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 pr…
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.
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.