It's not clear to me what it means to ask whether goodness and badness are one dimension or two. But I do think there's a clear presumption of philosophical parity between the two, such that any putative asymmetries need to be explained rather than taken for granted. I'm happy to take that as self-evident. Insofar as Vinding is claiming …
It's not clear to me what it means to ask whether goodness and badness are one dimension or two. But I do think there's a clear presumption of philosophical parity between the two, such that any putative asymmetries need to be explained rather than taken for granted. I'm happy to take that as self-evident.
Insofar as Vinding is claiming that there's nothing *desirable* (or good), opposing the way that suffering is *undesirable* (or bad), I just think that's insane. I read the link; I don't see anything "plausible" or worth engaging with there.
Really? That surprises me. Do you think the following is wrong?
"In my view, the strongest argument against the existence of a phenomenological counterpart to suffering is that introspection yields no sign of such a counterpart. When we introspectively examine the proposed candidates of positive experiences, such as those listed above, we do not find that they have any phenomenological properties that render them the dual opposites of suffering, or anti-suffering, as it were."
My own introspection yields pretty much the same result as Vinding. I take it that your own introspection yields something different (e.g. that a certain experience of pleasure could reasonably "offset" a given experience of pain to yield an overall zero-valenced experience).
What conclusion, if any, would you draw from the existence of people whose most basic intuitions about the value of their own experiences differ so much from yours?
I think it's wrong that that is any kind of argument. Positive and negative experiences aren't like matter and anti-matter, that literally cancel out (leaving "an overall zero-valenced experience") when combined. They compensate *normatively*, not *descriptively*.
To give an obvious example from common sense: “'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” The suffering of grief is more than compensated for by the positive value of loving that person and getting to spend time with them while they were alive. This basic normative datum about compensation in no way depends upon combining the love and the grief to yield a weird combined experience with "zero valence".
I take your point about the compensation being normative rather than descriptive, but I don't think there is a "basic normative datum about [experiential] compensation," and I agree with Vinding that the impulse to posit such a datum comes from a mistaken account of experiential phenomenology combined with excessive systematizing zeal. There just isn't anything in our experiences (or at least in my experiences – perhaps there is in yours?) that could serve to ground a normative concept of "good experience" posessing philosophical parity with the concept of "bad experience" grounded by our experience of suffering.
Note, however, that I needed to add "experiential" to your proposed datum, because Vinding's criticism only targets assumptions about the normative value of subjective experiences. It has nothing to say about possible sources of value grounded in something other than the phenomenology of valenced experiences. It might undermine a "pro-existence" population ethics for a hedonic utilitarian, but it wouldn't necessarily undermine anyone else's.
(I don't know about you, but I find the notion that non-hedonic values can give us reasons for creating new lives much more intuitively plausible than the idea that hedonic values alone have the power to do so.)
I'm certainly inclined to think that the overwhelming bulk of what's valuable about our lives is non-hedonic. Raw pleasure isn't *that* big of a deal. But it's really just bonkers to deny that there's *any such thing* as positive experience.
I'm trying to imagine the response of ordinary people to your telling them, "On reflection, it doesn't seem to me that there's any such thing as happiness or good feelings. Don't you agree?" Pretty similar to if you suggested that grass was purple, I imagine.
This is a sleight of hand. Vinding never denied the existence of happiness, he denied the existence of "positive value" from mental states like happiness. I know you probably also think that's bonkers, but it's quite obviously not in the ballpark of obvious absurdity as denying the existence of happiness as a mental state.
The argument Quiop pointed to invoked the claim that there's no mental state that even *seems* good, phenomenologically speaking. That sounds to me a lot more like denying the existence of happiness as a mental state, than granting happiness (a good-seeming feeling) and merely denying that it has *objective* positive value. Though I certainly do think that both claims are bonkers, it's the specifically *phenomenological* argument that we're discussing here.
If you're going around telling people that sort of thing, it helps if you wear special robes, or a silly hat, or something like that. They're much more likely to believe you that way.
It's not clear to me what it means to ask whether goodness and badness are one dimension or two. But I do think there's a clear presumption of philosophical parity between the two, such that any putative asymmetries need to be explained rather than taken for granted. I'm happy to take that as self-evident.
Insofar as Vinding is claiming that there's nothing *desirable* (or good), opposing the way that suffering is *undesirable* (or bad), I just think that's insane. I read the link; I don't see anything "plausible" or worth engaging with there.
Really? That surprises me. Do you think the following is wrong?
"In my view, the strongest argument against the existence of a phenomenological counterpart to suffering is that introspection yields no sign of such a counterpart. When we introspectively examine the proposed candidates of positive experiences, such as those listed above, we do not find that they have any phenomenological properties that render them the dual opposites of suffering, or anti-suffering, as it were."
My own introspection yields pretty much the same result as Vinding. I take it that your own introspection yields something different (e.g. that a certain experience of pleasure could reasonably "offset" a given experience of pain to yield an overall zero-valenced experience).
What conclusion, if any, would you draw from the existence of people whose most basic intuitions about the value of their own experiences differ so much from yours?
I think it's wrong that that is any kind of argument. Positive and negative experiences aren't like matter and anti-matter, that literally cancel out (leaving "an overall zero-valenced experience") when combined. They compensate *normatively*, not *descriptively*.
To give an obvious example from common sense: “'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” The suffering of grief is more than compensated for by the positive value of loving that person and getting to spend time with them while they were alive. This basic normative datum about compensation in no way depends upon combining the love and the grief to yield a weird combined experience with "zero valence".
I take your point about the compensation being normative rather than descriptive, but I don't think there is a "basic normative datum about [experiential] compensation," and I agree with Vinding that the impulse to posit such a datum comes from a mistaken account of experiential phenomenology combined with excessive systematizing zeal. There just isn't anything in our experiences (or at least in my experiences – perhaps there is in yours?) that could serve to ground a normative concept of "good experience" posessing philosophical parity with the concept of "bad experience" grounded by our experience of suffering.
Note, however, that I needed to add "experiential" to your proposed datum, because Vinding's criticism only targets assumptions about the normative value of subjective experiences. It has nothing to say about possible sources of value grounded in something other than the phenomenology of valenced experiences. It might undermine a "pro-existence" population ethics for a hedonic utilitarian, but it wouldn't necessarily undermine anyone else's.
(I don't know about you, but I find the notion that non-hedonic values can give us reasons for creating new lives much more intuitively plausible than the idea that hedonic values alone have the power to do so.)
I'm certainly inclined to think that the overwhelming bulk of what's valuable about our lives is non-hedonic. Raw pleasure isn't *that* big of a deal. But it's really just bonkers to deny that there's *any such thing* as positive experience.
I'm trying to imagine the response of ordinary people to your telling them, "On reflection, it doesn't seem to me that there's any such thing as happiness or good feelings. Don't you agree?" Pretty similar to if you suggested that grass was purple, I imagine.
This is a sleight of hand. Vinding never denied the existence of happiness, he denied the existence of "positive value" from mental states like happiness. I know you probably also think that's bonkers, but it's quite obviously not in the ballpark of obvious absurdity as denying the existence of happiness as a mental state.
The argument Quiop pointed to invoked the claim that there's no mental state that even *seems* good, phenomenologically speaking. That sounds to me a lot more like denying the existence of happiness as a mental state, than granting happiness (a good-seeming feeling) and merely denying that it has *objective* positive value. Though I certainly do think that both claims are bonkers, it's the specifically *phenomenological* argument that we're discussing here.
If you're going around telling people that sort of thing, it helps if you wear special robes, or a silly hat, or something like that. They're much more likely to believe you that way.