Parsimony in Theories of Welfare

[I ended up cutting the 'simplicity' section from the introductory essay on 'Theories of Welfare' that I'm working on.  But I rather like the following little argument, so thought I'd share it here...]

It's an interesting question which kinds of simplicity have epistemic significance. Should hedonists think it more likely that there are fewer pleasures in the world, since that would entail fewer items of value?  Presumably not. Alternatively, once we have admitted a certain type of thing into our ontology, we may not need to worry too much about how many instances (or “tokens”) of that type exist.

If this latter understanding is correct, then pluralists could likewise argue that we have already admitted the property of being a welfare value into our ontology, so whether we attribute it to just one type of thing or to many types does not ultimately change our ontological commitments. Whatever our theory of welfare, we are all committed to the exact same array of natural and normative properties. We just dispute which natural properties the normative ones are attached to.

Is Objective List Theory "Spooky"?

[I'm currently working on a new introduction to theories of welfare for utilitarianism.net, and am wondering whether to include the following.  Two big questions: Do you agree that "spookiness" worries seem like a common basis (especially amongst students / non-specialists) for rejecting objective list theories?  And if so, do you find the substantive discussion here to be helpful?]

Resistance to objective list theories may sometimes stem from the sense that there is something metaphysically extravagant, disreputable, or “spooky” about the objective values that it posits. But competing theories of welfare are arguably in no better position with regard to such metaethical concerns. Wellbeing is an inherently normative notion: it is that which is worth pursuing for an individual’s sake. (If you are not describing something that matters in this way, then whatever it is that you are giving an account of, it cannot truly be welfare. A thoroughgoing normative skeptic or nihilist must deny that there is any such thing.)^[Expressivists may give an anti-realist gloss on what “mattering” amounts to. But then they can just as comfortably extend this gloss to the kind of first-order “objectivity” posited by objective list theories.]

Conscientious Sadism

I've previously argued that sadistic pleasure (in oppressing the innocent) lacks value. But consider a complication.  Suppose this time that the sadistic majority are all conscientious utilitarians who would never willingly increase net suffering in the world.  They all appreciate that their victim's suffering is a bad thing in itself, and so would genuinely prefer to realize the same amount of pleasure without any suffering at all, if possible.  But alas, this just isn't possible in the circumstances.  We may further suppose that they would each be willing to themselves be tortured in order to generate greater net pleasure for their companions.  But alas, this isn't possible, either.  Their only options are to torture an unwilling innocent person, generating population-wide sadistic pleasure, or do nothing and have uniformly neutral experiences throughout the population.

In this revised case, many will of course still think it would be wrong to torture the innocent.  But I wonder whether this assimilates it to a standard sort of rights-violation scenario (e.g. involving non-sadistic pleasure), or whether we should still regard the sadistic pleasure itself as entirely lacking in value?

Hedonism, Egoism, and Implausible Restrictions

Rational Egoism claims that self-interest is uniquely rational; concern for anything besides your own wellbeing is (on this view) strictly irrational or unwarranted.  Value hedonists claim that pleasure is the only thing that has value: it follows that caring about anything besides pleasure is strictly irrational and unwarranted. (Though, due to the paradox of hedonism, it may be rational to try to acquire such irrational concerns, if this would actually serve to better promote your happiness.)  Both views are, I think, deeply implausible, in a distinctive kind of way.

Compare subjectivist (preferentist) views, which place no substantive restrictions on the content of what we may rationally prefer and pursue.  While these, too, strike me as implausible -- for broadly Parfitian reasons -- I can at least get myself into the mindset of appreciating their liberality.  "Who's to say what's really worth pursuing?"

But Hedonism and Egoism are different. These views purport to offer objective normative constraints on what really matters, but their substantive content just seems ludicrously unmotivated.  I mean, one's own wellbeing is indeed something that matters.  And pleasure is certainly of value.  So that much is right. But why on Earth would anyone think that either of these was the only thing that matters? (What could be more obvious than that love also matters?  That we shouldn't -- or at least needn't -- be indifferent to the possibility of our loved ones being secretly replaced by robots?) 

