There is nothing bad in each of these lives; but there is little happiness, and little else that is good. The people in Z never suffer; but all they have is muzak and potatoes.
- Derek Parfit, Overpopulation and the Quality of Life
The image of World Z provokes an unsettling cognitive dissonance. It forces us to confront the possibility that any degree of happiness, no matter how magnificent, can be outweighed by arbitrarily small pleasures multiplied across a sufficiently large population. Imagining this kind of mediocrity, we can hardly endorse it over a small yet ecstatic utopia.
And yet, I feel strongly that this perceived tension is due entirely to a failure of the imagination. When Parfit says “muzak and potatoes”, perhaps you conjure up the image of a medieval European peasant, covered in mud, living in squalor, only just barely getting by.
But read again more carefully: “There is nothing bad in each of these lives”.
Although it sounds mundane, I contend that this is nearly incomprehensible. Can you actually imagine what it would be like to never have anything bad happen to you? We don’t describe such a as mediocre, we describe it as “charmed” or “overwhelmingly privileged”.
After all, each of our lives are absolutely filled with bad things. Some of these are obvious (injury, illness, the loss of a loved one), but mostly they just exist as a kind of dull background pain we’ve grown to accept. The bad things are, as Simone Weil put it, the “countless horrors which lie beyond tears”.
In stark contrast, consider Parfit’s vision of World Z both seriously and literally.
These are lives with no pain, no loneliness or depression, no loss or fear, no anxiety, no aging, no disease, nor decay. Not ever a single moment of sorrow. These are lives free entirely from every minor ache and cramp, from desire, from jealousy, from greed, and from every other sin that poisons the heart. Free from the million ills that plague and poke at ordinary people.
It is thus less the world of peasants, and closer to that of subdued paradise. The closest analog we can imagine is perhaps a Buddhist sanctuary, each member so permanently, universally and profoundly enlightened that they no longer experience suffering of any kind.
And that’s not all! Parfit further tells us that their lives are net positive. And so in addition to never experiencing any unpleasantness of any degree, they also experience simple pleasures. A “little happiness”, small nearly to the point of nothingness, yet enough to tip the scales. Perhaps the warmth of basking under a beam of sun, the gentle nourishment of simple meals, or just the low-level background satisfaction of a slow Sunday morning.
Properly construed, that is the world Parfit would have us imagine. Not a mediocre world of “muzak and potatoes”, but a kind of tranquil nirvana beyond pain. And that is a world I have no problem endorsing.
I agree that some people don't seem to give hedonism a fair hearing when discussing experience machine thought experiments. But also, I think that some people have genuine reservations that make sense given their life goals.
Personally, I very much see the appeal of experience machines. Under the right circumstances, I'd be thrilled to enter! If I was single and my effective altruist goals were taken care of, I would leave my friends and family behind for a solipsistic experience machine. (I think I do care about having authentic relationships with friends and family to some degree, but definitely not enough!) I'd also enter a non-solipsistic experience machine if my girlfriend wanted to join and we'd continue to have authentic interactions (even if that opens up the possibility of having negative experiences). The reason I wouldn't want to enter under default circumstances is because the machine would replace the person I love with a virtual person (this holds even if my girlfriend got her own experience machine, and everyone else on the planet too for that matter). I know I wouldn't necessarily be aware of the difference and that things with a virtual girlfriend (or girlfriends?) could be incredibly good. Still, entering this solipsistic experience machine would go against the idea of loving someone for the person they are (instead of how they make me feel).
I wrote more experience machine thought experiments here.
I don't think there's such a thing as "the ethical value of a life," at least not in a well-defined objective sense. (There are clearly instances where people's lives aren't worth living and instances where it would be a tragedy to end someone's life against their will, so when I say the concept "isn't objective," I'm not saying that there's nothing we can say about the matter. I just mean that it's defensible for different people to emphasize different aspects of "the value of a life." [Especially when we're considering different contexts such as the value of an existing or sure-to-exist person vs. the value of newly creating a person that is merely a possible person at the time we face the decision.])