There are a few smaller problems, but these are the big ones.
1) It implies hypersensitivity. Let's say that pleasure that you get from friends is more valuable than the pleasure you get from other sources. Presumably if your friends were slowly replaced by zombies, that would make it so that they no longer multiply your pleasure val…
There are a few smaller problems, but these are the big ones.
1) It implies hypersensitivity. Let's say that pleasure that you get from friends is more valuable than the pleasure you get from other sources. Presumably if your friends were slowly replaced by zombies, that would make it so that they no longer multiply your pleasure value. However, as the amount of pleasure you get from your friends tends towards infinity, that would mean that each milisecond of zombification decreases your well-being by an arbitrarily large amount. This is really implausible; if zombification takes 10 years, it doesn't seem like one second of your friends becoming slightly more zombieish could decrease your well-being by any arbitrarily large amount -- having a more deleterious effect on utility than the worst crimes in human history. The same idea can be applied to the other things that are on the objective list.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding and it caps out at 1 where 1 is just a very good life. But if that's true then you have to accept that there's some pleasure cap, which seems implausible. You also still get hypersensitivity, because when a life is at the positive extreme, increasing the multiplying factor could be arbitrarily good (or maybe good till it reaches 1, but at 1 things are very good). While this doesn't look like hypersensitivity, in that it only changes the final score from 0-1 by a very small amount, remember, 1 is the best possible life and 0 is the worst, so small differences in the final scores will still be enormous.
2) It seems to result in equal pleasures and pains not offsetting. Suppose that everytime I see someone I get a headache, such that the overall quality of interacting with them is neutral. The pleasure precisely cancels out the badness of the headache. In this case, it seems strange to say that it's actively good to interact with them. However, on an OLT account, it seems it would be, because the pain's badness is left unchanged by the interaction, but the pleasure's goodness increases because I'm interacting with another person. You could get around this though by taking it to be about momentary net hedonic value, so that pleasures and pain's cancel out.
3) These views also violate the following intuitively plausible constraint.
Pleasure and Non-Hedonic Dominance: For any two lives, if one life contains both more pleasure and more non-hedonic goods than the other life, that life is better.
This violates it in the following way. Suppose that the only two goods on the objective list are knowledge and pleasure and pleasure from knowledge is twice as good. Suppose that, to dramatically simplify things, the relevant feature in regards to knowledge is the number of facts one knows. Person 1 knows 10,000 facts and has 8,000 units of pleasure. Person 2 knows 5,000 facts and has 6,000 units of pleasure. However, all of person 2’s pleasure comes from their acquisition of facts (they are an avid reader of the dictionary and encyclopedia!), while non of person A’s pleasure comes from their acquisition of facts. Person 1 would have 8,000 units of well-being, while person 2 would have 12,000 units of pleasure.
4) This gets a really wrong result when it comes to simultaneous experience of both pleasure and pain. Suppose a person simultaneously experiences some vast amount of pleasure from a source that’s on the objective list and some far greater amount of pain. Suppose the multiplier is 2 times. Suppose additionally that they experience 2 billion units of pain, and 1.5 billion units of pleasure from friendship. Additionally suppose that vicious torture causes overall about 100 million units of pain. Thus, their mental states, considered in isolation, are far worse than that of a person being tortured. The objective list theorist who adopts the multiplier view has to think that this person is very well off -- for their pleasure is multiplied to be greater than the pain. However, the notion that a person is well off who every second has experiences that are hedonically far worse than torture, is totally absurd. You can get around this though
5) Not sure if I'm missing something, but this seems to hold that if you're at 0 on the objective list score, then being at 1 on the hedonism score would be equivalent to being at zero on the hedonism score, which is wildly implausible. Your later solution avoids this though by taking it to be about momentary net hedonic value, so that pleasures and pain's cancel out.
I'm glad you started writing about well-being, so that we finally have something to disagree about. One clarifying question: is this over the course of lifetimes or moments, when we add up the values to multiply?
One other question: are the intervals regular? So, for example, is the difference between .55 and .65 the same as between .65 and .75?
re: 1, yeah, I was implicitly assuming diminishing asymptotic returns to pleasure. (My intuitions vacillate, but this seems plausible to me about half the time.) If small differences in score between 0 - 1 are truly "enormous" when translated into value, then won't correspondingly small-seeming non-hedonic scores indicate correspondingly "enormous" non-hedonic differences? Especially if we restrict the scale, e.g. so that the non-hedonically worst and best lives only differ by 0.5 or less in non-hedonic score. So I think hypersensitivity is avoided.
re: 2, I think I'm OK with that implication! I don't think interacting with a stranger necessarily has non-hedonic value, but for someone who's really important to you, I think such interactions are (at least in moderation) plausibly positive even if you get enough of a headache that it's hedonically neutral. I don't think this sort of value aggregates additively.
re: 3, I guess the implications here depend on whether the multiplicative model is applied to lifetime scores or momentary/episodic scores. But for someone who has "hybrid"-style intuitions (that objective value only has welfare value when subjectively appreciated in some way), it seems natural for them to reject the dominance constraint when the putatively "dominating" life doesn't actually *secure* the objective value (due to the lack of necessary appreciation).
re: 4, agreed, seems important to formulate the view in a way that avoids that implication! Seems like their hedonic score should count as super low, and sufficient to outweigh the positive boost from the appreciated objective goods.
re: 5, probably best to exclude zero from the range of allowed scores! Take (0,1) as an open rather than closed interval (if I'm remembering my math terms right). Also most plausible, I think, to restrict non-hedonic scores further, as mentioned in a bullet point.