Vulcan Interests and Moral Status

Inspired by David Chalmers' recent Zoom talk on 'Consciousness and Moral Status': consider affectless (but otherwise phenomenally conscious) vulcans. They can perceive, and think, but have no positive or negative feelings of any kind.  Do they matter?  Is there anything in their lives that is (intrinsically) good or bad for them?

I think these are importantly distinct questions.  One way to see this is to note that even if (as I am inclined to think) their vulcanized lives contain no basic goods or bads, this very fact might be (extrinsically, comparatively) bad for them.  We would have strong moral reasons to devulcanize them, if possible, and provide them with the capacity for valenced experiences.  Crucially, this moral reason stems from concern for the very being that already exists: It is importantly different from simply bringing into existence a new conscious being where none was before.  So vulcans have one important kind of moral status -- they are morally considerable individuals -- even though in the ordinary run of things (i.e., while remaining a vulcan) nothing we did could be basically good or bad for them: their welfare is stuck at zero.

Acquired Tastes and Necessary Interests

Suppose that what time-relative interests you'll have in future depends upon what decision you make now.  For example, in McMahan's case of The Cure you can choose between five years of happy life continuous with your current psychology, or else taking a cure that greatly extends your future life but at the cost of introducing an immediate radical psychological discontinuity, such that the future happy person -- while numerically identical to you -- has nothing psychologically in common with your current self (in terms of memories, personality, values, etc.).  Now: If you never take the cure, then there are no time-relative interests that would be served by taking the cure, since the psychological discontinuity discounts the value (to you) of the discontinuous future life to zero.  But if you do take the cure, then you've many future timeslices who have strong time-relative interests in this future.  So, is it prudentially rational to take the cure or not?  Do contingent time-relative interests count?

"Objective Menu" Theories of Wellbeing

"Objective list" theories of wellbeing are easily misunderstood.  It's often assumed that such theories are committed to the implausible ideas that (i) the same things are good for everyone, regardless of their personal tastes and inclinations, and (ii) a good life must tick off every item on the list, and insofar as it misses one, the life thereby suffers from a significant lack.

These misunderstandings might be easily avoided with a little re-framing.  I take the core idea of objective theories of wellbeing to be that some personal projects are (inherently) more worth pursuing than others. (Becoming a happy vegetable, permanently hooked up to a passive "pleasure machine", does not make for an especially good life, even if that's what the individual in question most wants and enjoys.)  There's nothing in this core idea that requires everyone to have the same projects.  But the "list" metaphor can easily evoke this impression of a totalizing, one-size-fits-all approach.  A better metaphor, I think, would be that of a menu.

Locating the benefit of future-directed desires

Inspired by Princeton's recent (and very interesting) "Workshop on Well-being", I've been thinking about the debate between Bradley and Dorsey over the question: Where in time should Desire Theorists "locate" the benefit of a satisfied future-directed desire? At the time (t1) of the person's having the desire, or the later time (t2) where the object of the desire, i.e. the desired "good", is located?

I'm not sold on the idea that harms and benefits must be temporally located at all.  But supposing we do want to locate the benefit here, the former option -- locating it at the time of the state of desire -- seems to me to make most sense.  This may be illuminated by translating welfare talk into 'for the sake of' talk.

Early Death vs. Non-Existence

Consider what we might call the "Pure Deprivation Account" of the harm of death, that death is worse for you the more (of a good future) it deprives you of.  So it's a grievous harm to die the moment after you come into existence. McMahan objects to this kind of view on the grounds that it would render it "profoundly important to prevent the existence" of one who would otherwise immediately die (whereas he takes it that such preventive measures are not profoundly important).  Ben Bradley, in 'The Worst Time to Die', offers the intriguing response that it isn't always important to prevent great harms.  In this post, I want to explore this idea further.

The Value of Defiance

Consider the situation of being coerced by an evil person: say they will torture you unless you become their slave, and do their bidding.  This strikes me as an interesting situation -- a horrible situation, to be sure, but philosophically interesting insofar as it raises the question: when should we give in to threats, and when should we defy them (and suffer the consequences)?

The Worst Time to Die

When is death worst for you? Here are a few possible accounts of the harm of death, and the answers each imply:

(1) Pure Deprivation Account: death is worse for you the more (of a good future) it deprives you of. The worst time to die is thus the moment you come into existence.

