Hic Habitat Felicitas

The Experience Machine, Inverted, Revisited and Updated...

I've talked about the experience machine and the status quo bias in a previous post, but if you're interested, you can check out the original article about the 'inverted experience machine' here.

UPDATE: Joshua Knobe recently produced a video explaining experimental philosophy using the experience machine as an example. Here it is!

 

 

 

Well-Being: Hodge Podge of Kludges?

Hello y'all,

Recently, Stephen Stitch argued that it may be difficult to come up with a good account of moral judgment--an account of moral judgment that captures the ordinary concept--because there is no coherent concept of morality (indeed, we have no reason to believe that there is, and one might argue, given the persistence of disagreement, reason to believe there isn't). Recent research seems to show that there isn't a single psychological system which generates our moral judgments: there are a hodgepodge of different systems, designed by evolution to address different problems, pushing us in different directions. Josh Greene for instance, has suggested that the psychological systems which generate our deontic moral judgments are distinct from the psychological systems that generate utilitarian moral judgments. Often, these two distinct cognitive processes, designed for different purposes, issue inconsistent moral judgments. 

I think this work provides a realistic framework in which to understand our welfare judgments. In an earlier post, I suggested that the social intuitionist model of moral judgment might also apply to our welfare judgments, but it wouldn't be entirely surprising if we discovered that there isn't a single psychological process that generates our welfare judgments. Instead, it seems we have reason to believe that welfare judgments are the by-product of a cornucopia of kludges. Some of these kludges might be designed to protect our progeny (which would explain why we think that what happens to our children after we die can affect our well-being even though we are dead) and other kludges might be activated in situations in which deception is afoot (as is the case in the experience machine thought experiment). This approach to understanding the intricacies of our moral judgments might also help us understand our strange and contradictory welfare judgments. Once we understand how we think about well-being from a psychological/evolutionary perspective our traditional beliefs about well-being might be altered profoundly (as our traditional beliefs about morality might be)...

  Excelsior!

  C.L.Sosis

Welfart!

Hello y'all,

Lately, I've been wondering how similar our welfare judgments are to moral judgments according to the social intuitionist model of morality advocated by Jonathan Haidt. According to the social intuitionist model, our moral judgments are driven by our intuitions and emotions and our ethical principles are merely post hoc rationalizations of these intuitions and emotions.

The social intuitionist model has interesting experimental consequences. If the social intuitionist model is correct, bizarre factors, such as whether you think somebody just farted, might play a role in the formation of your moral judgments. This is exactly what the research seems to show: it seems disgusted people tend to form harsher moral judgments than their non-disgusted counterparts.

The tail, it seems, wags the dog.

I wonder to what extent welfare principles are merely post hoc rationalizations of our intuitions and emotions. It's often taken for granted that our judgments about well-being reveal the nature of welfare principles, but these judgments might just reveal how we feel about certain lifestyles.  

If our welfare intuitions are the result of the affective factors that moral judgments seem to be, there are ways to show it. For instance, if the odor of the desk which you are using in order to answer a questionnaire about how well off Wally is influences your welfare judgments of Wally, we might take this as some evidence that your feelings of disgust are informing  your welfare judgments. This is just one potential experiment. We need a body of coverging evidence to show that the social intuitionist model is right. The important point is that it's possible to figure out whether your welfare judgments depend on how you feel empirically.

Still, I imagine you might take it that disgust is a relevant consideration in which case your welfare judgments ought to be mediated by what you think is disgusting. This could present a serious problem: if there isn't a fact of the matter about what's disgusting, as most of us seem to believe, there isn't a fact of the matter about who's well off. Then again, that might just be the way well-being (and morality) rolls!

  Excelsior!

  C.L.Sosis

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).

I'm Back!

Hello Fellow Hedonists,

I've been on a happiness hiatus. Ironically, the only thing getting in the way of my well-being has been my dissertation on well-being! Let's review what has happened on the happiness front in the past seven weeks.

1) It has been shown that your serotonin levels effect how you play the ultimatum game. Apparently, low serotonin levels probilify the rejection of unfair offers.  The researchers concluded that "5-HT plays a critical role in regulating emotion during social decision-making."

2) Check out Will Wilkinson's excellent discussion with Josh Knobe about experimental philosophy, the experience machine, the status quo bias and the endowment effect...