> "is this over the course of lifetimes or moments, when we add up the values to multiply?"
Good question! Not sure -- would have to think more about which option is least costly overall.
> "are the intervals regular?"
Not for the composite scores, at least. Maybe for the input scores? Not sure.
Re 1 If at one there is infinite pleasure, or some unfathomable amount of pleasure, then any change around one will have unfathomable significance -- even very small changes. You can't hold that there's a multiplicative effect for immense pleasure when you have lots of objective list goods and also that small amounts of goods doesn't produce unfathomable boosts to well-being (they produce a lot if they multiply it at all). This is hard to see because we don't have good intuitions about these numbers (particularly because of vagueness), but if it multiplies the value at all of something arbitrarily great, then it would violate hypersensitivity.
Re 2 Seems to me intuitively like a cost to the theory.
Re 3 If they have those intuitions, that's true, but that does seem very implausible.
Re 4 What if we make the pleasures and pains spread out across moments. So you have an unfathomably pleasurable experience for one second that is good on the objective list and an unfathomably painful experience the next moment, it seems that you'd be badly off if the painful experience was twice as painful as the pleasurable experience was pleasurable. If we accept that making the pain you experience happen in a second when you would otherwise be experiencing pleasure doesn't make you worse off -- in other words, spacing the pain a second apart from the pleasure rather than having them occur simultaneously -- then if we accept that if they occurred simultaneously and you were net horrifically miserable each second that you'd be poorly off, the same would be true if you spaced them a second apart. Thus, your view commits you to really implausible things in cases where you have oscillating pleasure of unfathomable goodness, before even greater pain, but where the pleasure is on the objective list.
The momentary view seems a lot better than the lifetime view, especially if we accept reductionism about personal identity -- which is pretty obvious.
If the intervals are regular for the input scores, then the pleasure scores would be undefined if we accept that pleasure can scale up to infinity.
There are a few smaller problems, but these are the big ones.
1) It implies hypersensitivity. Let's say that pleasure that you get from friends is more valuable than the pleasure you get from other sources. Presumably if your friends were slowly replaced by zombies, that would make it so that they no longer multiply your pleasure value. However, as the amount of pleasure you get from your friends tends towards infinity, that would mean that each milisecond of zombification decreases your well-being by an arbitrarily large amount. This is really implausible; if zombification takes 10 years, it doesn't seem like one second of your friends becoming slightly more zombieish could decrease your well-being by any arbitrarily large amount -- having a more deleterious effect on utility than the worst crimes in human history. The same idea can be applied to the other things that are on the objective list.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding and it caps out at 1 where 1 is just a very good life. But if that's true then you have to accept that there's some pleasure cap, which seems implausible. You also still get hypersensitivity, because when a life is at the positive extreme, increasing the multiplying factor could be arbitrarily good (or maybe good till it reaches 1, but at 1 things are very good). While this doesn't look like hypersensitivity, in that it only changes the final score from 0-1 by a very small amount, remember, 1 is the best possible life and 0 is the worst, so small differences in the final scores will still be enormous.
2) It seems to result in equal pleasures and pains not offsetting. Suppose that everytime I see someone I get a headache, such that the overall quality of interacting with them is neutral. The pleasure precisely cancels out the badness of the headache. In this case, it seems strange to say that it's actively good to interact with them. However, on an OLT account, it seems it would be, because the pain's badness is left unchanged by the interaction, but the pleasure's goodness increases because I'm interacting with another person. You could get around this though by taking it to be about momentary net hedonic value, so that pleasures and pain's cancel out.
3) These views also violate the following intuitively plausible constraint.
Pleasure and Non-Hedonic Dominance: For any two lives, if one life contains both more pleasure and more non-hedonic goods than the other life, that life is better.
This violates it in the following way. Suppose that the only two goods on the objective list are knowledge and pleasure and pleasure from knowledge is twice as good. Suppose that, to dramatically simplify things, the relevant feature in regards to knowledge is the number of facts one knows. Person 1 knows 10,000 facts and has 8,000 units of pleasure. Person 2 knows 5,000 facts and has 6,000 units of pleasure. However, all of person 2’s pleasure comes from their acquisition of facts (they are an avid reader of the dictionary and encyclopedia!), while non of person A’s pleasure comes from their acquisition of facts. Person 1 would have 8,000 units of well-being, while person 2 would have 12,000 units of pleasure.