Are there Virtues of Ignorance?

Julia Driver argues that modesty essentially involves ignorance (underestimation) of one's self-worth. Intuitively, modesty is a virtue. So this would count against traditional accounts of virtue (as involving moral perception or an internal orientation towards the good), and in favour of her instrumental account. But there are reasons to doubt whether modesty essentially involves ignorance after all.

Hedonism Review

Now to summarize my thoughts on hedonistic theories of welfare (understood broadly, to include qualia preferentism and other views on which your welfare depends only on your subjective mental states)...

(1) Some people are drawn to welfare hedonism for largely linguistic reasons: it just sounds wrong to their ears to say that a person is 'harmed' by an event that doesn't impact their experiences. In at least some cases this is the result of demonstrable conceptual and metaphysical confusions -- e.g. conflating different senses in which one might be "affected" by an event. But in any case, there is little point getting hung up on terminology. As I argue in 'The Importance of Implications', we should instead focus on the substantive normative questions in the vicinity, e.g., what we should want for the people we care about.

(2) When we reflect on the things that really matter to us in life, most of us find that we care about much more than just the quality of our subjective experiences. We also want, among other things, to form meaningful connections with other people, and to make actual progress towards accomplishing our goals. A life of pleasant delusion does not seem nearly so appealing. The hedonist may suggest that this is just because we care about more than our own well-being: for example, we want others to be well-off even when this doesn't benefit us personally. But even bracketing such moral concerns, departing your current life for the superficial thrills of Nozick's experience machine doesn't even seem like something worth doing for your own sake. (For another example: nor does plugging Morpheus back into the Matrix against his will seem like a particularly benevolent thing to do.) For many of us, at least, a life of appealing experiences is not sufficient for an appealing life.

[Update: this post argues that loving relationships also have non-instrumental value, for example.  Hedonism denies this, which strikes me as a decisive counterexample to the view.]

(3) Some hedonists try to debunk all such preferences as having been 'corrupted' by our mentally 'perceiving' what were meant to be unperceived events. I address this objection in my recent post, 'Imagining the Unseen'.

(4) Ben Bradley argues for hedonism on the grounds that other views run into problems specifying the 'timing' of certain harms. 'Must harms be temporally located?' explains why this is unconvincing.

---

As noted in #2 above, hedonism makes some incredibly implausible claims. For any hedonists out there: what do you think should motivate us to accept them nonetheless? (Even if you find that you personally only care about the experiential aspect of your life, what's the motivation for overriding others' self-regarding preferences regarding the sort of life they want - on reflection - to live?)

Imagining the Unseen

Consider what preferences you have over unseen outcomes. (For example, are you indifferent to the idea of your corpse being secretly donated - without warning - to the necrophiliacs society, or would you prefer that this not happen even if you're never told about it in advance?) To assess such questions, you likely try to 'picture' or imagine what the hypothesized state of affairs would be like, and then introspect your (actual) affective reaction to this mental exercise. If negative, as seems likely, then it seems you're not indifferent after all. You really do care about some things of which you could never learn. You would prefer that your corpse not be defiled, even if it has no impact on your experiences while you're alive.

Hedonists may object that this imagination-based methodology doesn't really get at your preferences concerning unknown and unseen outcomes. After all, they may say, all that this episode really establishes is that you are unhappy when you see, in your mind's eye, your corpse being defiled. Since you are imagining (mentally perceiving) the event in question, this corrupts your judgment concerning what was supposed to be an unperceived (by you) event. The hedonist may agree, after all, that this is unpleasant to think about. They just don't think that the event itself is bad (or undesirable for your sake).

I think this is not so much an objection as a cautionary note. It's true that someone might, if they're not careful, mistakenly conclude that they disprefer some X when really all that they disprefer is thinking about X. For example, when I imagine the sound of scratching a blackboard, I shudder in aversion. But that obviously doesn't commit me to disprefering a state of affairs in which a tree falls against a blackboard in an empty forest. As long as nobody is pained by the sound, it obviously doesn't matter. And, indeed, 'indifference' is precisely the response I have when I reflect carefully on what that state of affairs is like.

