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March 29, 2005

Paradoxes of Desire Satisfactionism and Hedonism

(crossposted at Pea Soup)

Here's a fun paradox that came up in the intrinsic value seminar. Fred Feldman (*Pleasure and the Good Life*) and Chris Heathwood ("The Problem of Defective Desires," forthcoming in AJP) point out the following paradox for desire satisfaction theory, which seems to have been first suggested by Richard Kraut. People sometimes desire to be badly off. Desire satisfactionists say that A's desire to be badly off is satisfied iff A's desires are on the whole not satisfied. This leads to paradox, at least in certain cases. If having a desire satisfied is good for you, then satisfying the desire to be badly off makes you better off; and in some cases, the result will be that you are not badly off; which means that the desire is not satisfied after all, so you are badly off. Paradox. (For a clearer formulation of the paradox, read Chris' paper.)

Chris suggests in his paper that the paradox for desire satisfactionism flows merely from a paradox about desire. Paradox arises just from the desire to have one's desires frustrated � whether or not desire satisfactionism is the right theory of welfare. If you have a favorite way to resolve those paradoxes, the desire satisfactionist can just employ your solution and save his theory of welfare.

I�m not sure Chris is right about this. Consider the sometimes paradoxical desire to have one�s desires be, on the whole, mostly frustrated. Suppose that the solution to this paradox is to say that this is an impossible desire. If desire satisfaction were true, this would entail that it is also impossible to desire one�s life to go badly on the whole. (Or at least that desire could never be satisfied.) But that desire is not paradoxical, and it seems like it could be satisfied. So there�s a cost to desire satisfactionism here � it entails that certain desires are paradoxical or unsatisfyable, while other theories of welfare would not. (I realize this is a bit sketchy, but this is after all just a blog post. Feel free to hammer away with de re/de dicto distinctions and such in the comments.)

I think this sort of paradox creates problems for other theories of welfare too, including Feldman's "Truth-Adjusted Intrinsic Attitudinal Hedonism." (Feldman doesn't seem to endorse TAIAH in the end, but he seems sort of sympathetic to it.) Very roughly, the idea behind TAIAH is that pleasures are more valuable when taken in propositions that are true. (Better to be pleased that others like you when they actually do like you than when they hate you, etc.) Just to make the view sufficiently precise, let's suppose that pleasures taken in truths ("true pleasures") are twice as valuable as similar pleasures taken in falsehoods ("false pleasures"). Here�s a variant on one of Chris' examples. Suppose that A's life contains more pain than pleasure, so that his life has intrinsic value of �15 (pending what else happens). A then takes pleasure to degree 10 in the fact that he�s had a bad life. Call this pleasure P. Is P a true pleasure or a false pleasure? If it�s a true pleasure, then its intrinsic value is +20, which means A's life has intrinsic value of +5, which means P is not a true pleasure after all. If P is a false pleasure, then P has intrinsic value of +10, which means A's life has intrinsic value of �5, which means P was in fact a true pleasure. Paradox.

Posted by bbradley at 12:05 PM

March 24, 2005

Depression and Ecstasy Helmets

At the New Zealand philosophy group blog, currently titled Prior Knowledge (though that may change), Patrick Kerr presents an interesting example regarding the debate between hedonism about well-being (i.e. what's in our best interest reduces to how much pleasure we have and how little pain we have) and theories of well-being that insist that having our desires being met is at least part of our well-being (call these preference theories).

Typically, pleasure machines and Truman Show cases are generally pulled out to show that hedonism is wrong. It would be bad if you were completely deceived about everything going on in your life, thinking everything is good and enjoying it all yet being misled as to the awful or false nature of every relationship in your life, the complete insignificance of all the decisions you've made to do good in the world, etc. Someone who believes everything is good when it isn't is much worse off than someone who believes all is fine when it is fine. Most people who don't think well-being is limited to things about your mental states consider it to be better to know it's terrible than to be deceived into thinking it's great when it's awful, even though your mental states are such that you're very happy. Patrick's example is supposed to go the opposite direction.