3) Often, when we think about egalitarianism or distributive justice, we think about the distribution of goods, rights or opportunities. In a recent paper, "Happiness Inequality in the United States," Betsy Stevenson and Justin Wolfers discuss...happiness inequality. According to Wolfers, "there is less happiness inequality today than in the 1970’s or 1980’s" even though there have been "large increases in income and consumption inequality." 

 

You can read the trilogy of articles on the topic, here. You can also read a brief summary of these findings, here.

4) Check out this tantalizing tidbit about the well known benefits of smiling.

5) Apparently, for one reason or another, the gender of your supervisor has an influence on how happy you are at work.

6) The August issue of Psychological Science contains a fascinating article by Eugene M. Caruso, Daniel T. Gilbert, and Timothy D. Wilson on the phenomenon known as temporal value asymmetry. 

7) Randy Newman has remarked that "short people got no reason to live."

Turns out, they're pretty miserable too...

This article suggests that "the main reason why taller people do better is because they have higher incomes, they are better educated, and they work in higher status occupations."

8) According to this article, "Between 1980 and 1985, only 2,125 articles were published on happiness, compared with 10,553 on depression. From 2000 to 2005, the number of articles on happiness increased sixteenfold to 35,069, while articles on depression numbered 80,161. From 2006 to present, just over 2 1/2 years, a search found 27,335 articles on happiness, more than half the 53,092 found on depression."

9) According to recent research the experience of positive emotions was more strongly related to life satisfaction than the absence of negative emotions across nations. However, "negative emotional experiences were more negatively related to life satisfaction in individualistic than in collectivist nations, and positive emotional experiences had a larger positive relationship with life satisfaction in nations that stress self-expression than in nations that value survival. These findings show how emotional aspects of the good life vary with national culture and how this depends on the values that characterize one's society. Although to some degree, positive and negative emotions might be universally viewed as desirable and undesirable, respectively, there appear to be clear cultural differences in how relevant such emotional experiences are to quality of life."

10) According to a recent study in the journal, BMC Cancer, women who suffered two or more traumatic events in their life, such as losing a loved one, had a 62 per cent greater risk of being diagnosed with breast cancer, but optimistic women were 25 per cent less likely to develop the disease. This study definitely deserves a closer look.

11) According to this article, conventional retributivist and utilitarian conceptions of punishment must accommodate our ability to adapt to changed circumstances (including fines and imprisonment) and, somehow, must ameliorate the devastating (unintended) consequences of incarceration (such as unemployment, divorce and disease). These phenomena are obstacles to implementing proportional punishment and creating a marginal deterrent, thus they threaten the foundations of punishment theory.

Well, that's all for now. I'll be back soon...

                                                                                                  Excelsior!

                                                                                                  C.L.Sosis

The Experience Machine and Experimental Philosophy...

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).

While I Was Gone...

Hello Fellow Hedonists,

The hustle and bustle of activity that has occured since my haitus is a bit overwhelming, but I am going to do my best to cover it here:

1) Peter Clough (University of Hull), in collaboration with AQR, has shown it is possible to teach kids to be tough (which they claim you can measure using the MTQ48) and that doing so has the beneficial effects you would expect, given other research on the benefits of resilience.

2) Research on hedonic adaptation has shown that “Within a few years, paraplegics wind up only slightly less happy on average than individuals who are not paralyzed.” Recently, researchers have shown that, ironically, functionally impaired patients with diseases such as amytrophic lateral sclerosis might be depressed (and, consequently, decline life sustaining treatment) because they don't realize that having the disease won't nessecarily compromise subjective quality of life (if they accept life sustaining treatment). It was also shown that, unsurprisingly, educated patients adapt to the illness better, from a hedonic point of view (this might be surprising if you buy into the myth of the melancholic genius). 

3) Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin have shown that having strong family ties is a much bigger predictor of contentment than income. This research seems to support the jist of the Easterlin Paradox: money matters up to a point (when basic needs are met), then, other things matter more. In the words of Rebecca J. North, one of the researchers,"Our findings underscore the importance of additional policy indicators that can tap the well-being of individuals and families at the psychosocial level to provide a more comprehensive understanding of a nation's well-being." As I have argued in other places, researchers often forget that money is extrinsically valuable. If it has any influence on subjective well-being, it is probably because of how it is used.

4) It has previously been shown old people are as happy as young people. This is puzzling, in part, because old people spend more time alone, which has been shown to cause (and be caused by) depression. In the current issue of Psychology and Ageing, Bill Von Hipple has shown that "older people are just as satisfied with their social lives because they seem to get much more from the few interactions they have." In other words, the old aren't lonely because the elderly simply adapt, hedonically, to being less social than they used to be.  