So, although it is easy to conflate conceiving that X and conceiving that X is conceived, it is not by any means inevitable. We can train ourselves to be careful in distinguishing the two. And we may then find that even if some of our preferences are purely hedonic in nature, many others are not like this. (It would certainly be a mistake to think that we can never have preferences about anything other than our experiences, or that we cannot identify such preferences via careful consideration of the hypothesized outcomes.)

For example: If you learn that there's a serious risk of blackboards being scratched in your vicinity after you die, that doesn't really call for any response. But if there's a serious risk of your corpse ending up in the hands of necrophiliacs, you might want to do something about that. (Just sayin'.)

Must harms be temporally located?

Ben Bradley's main argument for hedonism (in his recent diavlog with Roy Sorensen) seemed to be that other theories run into "difficulties" when it comes to specifying when certain alleged harms occurred. For example, most non-hedonists think that achieving your goals makes your life better. But suppose that you work hard to preserve a great work of art, only to have some vandal come along and destroy it after you die -- making it so that all your hard work was in vain. I think it's clear that this is bad for you, but Bradley asks, when is it bad for you? Roughly: "It can't be bad for you when you're alive, since your desire isn't thwarted yet, but nor can it be bad for you once you're dead, since you no longer exist to suffer harms. So it can't be bad for you at all."

I find pretty much every step of that argument dubious. Note that the first premise is technically false. Time-indexed propositions (e.g. "that the artwork survives beyond time t1") have their truth-values timelessly, so if you currently desire that the artwork survive beyond future time t1, and it doesn't so survive, then technically the desire is ("already") thwarted, in virtue of this future state of affairs.

The second premise is also dubious in light of 4-dimensionalism, as Bradley himself acknowledges and relies upon in explaining why death itself is bad for you. (Even after you die, you nonetheless exist in the past, and so the fact that your life wasn't longer can be bad for that past entity. And I doubt much really hangs on the metaphysics; presumably even presentists would want some way of saying things like this.)

Most importantly, it isn't at all clear why we should think that harms must have a temporal location at all. A harm is just whatever makes your life worse (less desirable). There doesn't have to be a particular time at which it is worse. Bradley's conclusion would only follow given the additional assumption of welfare atomism, i.e. the view that the welfare value of a life is simply the sum of the values of each individual moment. But there's no good reason to grant this assumption (especially for non-hedonists). We should instead be value holists, as I argue here. (See also Parfit on Global Preferences.)

(It's odd; in the discussion of the "James Dean paradox", Bradley effectively notes that the vast majority of people are in fact implicitly committed to value holism. We think that the overall 'shape' of the life matters, rather than only caring about the sum total of happiness contained therein. Bradley just dismisses this as "irrational", without argument.)

Indeed, even if we're hedonists, it seems that negative facts -- like the fact that you didn't get to live longer or experience more in the time that you had -- can be undesirable for your sake, and hence qualify as 'harms' in the broad sense of the term, even though these are 'global', atemporal features of your life. And on every plausible view, we can be harmed by events that take place before we're born. It doesn't seem that much of a stretch to acknowledge a similar phenomenon in the opposite direction.

The Importance of Implications

A recent discussion of wellbeing over at Go Grue reminded me of how easily philosophical debates can degenerate into mere terminological disputes and "concealed tautologies" (as Sidgwick and Parfit warn against) if we're not careful. For example, a hedonist might be tempted to define 'wellbeing' as 'the felt quality of a life'. But then they are not actually saying anything of substance when they assert that 'wellbeing is the felt quality of a life'. Given what they mean by the former term, this claim becomes logically equivalent to the empty tautology, 'The felt quality of life is the felt quality of life,' which is hardly a claim worth making.

In order to make our affirmation of a particular theory of wellbeing substantive, we must have some independent grasp of the meaning of the term. For example, we might analyze S's interests in terms of what's desirable for S's sake. But even if we lack a full-blown analysis of the concept, we should at least have some sense of its conceptual role, i.e. what implications it has for other philosophically important concepts.