4) This gets a really wrong result when it comes to simultaneous experience of both pleasure and pain. Suppose a person simultaneously experiences some vast amount of pleasure from a source that’s on the objective list and some far greater amount of pain. Suppose the multiplier is 2 times. Suppose additionally that they experience 2 billion units of pain, and 1.5 billion units of pleasure from friendship. Additionally suppose that vicious torture causes overall about 100 million units of pain. Thus, their mental states, considered in isolation, are far worse than that of a person being tortured. The objective list theorist who adopts the multiplier view has to think that this person is very well off -- for their pleasure is multiplied to be greater than the pain. However, the notion that a person is well off who every second has experiences that are hedonically far worse than torture, is totally absurd. You can get around this though
5) Not sure if I'm missing something, but this seems to hold that if you're at 0 on the objective list score, then being at 1 on the hedonism score would be equivalent to being at zero on the hedonism score, which is wildly implausible. Your later solution avoids this though by taking it to be about momentary net hedonic value, so that pleasures and pain's cancel out.
I'm glad you started writing about well-being, so that we finally have something to disagree about. One clarifying question: is this over the course of lifetimes or moments, when we add up the values to multiply?
One other question: are the intervals regular? So, for example, is the difference between .55 and .65 the same as between .65 and .75?
Thanks for these objections!
re: 1, yeah, I was implicitly assuming diminishing asymptotic returns to pleasure. (My intuitions vacillate, but this seems plausible to me about half the time.) If small differences in score between 0 - 1 are truly "enormous" when translated into value, then won't correspondingly small-seeming non-hedonic scores indicate correspondingly "enormous" non-hedonic differences? Especially if we restrict the scale, e.g. so that the non-hedonically worst and best lives only differ by 0.5 or less in non-hedonic score. So I think hypersensitivity is avoided.
re: 2, I think I'm OK with that implication! I don't think interacting with a stranger necessarily has non-hedonic value, but for someone who's really important to you, I think such interactions are (at least in moderation) plausibly positive even if you get enough of a headache that it's hedonically neutral. I don't think this sort of value aggregates additively.
re: 3, I guess the implications here depend on whether the multiplicative model is applied to lifetime scores or momentary/episodic scores. But for someone who has "hybrid"-style intuitions (that objective value only has welfare value when subjectively appreciated in some way), it seems natural for them to reject the dominance constraint when the putatively "dominating" life doesn't actually *secure* the objective value (due to the lack of necessary appreciation).
re: 4, agreed, seems important to formulate the view in a way that avoids that implication! Seems like their hedonic score should count as super low, and sufficient to outweigh the positive boost from the appreciated objective goods.
re: 5, probably best to exclude zero from the range of allowed scores! Take (0,1) as an open rather than closed interval (if I'm remembering my math terms right). Also most plausible, I think, to restrict non-hedonic scores further, as mentioned in a bullet point.
> "is this over the course of lifetimes or moments, when we add up the values to multiply?"
Good question! Not sure -- would have to think more about which option is least costly overall.
> "are the intervals regular?"
Not for the composite scores, at least. Maybe for the input scores? Not sure.
Re 1 If at one there is infinite pleasure, or some unfathomable amount of pleasure, then any change around one will have unfathomable significance -- even very small changes. You can't hold that there's a multiplicative effect for immense pleasure when you have lots of objective list goods and also that small amounts of goods doesn't produce unfathomable boosts to well-being (they produce a lot if they multiply it at all). This is hard to see because we don't have good intuitions about these numbers (particularly because of vagueness), but if it multiplies the value at all of something arbitrarily great, then it would violate hypersensitivity.
Re 2 Seems to me intuitively like a cost to the theory.
Re 3 If they have those intuitions, that's true, but that does seem very implausible.
Re 4 What if we make the pleasures and pains spread out across moments. So you have an unfathomably pleasurable experience for one second that is good on the objective list and an unfathomably painful experience the next moment, it seems that you'd be badly off if the painful experience was twice as painful as the pleasurable experience was pleasurable. If we accept that making the pain you experience happen in a second when you would otherwise be experiencing pleasure doesn't make you worse off -- in other words, spacing the pain a second apart from the pleasure rather than having them occur simultaneously -- then if we accept that if they occurred simultaneously and you were net horrifically miserable each second that you'd be poorly off, the same would be true if you spaced them a second apart. Thus, your view commits you to really implausible things in cases where you have oscillating pleasure of unfathomable goodness, before even greater pain, but where the pleasure is on the objective list.
The momentary view seems a lot better than the lifetime view, especially if we accept reductionism about personal identity -- which is pretty obvious.
If the intervals are regular for the input scores, then the pleasure scores would be undefined if we accept that pleasure can scale up to infinity.