5) Check out this Gallup graph. Apparently, everybody is, in fact, working for the weekend. Yet another reason to pursue a gratifying profession.

6) Previously, I have discussed the link between subjective well-being and health. A new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has shown "that positive affective states are related to favourable profiles of functioning in several biological systems and may thereby be relevant to risk of development of physical illness."

7) Read this interesting how-to article on how to maintain a happy marrige (and your health, by extension).

                                                                                               Excelsior!

                                                                                               C.L.Sosis

                                      

Well-Being, Deontology and Utilitarianism...

Hello Fellow Hedonists,

Drawing on a range of empirical evidence, this essay argues that the failure to include, and to give sufficient weight to, fairness preferences undermines legal economists' policy recommendations. The authors argue that given the growing body of research revealing that individuals value fairness over their own rational self-interests, it is incumbent on legal economists to take preferences for fairness into account. This claim is problematic from the get go. After all, what we value (or what we prefer) isn't necessarily good for us. I think the authors are on to something, nonetheless.

Often, when simple utilitarians calculate the happiness/welfare/well-being of an individual or group, they pretend that people don't care about things such as fairness. When utilitarians, such as Peter Singer, recommend a counterintuitive social policy, they pretend that ignoring our intuitions (of the deontic variety) doesn't have a negative influence on our subjective well-being, but it wouldn't be entirely surprising if people were upset by non-utilitarian considerations even if they shouldn't be. If utilitarians were to take the influence our ineliminable (moral) judgments of right and wrong have on our subjective well-being into account, they might be forced to concede that non-utilitarian concerns (such as justice and fairness) must be respected.

Shouldn't utilitarians simply attempt to accommodate deontic considerations? I don't think so. My deontic judgments are the evolutionary by-product of morally irrelevant processes that were conducive to my fitness. Fitness, from my point of view, is morally irrelevant. Thus, it seems to me that I should ignore my deontic judgments when I try to figure out what I ought to do. However, whether or not I should ignore these judgments depends on whether or not I can. On one hand, it might turn out that I can simply dismiss my own judgments and values as systematic biases that undermine my well-being and be done with it.

On the other hand, it might turn out I can't ignore these judgments, even if I am able to recognize they are biases upon reflection. Ignoring these biases could make me miserable, even if I don't identify with them. If this turns out to be the case, it might be a good idea to chemically or surgically alter my brain to relieve myself of these harmful biases. It might also be a good (and less difficult) idea to trick myself by creating situations in which acting in accordance with these illusions doesn't undermine my well-being (intentionally damaging my brain might not work). Either way, reasoning away my conscience might not be a viable option.

                                                                                                   Excelsior!

                                                                                                   C.L.Sosis

Don't Judge Me: Moral Reasoning and Well-Being...

Hello Fellow Hedonists,

Templeton Prize winner, Jonathan Haidt, delivered an excellent lecture at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies on the place of harm/care and justice/fairness (as well as other non-western moral sentiments) within the context of evolutionary/moral/folk psychology. It includes an interesting discussion of the moral intuitions of liberals and conservatives.

Haidt catalogs our moral intuitions, and he seems to believe we should use this catalog as a guide to good moral reasoning. This seems to be the wrong way to formulate a good guide to moral reasoning. If we were carefully catalog our epistemic intuitions, for instance, it would be idiotic to use that catalog as a guide to good reasoning. If we did, in epistemology, what Haidt does here, in ethics, we would reason as our forefathers did: poorly. There is a better way! Our epistemic intuitions aren't reliable guides to good reasoning. It would be a miraculous coincidence if our moral intuitions were perfectly reliable guides to human well-being. 

In the end, Haidt is content to kowtow to conservatives and leave everything as he found it. If we were to follow his lead, we would encourage bad moral reasoning, moral reasoning that conforms to our moral intuitions but ultimately undermines our well-being.

                                                                                       Excelsior!

                                                                                       C.L.Sosis

                                                                                                                                                         

Conference on Subjective Measures of Well-Being and the Science of Happiness‏...

Hello Fellow Hedonists,

A workshop (Subjective Measures of Well-Being and the Science of Happiness: Historical origins and philosophical foundations) has been organized by the Department of Philosophy and the Center for Ethics and Values in the Sciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (pictured).

                                          Excelsior!

                                          C.L.Sosis