I think it's very dangerous to just test one's linguistic intuitions in isolation. Often, people seem be drawn to hedonic (or 'mental state') theories of wellbeing simply because they think it sounds wrong to say that someone was "harmed" by an event that they never learned of (or that otherwise impacted their subjective experiences). This does not strike me as a philosophically interesting or relevant consideration. Instead of assessing what combination of words sounds natural to our ears (as if we were mere grammarians), we should be assessing the real content of the claim, as revealed by its philosophical (e.g. normative) implications.

The concept of 'wellbeing' seems important only insofar as it has implications regarding what we have normative reason to want and to do when we care about a person (including ourselves). If we do not think that a loving parent would (qua loving parent; bracketing all other motivations) want to plug their child into a Nozickian experience machine to live a meaningless life of pleasant delusion, or that a prudent person would want this for themselves, then we shouldn't be hedonists about wellbeing. It's that simple.

"Contributive Justice"

[P]hilosophers have thought that justice is about what people get; I think it is about what people are able to do, particularly how they are able to develop their abilities, give back to society, and be respected for their contributions.

-- Paul Gomberg, How To Make Opportunity Equal, quoted in NDPR

I can't say I see much interest in "justice" talk, but if translated into a claim about welfare / the good life, this is certainly a sentiment I'm sympathetic towards.

Hedonism vs. Qualia Preferentism

It's worth distinguishing 'happiness' (positively valenced experience) from preferred experience. For example, an ascetic monk may wish to avoid strongly valenced experiences, or a self-loathing individual might even want to feel miserable (i.e. have negatively valenced experiences). More interestingly, we might feel attached to our current tastes (hedonic likings), and so be averse to the idea of inducing satisfactions of other tastes.

Imagine, for example, an aesthete who loves opera and fine wine, and utterly detests Britney Spears and cheap bubbly. Suppose a mad scientist offered to rewire their tastes and have them enjoy listening to Britney for hours on end. It's entirely conceivable that the aesthete would find this prospect abhorrent. While acknowledging that he would - in the proposed scenario - be deluded into experiencing great happiness, from his actual perspective the aesthete strongly prefers not to undergo this experience. He prefers not to enjoy the experience of listening to crap.

Is this preference unreasonable? I think that Derek Parfit may be committed to saying so. Parfit holds that hedonic likings and dislikings (unlike desires) are not responsive to reasons. They are simply brute psychological facts. We can have reason to want to like fine wine, if it has a greater potential for intense liking/enjoyment than does cheap bubbly. But there is no reason to like fine wine (any more than there are reasons to bleed), if 'liking' is a brute, reasons-insensitive state: something that happens to us, rather than something we do.

Anyway, if Parfit is right that there are no reasons for liking aesthetically superior objects more, then it's hard to see why we should care about the objects, as opposed to the intensities, of our likings. That is, it looks like the only reason to want to like fine wine more is insofar as it would yield a more intense liking. This might seem to devalue aesthetic evaluation. Beethoven's symphonies no longer merit appreciation. They're just cheesecake. Really, really enjoyable cheesecake. And if you could find Britney just as enjoyable, then that would be just as good.

I wonder about applying this to the moral case. It seems intrinsically bad to derive pleasure from others' suffering (even if you reflectively prefer that others not suffer, and would never act to cause suffering, or anything like that). If a mad scientist offered to rewire your tastes to make you enjoy child porn, say, that would seem very undesirable indeed (and again, I think, not just on instrumental grounds -- though that would surely be part of it). Are these intuitions mistaken?

Confusing Welfare and Happiness

Larry Solum "highly recommended" the paper 'Welfare as Happiness' by legal scholars Bronsteen, Buccafusco and Masur. I'm not sure why. As Solum himself explains in a follow-up post, the paper's main argument (that hedonism must be true because our lives are constituted by subjective experiences, and hence nothing can affect our life unless it affects our experiences) rests on an equivocation. Much of the paper continues in this vein. For example:

What it means for something to be a bad experience for an individual is for it to make the individual feel bad. Negative feelings define bad life experiences, whereas positive feelings define good ones.

It could be argued that whether a moment is positive or negative for a person does not depend solely on that person's physiological experience of it. Indeed, disagreeing with our thesis may well require such an argument. But what else could make it positive or negative?

