Utilitarianism.net has just published two guest essays on ethical hedonism:
(1) In Analytic Hedonism and Observable Moral Facts, Sharon Hewitt Rawlette offers a précis of her 2016 book, The Feeling of Value. Philosophers may be especially interested in her explanation of analytic hedonism and how she addresses Moore’s open question argument. For a general audience, the bulk of the essay then runs through how she responds to a variety of objections to hedonism.
(2) Neil Sinhababu’s Naturalistic Arguments for Ethical Hedonism offers two new (and, I think, very interesting) arguments for hedonism: the reliability argument and the universality argument. More philosophical background may be required to get the most out of this one (it’s very clearly written, but the latter argument, especially, is quite intricate).
Enjoy!
[Update: And for a broader view, see our full chapter on theories of well-being.]
From the first essay:
"However, I believe it’s a mistake to think that the descriptive and the normative can never overlap. Imagine that you are a scientist taking an inventory of all the various qualities present in conscious human experience. You’ve written down the qualities of experiencing various colors, sounds, and smells. But there are two distinct experiential qualities that you can’t quite figure out how to describe. In the end, you realize that the only way to describe the one is to say that it’s “good” or “positive”, and that you can only describe the other by saying it’s “bad” or “negative”. That is, you have to mention the normativity of the experiences in order to describe them accurately. The qualities of these experiences are simultaneously normative and descriptive."
I can't imagine being satisfied with such a theory of consciousness. It seems like there will always be another question about how to explain "good" and "bad" or the appearance of them. Stopping here and invoking normative properties that aren't further explained physically is giving up, a lot like invoking the supernatural or gods to explain natural phenomena.
Intrinsic good and intrinsic bad as properties necessary to describe pleasure and suffering also seem incompatible with functionalism and illusionism, which both seem basically true to me. Are any popular theories of consciousness compatible with this?
I'm not sure how to interpret this, then:
"In the end, you realize that the only way to describe the one is to say that it’s “good” or “positive”, and that you can only describe the other by saying it’s “bad” or “negative”. "
Was this not a motivating example for her view? Or just proposed as an example where the descriptive and normative may overlap?
Does she have a specific descriptive definition of pleasure she's working with that doesn't directly use normative terms but from which she can derive its normative goodness? (I don't expect a persuasive solution to the is-ought problem; at some point you need to assume a normative fact to obtain any further ones, and I think we could prove this formally.)