Non-Fungible Hedonism

A subtle improvement, as far as it goes?

My previous post explained how the strongest objection to totalism can be at least partly mitigated once we mark significance with attitudes. I’m now wondering whether a similar move could help against the strongest objection to hedonism: that equally-pleasant goods aren’t all fungible. We shouldn’t be indifferent to the possibility of our loved ones being secretly replaced by robots, for example.

Hedonism is most naturally conceived as holding that, at least within an individual life, different pleasures are fungible. What matters (for you) is just the aggregate pleasure you experience, not what particular experiences you have. There is no “separateness of pleasures”, on the orthodox account.

But we could deny this. On a pluralist (objective list) account of well-being, it’s very natural to think that the different types of goods are non-fungible, such that an overall worthwhile trade-off may still occasion some regret. (Compare Parfit’s pro tanto regret that he didn’t pursue poetry, despite being overall happy with his life of philosophy.)

We could imagine a non-fungible hedonist who claims that sufficiently qualitatively distinct kinds of pleasures constitute distinct final goods. To accommodate Parfit’s regret, for example, they may claim that the pleasures of philosophy and of poetry are normatively distinct (or worth desiring separately, not just as two possible means to one and the same end of generic pleasure).

Life is full of tough choices!

Likewise, experiences of family life, or of loving relationships, may be valued separately from other kinds of desirable experiences. Further, experiences of specific relationships with particular people may be valued separately from those of other relationships. That seems important, for not viewing your loved ones as entirely replaceable.

But I think it still doesn’t go far enough. Even the “non-fungible” hedonist still only values the subjective experience, and not the reality underlying it. So any other sufficiently reliable means to securing that same qualitative experience (from a convincing robot-swap to a full-blown experience machine) will be normatively indistinguishable from maintaining a loving relationship, as far as hedonism is concerned. That seems a pretty objectionable degree of fungibility, even from the most “non-fungible” form of hedonism we can find.¹

In short: non-fungible hedonism can allow that something is lost if a happy marriage is “replaced” with another, noticeably different (but equally happy) one. But nothing is lost if you and your spouse are both put in (isolated) experience machines, and never interact again, so long as your respective streams of conscious experience are unaffected by the transition. And that seems very wrong to me. For all the challenges associated with value pluralism, I literally cannot believe that there would be nothing regrettable about never again truly interacting with your loved ones.

1. Unless you can further individuate experiences, not just by their subjective qualitative character, but also by their external causes. But there seems no motivation internal to hedonism for doing that.