It seems plausible that someone whose life had negative hedonic value could overall be better off than someone whose life had positive hedonic value. Let me try to sketch out a comparison.
Let's imagine one person Sal, who is a perfectionist and overachiever. Sal involves herself in many worthy causes and because of the effort she puts in…
It seems plausible that someone whose life had negative hedonic value could overall be better off than someone whose life had positive hedonic value. Let me try to sketch out a comparison.
Let's imagine one person Sal, who is a perfectionist and overachiever. Sal involves herself in many worthy causes and because of the effort she puts in, she is mostly successful by any reasonable standard. Because she is such a perfectionist and has extremely high standards, she does not derive much pleasure from her achievements. She has friends and family and her life is contains many objectively good things, and while she is pleasant to be around, she obtains at most a mild degree of pleasure from her life. She lives a long life. And in the last five years of her life, even though she suffers from a painful and debilitating illness, she pushes on to do lots of good for others (e.g. she involves herself in effective charitable work). She does this out of a sense of duty and derives no pleasure from this. On her last day, while cooking a meal, she slips and falls in the kitchen, and breaks her hip. While she is lying there her house catches fire and she burns painfully to death. Overall, Sal seems to have lived a good life even though the last few years and especially her final moments put her total hedonic value on the negative end of the ledger.
Hal is a petty bully and drug addict. He lives till his twenties more or less on a constant high and dies painlessly of an overdose. Overall, netting off from any pain he might experience from going through periodic drug withdrawal (whenever he cannot get his hands on drugs), the hedonic value of his life is barely positive.
Let me make 3 points
a) I think Sal's life is better than Hal's all things considered.
b) a life with negative hedonic value is not necessarily worse off than one with positive hedonic value (all things considered) and hence avoiding such results cannot be a motivation for the multiplicative account.
c) Your multiplicative account (or some account like yours) can explain why Sal's life is better than Hal's. Sal's pleasures in her life are derived from a genuine if understated appreciation of objective goods and hence are greatly valuable. A good deal of the pain in her life especially that which is due to her illness is borne by her in order to do something that she takes to be worthwhile. Hence it's disvalue is less than it otherwise would have been. Hal's pleasures are empty and superficial and his pains arise from his pursuit of empty pleasure.
It seems plausible that someone whose life had negative hedonic value could overall be better off than someone whose life had positive hedonic value. Let me try to sketch out a comparison.
Let's imagine one person Sal, who is a perfectionist and overachiever. Sal involves herself in many worthy causes and because of the effort she puts in, she is mostly successful by any reasonable standard. Because she is such a perfectionist and has extremely high standards, she does not derive much pleasure from her achievements. She has friends and family and her life is contains many objectively good things, and while she is pleasant to be around, she obtains at most a mild degree of pleasure from her life. She lives a long life. And in the last five years of her life, even though she suffers from a painful and debilitating illness, she pushes on to do lots of good for others (e.g. she involves herself in effective charitable work). She does this out of a sense of duty and derives no pleasure from this. On her last day, while cooking a meal, she slips and falls in the kitchen, and breaks her hip. While she is lying there her house catches fire and she burns painfully to death. Overall, Sal seems to have lived a good life even though the last few years and especially her final moments put her total hedonic value on the negative end of the ledger.
Hal is a petty bully and drug addict. He lives till his twenties more or less on a constant high and dies painlessly of an overdose. Overall, netting off from any pain he might experience from going through periodic drug withdrawal (whenever he cannot get his hands on drugs), the hedonic value of his life is barely positive.
Let me make 3 points
a) I think Sal's life is better than Hal's all things considered.
b) a life with negative hedonic value is not necessarily worse off than one with positive hedonic value (all things considered) and hence avoiding such results cannot be a motivation for the multiplicative account.
c) Your multiplicative account (or some account like yours) can explain why Sal's life is better than Hal's. Sal's pleasures in her life are derived from a genuine if understated appreciation of objective goods and hence are greatly valuable. A good deal of the pain in her life especially that which is due to her illness is borne by her in order to do something that she takes to be worthwhile. Hence it's disvalue is less than it otherwise would have been. Hal's pleasures are empty and superficial and his pains arise from his pursuit of empty pleasure.