This passage neglects the fact that there are two different things we might mean in talking of 'bad life experiences'. We might mean to talk of subjectively unpleasant experiences, as the authors do. (But then their claims are tautological, when surely they had hoped to establish a substantive conclusion.) Alternatively, we might mean to talk of a life experience (or event) that was bad for you, i.e. undesirable for your sake. For a possible example of the latter, consider the experience of being subtly mocked (without realizing it). Though the undesirable feature of this circumstance is not subjectively transparent to you, nonetheless you (and others who care about you) generally have reason to hope that no such event actually befall you -- or so one might plausibly claim. This is the substantive question of welfare, which the authors fail to address or - it seems - even recognize.

In Solum's follow-up post, the authors set out their core argument as follows:

each of us has a veil of experience, and anything that happens outside that veil of experience and never affects it (even indirectly) has no effect on our lives.

Here they appear to confuse the metaphysical question whether an event "affects" you, in the sense of altering your intrinsic properties, with the normative question of welfare: whether it "affects" you in the sense of being an event that you have self-interested reasons to care about. (In fairness, I think even Shelly Kagan may have once made a similar mistake.) These are wildly different questions, and if one thinks that they are linked in any way, this would require substantial argument. It is far from obvious that welfare supervenes on our intrinsic properties. (Presumably only hedonists will believe this.) Sometimes people talk of one's "life" or "life story" in a broader sense that includes all of the external events and relations that could conceivably be relevant to assessing one's life along any dimension (one's success, popularity, and - of course - welfare). It would then follow trivially that one's welfare supervenes on the intrinsic properties of one's "life" in this broad sense. But this is compatible with any of the main theories of welfare, since one's "life" in this broad sense includes all manner of external events and relations.

I was also struck by the authors' self-defeating arguments against objectivism. Consider the following:

According to the objectivist view, not only don't the individuals know what's good for them, but their view of what's good for themselves doesn't determine what's good for them--no matter how considered or accurate (in terms of happiness) a view it is.

But the authors' own view is no different in this regard. They are hedonists, not preferentists. Even if I care about truth more than happiness, the authors will paternalistically insist that happiness is in fact what's good for me. For them, individuals' own views of "what's good for themselves" are strictly irrelevant -- no matter how "considered" and well-informed our self-regarding preferences might be. (Of course, even preferentists think that people might have false beliefs about welfare: some people believe the competing theories, after all! But there's no avoiding that.)

Their main objection to preferentism is that people may have preferences about distant events that are intuitively irrelevant to their welfare. (They mention 'Sheila the environmentalist', who passively hopes that a rare foreign squirrel avoids extinction.) But this merely shows that preferentists need to restrict which desires count in determining one's welfare, say to those that concern one's own "life story". One might wish to critically examine whether various such proposed restrictions are sufficiently well-defined and non-circular to do the job. But the only such view that the authors consider is the explicitly circular view according to which only "self-interested" preferences count for determining your self-interest. They then respond:

A self-interested, restricted theory of welfare demands that the individual actually receive some benefit before one can say that her welfare has increased; this conception of "benefit" is rendered meaningless unless the individual actually experiences the benefit. To claim otherwise--to argue that an individual's welfare can improve without that improvement registering subjectively--is to welcome Sheila and her Sri Lankan squirrel back into the fold.

But this is effectively just to assert that no independent restriction can be found. There's no argument here, and they appear completely oblivious to the fact that philosophers like Derek Parfit (with his "success theory") have actually proposed some prima facie plausible candidates for this role -- proposals that they're really obliged to engage with. It's extremely frustrating.

[Compare 'psychologists mangling philosophy'. As a general rule, if you're going to attempt scholarly work that's beyond your disciplinary expertise, it would seem wise to consult with a colleague from the relevant discipline, so that they might flag these sorts of problems.]

Irrelevant Interests?

We may think there's a sense in which it is "bad for a plant" to be deprived of sunlight and water. For then the plant won't flourish; it will wither and die. But, one might add, it doesn't (intrinsically) matter if a plant dies, for plants lack moral status. Someone who accepts both these claims must then hold that the following two questions are independent: (i) whether an entity has interests; and (ii) whether the entity matters morally. Some harms are real enough, but they don't matter. On this view, the moral significance of a harm depends not on the nature of the harm, but on the nature of the entity being harmed.