Do you reject axiological hedonism, and what evidence is there for any alternative view?

Nunik

[Question]

Do you reject axiological hedonism, and what evidence is there for any alternative view?

Nunik

1 min readJan 19, 2025

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Richard Y Chappell🔸

See the Theories of Well-being chapter at utilitarianism.net for a detailed philosophical overview of this topic.

The simple case against hedonism is just that it is bizarrely restrictive: many of us have non-hedonistic ultimate desires about our own lives that seem perfectly reasonable, so the burden is on the hedonist to establish that they know better than we do what is good for us, and - in particular - that our subjective feelings are the only things that could reasonably be taken to matter for our own sakes. That's an extremely (and I would say implausibly) restrictive claim.

Nunik

When you say "what is good for us", could it be translated as "what we are attached to"? If you care about knowledge or relationships, you will experience (dis)satisfaction depending on what relevant events happen in your life, and you will be motivated to achieve goals related to these things, but this is a far cry from what intrinsic value means in my view.

In essence, when I say suffering is intrinsically bad, I don't mean that it is bad for anyone; I mean that it is bad period. The badness is an inherent feature of the experience.

So from my perspective, the non-hedonist is making an extraordinary and unfalsifiable claim when positing the existence of non-experiential goods.

GoodHorse413🔸

I'm a long time committed axiological hedonist and have never believed that pleasure was objectively commensurable with suffering, and I also strongly suspect (but could be wrong) that pleasures are heterogenous and therefore not all pleasureable experiences are commensurable with each other (and the same with suffering). I find this makes it easier to explain clear cases of ambiguity in ethics, because I think ambiguity is baked into the axiological ground truth. I do believe that some things are objectively good and some things are objectively bad, but there is no universally accessible objective utility function by which you can rank all things from most to least desirable. Recognizing this clarifies weird edge cases where one form or another of utilitarianism seems to lead to a bad result, like symmetric utilitarianism leading to the repugnant conclusion or negative utilitarianism implying that we should destroy the world. These seem to be examples where maximizing hedonistic utility functions leads to bad things happening, because they are.

Axiological hedonism follows logically from materialist metaphysics and empiricist epistemology. Good and bad are qualities of experiences rather than external events or objects, hence why reasonable people may disagree whether or not a song was good. One person's experience of listening to the song was good, while the other person's experience was bad. Projecting qualities like "good" and "bad" onto things besides experiences is to mistake the map for the territory. And if anyone doubts that pleasure is good then they just haven't experienced the pleasures I have.

Nunik

We are mostly in agreement, though I don't quite understand what you meant by:

These seem to be examples where maximizing hedonistic utility functions leads to bad things happening, because they are.

If suffering and pleasure are incommensurable, in what way are such outcomes bad?

I would also be interested in your response to the argument that suffering is inherently urgent, while pleasure does not have this quality. Imagine you are incapable of suffering, and you are currently experiencing pleasure. One could say that you would be indifferent to the pleasure being taken away from you (or being increased to a higher level). Now imagine that you are instead incapable of experiencing pleasure, and you are currently suffering. In this case it would arguably be very clear to you that reducing suffering is important.

Michael St Jules 🔸

I reject axiological hedonism. I don't think anything has intrinsic value or intrinsic disvalue. On my preferred view, all value is projected subjectively onto the world, and pleasure is just one way, among multiple, to find something "good". Conscious approval is another way to find something good, for example. Things are only (dis)valuable if they are (dis)valued. I describe this view in this piece, and some more implications here.

The disvalue of suffering is self-evident from introspection, i.e. from observing how suffering feels.

Could you elaborate? FWIW, I don't really think anything is self-evident, maybe other than direct logical deductions and applications of definitions.

The disvalue is inherent in the experience; it is not a matter of an evaluation done by me, or a desire for the suffering to stop felt by me (even though there is a strong correlation), or me having a certain attitude towards suffering.

I would say suffering actually is an evaluation done by you (disliking) and a desire (wanting). The evaluations and desires inherent to suffering are kind of hardwired in, not reason-based. They are not the kind where you decide by reasoning that something is bad and to be avoided. They are forced onto you. These are empirical claims for which I think there is some evidence from cognitive neuroscience. I discuss this more in this piece and this piece.

Nunik

When you perceive a color, is it not self-evident that the color "looks" a certain way? There is no one doing the looking; it just looks. Color and disvalue are properties of conscious experience, and they are real parts of the world. I would say our subjective experience is in fact the "realest" part of the world because there can be no doubt about its existence, whereas we cannot ever be sure what is really "out there" that we are interpreting.

