Utilitarianism tends to retain whatever appeal it has by an illicit back-and-forth between two quite different positions, a corporeal hedonism on the one hand and a more evanescent ethical satisfactionism on the other.
As Nozick emphasized with his hypothetical "experience machine," we value more in life than pleasure. We value more in life than any set of internal states of our own body/mind, states that could be produced by a machine. We value doing and achieving X, not just the illusion that we did it and achieved it.
Heck, this is the moral of the Matrix movies. Even beyond the Cartesian stuff, the point is that if the machines that had taken over the world and confined all humans in tubes were nice enough to give all those humans the most pleasant fantasies, the situation would still be an oppressive one whence revolutionaries would rightly seek to free us.
So we naturally make the move away from hedonism or any hedonistic reading of utilitarianism toward desire satisfactionism. But that, too, has its difficulties. A professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder has offered this thought experiment:
suppose a person (we can call him 'Max the Masochist') suffers from some mental defect that makes him desire pain, failure, illness, humiliation, and early death. Suppose he gets these. [Desire Satisfationism] implies that his life went well for him. But surely his life was a wreck. He would have been much better off if he had different desires and they had been satisfied. The satisfaction of these desires did him no good.
So we have this little argument:
Max the Masochist:P1: Look at his life. From early on, he was constantly in pain. He failed at everything he did. He was sick and ill. He was constantly humiliated and ashamed of himself and his failures .... And he died young. This is what happened in Max's life. Now, are we going to say this is not a miserable life? If you were asked to describe a life in which the person was not doing well, could you do a better job than to describe Max's? It seems not. So it seems clear that Max's life did not go well for him -- he led a miserable life.
1. Max the Masochist led a miserable life.
2. If Max the Masochist led a miserable life, then DS is false.
3. Therefore, DS is false.
P2: But if Max really did lead a miserable life, then DS can't be true, because DS implies that Max's life went well for him. It implies this because all of these things Max got, he actually wanted! He wanted this misery. He wanted the pain, the humiliation, the illness, the early death.
Maybe you're skeptical about P1. Maybe, you say, if Max really did want those things, then his life was fine. Maybe some people are inclined to think Max's life didn't go so well because they wouldn't want those things.
But can you really swallow this? Suppose you had a close friend just like Max -- your friend had desires just like Max, and he was getting them satisfied. Would you then just sit back and say, "Oh wonderful, I'm so glad things are going so well for my friend?" No -- you'd try to get your friend some help. You'd think things would be better for your friend if he had different desires (say for love, pleasure, friendship, success) and got those things. But if DS is true, what you are saying doesn't even make sense. It doesn't even make sense to say the things he desires are bad for him.
I agree with the professor, Chris Heathwood that that is rather much to swallow.
Max desires pain, but does he desire to desire pain? Or does he instead see normally happy people around him and wish that he could be like them? In other words, does he know that he is mentally ill?
ReplyDeleteA depressed person may desire to stay in bed all day, but he usually knows that he is depressed and desires not to be. He desires that he not desire to stay in bed all day.
I suggest that we define utilitarianism in terms of meta-desires (what one desires to desire), and count only healthy meta-desires. This would be to apply objective criteria in determining whether a meta-desire is healthy, but is there a problem in doing that? Sometimes, as when homosexuality was considered a mental illness, criteria derive from bigotry. But I do not think that there is any bigotry underlying the claim that Max is sick.
Henry,
ReplyDeleteYou seem to be proposing to reform utilitarianism in much the same way John Stuart Mill did. Mill too gave his notion of "higher pleasures" a sort of meta component, though it wasn't precisely what you have outlined.
I took the above story of Max from Heathwood, as the link indicates, but here is a thought experiment of my own, that may bear on your point.
Late in a largely quiet life filled with fantasies, Walter Mitty finally decides to have a real adventure. So he heads to central Asia determined to climb Everest. He gets to the top of Mount Everest -- desire achieved.
But his body reacts badly to the thinness of the air and though he survives, the next day he is saying, "That hurt much more than I thought it would, and didn't give me the thrill I expected."
In other words, though the desire was satisfied, and though it was a desire he desired to have, he subsequently regrets having had it.
Does his arrival at the summit of Everest count as good -- despite pain and regret, or not?
It seems it is at least plausible to say that some of our desires/demands are mistaken, and are discovered to be mistaken later. But if goodness simply IS their satisfaction (even after they have satisfied the meta test you've specified) then this wouldn't be plausible at all.
Suppose that I am a seller of mountain climbing equipment, and I know from experience that customers of Walter Mitty's age and body type will regret climbing Mount Everest. Would I do good if I refuse to sell to him (and all other sellers also refuse), thereby thwarting his desires? I'd have to take into account the frustration that I would cause him to feel if I did not sell to him.
ReplyDeleteFrankly, I don't take this issue very seriously, because I think that defining goodness in a unitary way is impossible. Goodness does not have a set of necessary and sufficient conditions. It is merely a adjective, which we apply in various circumstances for various reasons.