According to hedonism your well-being is entirely the function of the intensity and duration of your positive subjective experiences. In particular, hedonists believe that “welfare consists in happiness and that happiness consists in pleasure and the absence of pain” (Sumner, pg 87). In general, a subjective account, such as hedonism, is criticized by pointing out that there are examples of people who we don’t want to say are well off—the deceived, for instance— which seem to satisfy subjective criteria of well-being. Consider the experience machine, for example:

Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Superduper neuropsychologists 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 desires?...Of course, while in the tank you won't know that you're there; you'll think it's all actually happening. Others can also plug in to have the experiences they want, so there's no need to stay unplugged to serve them. (Ignore problems such as who will service the machines if everyone plugs in.) Would you plug in? What else can matter to us, other than how our lives feel from the inside? (Nozick, pg 43)

The fact that we wouldn’t choose to plug into the experience machine (because we believe our well-being doesn’t entirely depend on what we experience) is supposed to show that hedonism is descriptively inadequate. Accordingly, we ought to modify or reject hedonism in favor of a theory that doesn’t have any (or as many) counterintuitive consequences. We ought to adopt a theory that acknowledges that it seems, to most of us, that whether we are well-off depends at least in part on what the real world is like.

According to objectivist accounts of well-being—such as perfectionism, authentic happiness and all desire satisfaction accounts—the well-being of an individual is not entirely a function of subjective experience. Informed desire accounts of well-being, for instance, suggest that your well-being depends on whether your informed desires are satisfied. In order for a desire to be satisfied, we can’t just think our desires have been satisfied, the external world must be a certain way. So, if I want to win the Nobel Prize, I’m not better off if my dissertation director convinces me I’ve won the Nobel Prize. My informed desire to win the Nobel Prize is satisfied if and only if I actually win the Nobel Prize. It is in this sense informed desire accounts of well-being are objectivist.

In this case, as in the last, objectivist accounts—such as informed desire satisfaction accounts—are criticized by pointing out that there are examples of people who we don’t want to say are well off—the idiosyncratic, for instance—even though they satisfy objectivist criteria of well-being. For example, imagine a brilliant Harvard Mathematician who has an informed desire to count all of the blades of grass in his front yard (Rawls, pg 379). Assume that he is fully informed; that he isn’t delusional. Now suppose he satisfies this informed desire. Even though his informed desire is satisfied, intuitively, he doesn’t seem better-off because of it. This example is supposed to reveal that the informed desire satisfaction account of well-being is descriptively inadequate. Thus we ought to modify or reject desire satisfaction in favor of a theory that doesn’t have any (or as many) counterintuitive consequences.

You usually modify or reject a theory of well-being when it has counterintuitive consequences. You might also simply ‘outsmart’ your opponent, that is, you might ignore these intuitions if they conflict with a fairly coherent, intuitively plausible, descriptively adequate (though imperfect) theory.[2]It could also be the case that upon reflection, these intuitions evaporate (Crisp, pp 640-1). Philosophers often don’t see eye to eye with each other about these cases, and it would appear we have hit philosophical bedrock. Subjective and objective theories of well-being seem to be at loggerheads and they have been for awhile now.

If history is a guide here, the prospects for the traditional approach—a methodology that has been used for at least two millennia— leading to a descriptively adequate theory of well-being any time soon don’t look so good. Approaching this problem from another angle couldn’t hurt, right?

Excelsior!

C.L.Sosis

[1]Most philosophers seem to think that this is the correct way to come up with an account of well-being, so many, in fact, I can’t list them all here.

[2]The Philosophical Lexicon: outsmart, v. To embrace the conclusion of one's opponent's reductio ad absurdum argument. "They thought they had me, but I outsmarted them. I agreed that it was sometimes just to hang an innocent man."

Bibliography--

Crisp, Roger. “Hedonism Reconsidered.” The Journal of Phenomenological Research. Volume 73 Issue 3, pp 619 – 645, (2006).

Nozick, R. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Blackwell, (1974).

Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. New York: Belknpap Press, (2001).

Posted at 11:23 PM in Ethics, Intuition, Metaphilosophy, Philosophy, Psychology | Permalink

Comments

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C.L.: Sorry I'm just now looking at this post again; I hope you find this comment, and that it's in the ballpark of helpful. I was re-visiting the experience machine today in my Happiness and the Good Life class (Nozick's discussion of it in The Examined Life), and I drew attention to the fact that Nozick seems to have a "traditional" view of thought experiments: that they pump pre-theoretical intuitions to be used as data. That's contentious. Still, the example is an occasion for an interesting and relevant conversation. But it's not always clear that we should trust our intuitions (though I sympathize with my gut reaction to the experience machine!).

On the "stalemate": I think part of the difficulty is that often, more than one variable is at stake in trying to account for well-being. One is, as you put it, descriptive adequacy, but I suspect that normative adequacy is never too far in the distance. That is, if we have some sense that well-being ought to play some important role in practical deliberation (or policy), then we don't want well-being to be trivial. (Not logically trivial, but rather uninteresting, easy to come by--perhaps for some, "too subjective.") The threat for subjectivist-leaning views is that well-being gets "dumbed down"--at the limit: just plug into an experience machine; your life will be (and not just feel) wonderful. For objectivist views, the threat is something like exclusivity--at the limit: only Aristotle's contemplative philosopher is truly happy.

It seems to me--though I'd need to think a lot more about this--that one's theory of well-being may somehow be linked to one's sense of how much objective (or real) value there is in the world. I've also been thinking that one's conception of well-being is essentially tied to what it is to be a person, or have a life: if you're "Cartesian" in the sense of identifying the person/life with consciousness, then mental states are going to play a larger (if not exclusive) role. If you have a more embodied sense of personhood, then connections to reality, relational goods (that aren't reducible to the pleasure or other mental state that result), are going to matter, too.

So, it's all a mess. Maybe thinking about well-being needs to be more transparently connected to these other domains?

Posted by: Matt Pianalto | April 29, 2009 at 12:18 AM