Patrick says to consider the following cases:

Two highly sophisticated helmets are invented. One, the "depression helmet", when worn allows the person wearing it to go about their life as usual. However, it causes them to believe that all of their desires have been thwarted. The second helmet is called the "ecstasy helmet" and evokes in the subject a pathological optimism: they believe that they have everything in the world they could possibly want and more.

I thought I knew what was going on in this post, then I re-read it, and now I'm not so sure. I can interpret his language in three ways, none of which seems to fit exactly with how he puts it:

(1) The helmets transform the experiences, holding the desires constant. The ecstasy helmet makes me experience things that I consider good, even if bad things are happening. The depression helmet makes me experience things that are bad, even if good things are happening. This description seems to fit this one:

Would you rather actively fulfill all the desires you have in life, or at least see others fulfill them for you (but wear the depression helmet, so as to believe that the opposite is happening and hence be in utter anguish), or would you rather live what you would have called a worthless life, lying in bed all day like a heroin addict (but because you are wearing the ecstasy helmet you think you have everything that you desire, and because of this you are in utter bliss)?

(2) They transform my desires, holding my perceptual experiences constant. The ecstasy helmet makes me enjoy things I would not normally enjoy, and the depression helmet makes me loathe things I would normally enjoy.

This wasn't my first thought upon reading the post, but there's enough evidence against the first interpretation that this seemed worth thinking about. What counts most against it is that your desires would be fulfilled if you had the ecstasy helmet on, and Patrick wants to say that they're not but you think they are.

(3) The experiences are normal, and the desires are also unchanged, but the ecstasy helment makes me believe against all my evidence that my desires are satisfied when in fact they aren't, and the depression helmet makes me believe against all my evidence that my desires are unsatisfied when in fact they are satisfied.

Patrick's statement that the Ecstasy Helmet leads to a pathological optimism suggests version (3). With an Ecstasy Helmet Mark 3, I believe I have everything I could want and more, even though all my experiences give me enough empirical evidence to the contrary, and I really don't desire any of what I get. That would surely be pathological.

What counts against this is this statement of Patrick's, just before he gives the helmet examples: "Perhaps it follows that what a person would most prefer to happen, is for their own informed desires to be fulfilled in fact." If the example is a counterexample to this, it should involve informed beliefs, but the beliefs are exactly what are not informed in the Mark 3 helmets.

Since I don't know which Patrick meant, I'll record my thoughts on all three. I was assuming (1) in my first comment. Here is what I said:

It's interesting that if you're right it doesn't show hedonism to be correct, because then we'd have one case that moves us that way and the pleasure machine that moves us the other way. I think Richard is right to try to find a view that explains both responses, but what if in the end we can't do that? Which of these examples should take precedence?

I think I'm going to bite the bullet on this anyway. If I'm trying to devote my life to helping people out, and I do so, then I think it's so good for me to have my life purpose met that it's still better for that to be the case with my being fooled into thinking I've completely failed than it is for me to be all happy and content thinking I'd succeeded when in fact I've completely hurt everyone and everything I've touched. It's terrible for me that I'm misled about this (which is true of both cases), but it's even worse that my life goal is not only failed but that I never know that, whereas it's not so bad that I simply never know that I've succeeded, because I have succeeded.

With (2), I'm less sure. If the experiences are held constant, and the desires are changed, I'm not as sure what to say. The helmet transforms my desires so that I falsely think my desires are being fulfilled (or not, depending on which helmet we're talking about). If my desires are transformed, it's strange to say the helmets make it so your desires aren't fulfilled. They are fulfilled. It's just that they're not the desires you would have otherwise had.

Even so, I think preference views do better than hedonism with this case. If my desires are changed so I like awful things, and awful things happen and I enjoy it, I think that's bad for me. If my desires are changed so I hate good things, and good things happen, that's also bad for me. In each case I'm conditioned to hate the good or to love the bad. In one case, I'm hating the bad in addition to hating the good. In the other, I'm loving the bad in addition to loving the good. Those seem equally bad to me, so the desire-altering doesn't seem better or worse in either case.