If no property of (dis)value existed and couldn't ever exist, then I think it would make no difference at all which outcome is brought about. I could just go chop my arm off and it wouldn't matter. The fact that I wouldn't want to do this would be irrelevant, because the wanting wouldn't by itself translate into any value. "I" am just a flow or sequence of experiences, and wanting is just a kind of experience with no intrinsic value.

The motivational salience you speak of in one of your posts may be a necessary condition for suffering (in humans), but the disvalue is exclusively in the distinct way the experience feels.

Michael St Jules 🔸

When you perceive a color, is it not self-evident that the color "looks" a certain way? There is no one doing the looking; it just looks. Color and disvalue are properties of conscious experience, and they are real parts of the world. I would say our subjective experience is in fact the "realest" part of the world because there can be no doubt about its existence, whereas we cannot ever be sure what is really "out there" that we are interpreting.

I'm sympathetic to illusionism about phenomenal properties (illusionism about phenomenal consciousness), i.e. I don't believe consciousness is phenomenal, ineffable, intrinsic, qualitative, etc.. People often mean phenomenal properties or qualia when they talk about things just looking a certain way. This might cut against your claims here.

However, I suspect there are ways to interpret your statements that are compatible with illusionism. Maybe something like your brain is undergoing specific patterns of reactions and discriminations to inputs, and these are distinctive for distinctive colours. What it means to "look" or "feel" a certain way is to just undergo particular patterns of reactions. And it's wired in or cognitively impenetrable: you don't have direct introspective access to the processes responsible for these patterns of reactions, only their effects on you.

Furthermore, everything we respond to and are aware of is filtered through these processes, so "we cannot ever be sure what is really "out there" that we are interpreting".

there can be no doubt about its existence

I'm not sure about this. I'd probably want to see a deductive argument for this.

If no property of (dis)value existed and couldn't ever exist, then I think it would make no difference at all which outcome is brought about.

I'm not saying values don't exist, I just think they are projected, rather than intrinsic. It can still matter to whatever's doing the projection.

The motivational salience you speak of in one of your posts may be a necessary condition for suffering (in humans), but the disvalue is exclusively in the distinct way the experience feels.

This seems to me to be separating the apparent disvalue from one of the crucial mechanisms responsible for (a large share of) the apparent disvalue. Motivational salience is what gives suffering its apparent urgency, and (I think) a big part of what makes suffering feel the way it does. If you got rid of its motivational salience, it would feel very different.

Nunik

I don't think I properly understand your position. You are not sure that you are currently having an experience? Because if you are having an experience, then the experience necessarily exists, otherwise you can't be having it.

David T

I'd add that to the extent conscious experience can be considered "self evident" only one's own experience of pain and pleasure can be "self evident" via conscious experience.

If Nunik's contention is that only things which achieve that experiential level of validation can be assigned intrinsic value with intuitions carrying zero evidential weight, it seems we would have to disregard our intuitions that other people or creatures might have similar experiences, and attach zero value to their possible pain/pleasure.

I mean, hedonic egoism is a philosophical position, but perhaps not a well-regarded one on a forum for people trying to be altruistic...

Nunik

What I meant is that the disvalue of suffering becomes evident at the moment of experiencing it. Once you know what disvalue is, the next step is figuring out who can experience this disvalue. Given that you and I e.g. have a very similar nervous system, and that we behave similarly in response to noxious stimuli, my subjective probability that you are capable of suffering will be much higher than the probability that a rock can suffer.

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Michael St Jules 🔸

When you perceive a color, is it not self-evident that the color "looks" a certain way? There is no one doing the looking; it just looks. Color and disvalue are properties of conscious experience, and they are real parts of the world. I would say our subjective experience is in fact the "realest" part of the world because there can be no doubt about its existence, whereas we cannot ever be sure what is really "out there" that we are interpreting.

Furthermore, everything we respond to and are aware of is filtered through these processes, so "we cannot ever be sure what is really "out there" that we are interpreting".

there can be no doubt about its existence

I'm not sure about this. I'd probably want to see a deductive argument for this.

If no property of (dis)value existed and couldn't ever exist, then I think it would make no difference at all which outcome is brought about.

I'm not saying values don't exist, I just think they are projected, rather than intrinsic. It can still matter to whatever's doing the projection.

The motivational salience you speak of in one of your posts may be a necessary condition for suffering (in humans), but the disvalue is exclusively in the distinct way the experience feels.