That means two things remain that I can use to decide which is worse for me (both are bad, so it seems weird to ask which is better for me). One is the mere mental state, either enjoyment or unhappiness. The other is the circumstances, either good or bad. Patrick seems to be saying (if this is the right interpretation) that the depression helmet case might be better overall but no better for me. The ecstasy helmet case is better for me, though worse overall.

I just can't accept that. What makes the ecstasy helmet case so bad is that the enjoyment is based on a lie. It's not based on a lie in the way the enjoyment of Ecstasy Helmet Mark 1 was, since I do know exactly what's gone on. Ecstasy Helmet Mark 2 is still based on a lie, because my desires were fashioned into what they are through a transformation against my will of what my desires would normally be into something that I would never have preferred if I had a choice. It just seems to me that it's bad to get what I want when what I want is not only terrible but not what I would want if I hadn't been altered, even if I would enjoy it. Therefore, it's better to get what I don't want given that it's what I would have wanted had I not been changed, even if I wouldn't enjoy it.

I'm having trouble imagining what (3) could possibly be like, if it's even possible. With an Ecstasy Helmet Mark 3, I believe I have everything I could want and more, despite my experiences providing enough empirical evidence to the contrary, and I don't want anything I have. It doesn't make for the best thought experiment if I can't imagine what it would be like or even be sure it's possible.

Even so, the pathology of having false beliefs that my desires are being met when they're not seems worse than the pathology of having false beliefs that my desires are not being met when they are. I'd much rather my desires be fulfilled even if I for some reason can't intellectually grasp that or enjoy the satisfaction of having achieved what I desire. I think that's better for me.

So in all three interpretations I don't see how this example should favor hedonism over a preference theory. If it did, it would just suggest to me that both hedonism and strict preference theories are inadequate, which I believe anyway. I don't think well-being can be reduced to pleasure and pain together with desire-fulfillment. The conjunction of concluding one example shows hedonism is false and concluding the other shows strict preference theories to be false is consistent with my own view.

Posted by Jeremy at 4:39 PM | TrackBack

March 22, 2005

Hispanic Metaphysics, African Epistemology

Matthew posts at Prosblogion about his experiences at a religious studies conference, and one comment struck me as interesting:

The worst part of the workshop was having someone insist to me that there is such a thing as Hispanic and African metaphysics and epistemology. I'm cannot imagin what being Hispanic or African adds to ones analysis of material constitution or Gettier cases. However, if anyone has a suggestion I am willing to listen.
Since the comments there are acting up (the blog software thinks I just submitted a comment and tells me to wait, but I haven't submitted one in days), I decided to turn my comment into a post here and just trackback.

The one thing that might make some sense is if the African philosophical tradition or the Chinese philosophical tradition had approaches to these questions that we don't have in the western tradition. When Ted Sider was finishing up his Four Dimensionalism book (I believe I have the chronology right), he read a whole bunch of Asian philosophy to see what they thought about time and persistence, and he says many of the contemporary metaphysical views are in there. Maybe the ancient Chinese philosophers developed views that are distinctively in the Chinese tradition and haven't yet entered western philosophy. Of course, the average Asian wouldn't have much access to any of that, and I'm not sure how this would even begin to make sense of Asian metaphysics as opposed to any other kind. I don't see how anything analogous to that could even make sense for Hispanic metaphysics. In the end, I'd say the same about ethics or any other philosophical issue. These issues all transcend cultural background and race. Sometimes people's cultural assumptions will make certain views easier or harder to understand and more or less palatable to invididual people. Sometimes people might have more access to certain information, e.g. what it's like to be a woman or to be black in America, but it's a misnomer to call that feminist epistemology or black epistemology if you mean that this is an epistemological approach exclusive to women and common to all women. It's an epistemological thesis about women and men's relative access to certain truths, not a view for and by women as opposed to views for and by men. Men can hold such a view as well (e.g. Michael Stocker), and many women disagree with it (e.g. Susan Haack, to name one prominent philosopher). So I don't see how there could even in principle be a Hispanic ethics, an African political philosophy, or an Inuit aesthetics any more than there is a South Bronx metaphysics or Russian epistemology. Groups of people might all agree on a certain view, and that might mean there's a predominant view on Native American land claims among the Onondaga people of New York (though I imagine there isn't even that). It might turn out that, contingently, circumstances work so that all of a certain group end up with a view that no one else holds. That doesn't mean there could even be an Onondaga political philosophy, though, or a Martian metaphysics for that matter. There may end up being a political view that most Onondagas happen to believe, but it's a view that anyone could hold or even have come up with. Calling it Hispanic metaphysics sounds incredibly innatist and essentialist to my ears, as if Hispanics, merely by being Hispanic, are forced into certain views and/or approaches that others wouldn't ever begin to think of considering.

Posted by Jeremy at 5:39 PM | Comments (65)

March 21, 2005

Philosophers' Carnival XI

The eleventh Philosophers' Carnival is at the only official blog of Clayton Littlejohn.

Posted by Jeremy at 4:29 PM

March 16, 2005

Philosophers' Carnival XI Plug

The 11th Philosophers' Carnival is coming up next Monday. Submissions should be in by this weekend, so send them in. The host will be The Only Official Blog of Clayton Littlejohn.

Posted by Jeremy at 2:26 PM

March 14, 2005

Watch the Daily Show Tonight

Lindsay at Majikthise thankfully reminded me that philosopher Harry Frankfurt will be on the Daily Show tonight to talk about his classic, On Bullshit.

Posted by MarkSteen at 2:47 PM

March 11, 2005

2005 Syracuse Conference Update

Emeritus professor C.L. Hardin (our keynote speaker) has kindly made his paper, A Green Thought in a Green Shade, available for download as a PDF file on our Conference Web Page. Our conference is 8 - 9 April 2005.

Posted by kkukla at 10:50 AM

March 5, 2005

Mirror Test

Psychologists have a test that's generally agreed to show whether a child or an animal has self-consciousness. Someone will put a red dot on their forehead while they're asleep and then see what happens when they look in a mirror. If orangutans, say, can put their hand on their forehead when they see a red dot on the forehead of the image of the orangutan in the mirror, it's supposed to show that the orangutan is thinking, "Hey, that's me, and I've got a red dot on my forehead." I've been thinking about this, and I'm not so sure. Doesn't it really just show that they expect a correlation between things in mirrors and things that we know mirrors reflect? I wonder about this as I see my kids learning to identify themselves in the mirror. They might easily first get the concept that the things in the mirror match up with the things outside the mirror, long before they start thinking "that's me in the mirror". So why are these tests supposed to tell us that orangutans, gorillas, and chimps have self-consciousness? Maybe they do, but I can't see how this test should show that. Update: At my cross-posting of this on my own blog, Chris of Mixing Memory says there have been other experiments to rule out the alternative explanation I gave. I think my point still stands, though, because it was about whether this test proves self-consciousness, not about whether this test plus some other test proves self-consciousness. Update 2: Comments are closed. If you wish to leave a comment, go to the Parableman post linked to above.

Posted by Jeremy at 9:09 PM | Comments (10)

March 1, 2005

Science (I think)

Just read a metaphysically interesting article on the internet. It even regards the true nature of hells.

Posted by cmaxfield at 10:04 PM

Introducing Philosophy

Studi Galileiani has been developing a resource for introducting philosophy. It looks pretty good so far, for a fairly introductory level. I haven't had a chance to read it in detail, but I looked at the metaphysics and philosophy of religion entries, and they look pretty comprehensive. [Hat tip: Mormon Metaphysics]

Posted by Jeremy at 9:59 AM | Comments (2)