I feel like there is a bit of slippage here between whether something is lost and whether things are on net worse.
Obviously, different equally pleasurable experiences have different properties. At the simplest level the visual qualia differ when looking at one painting rather than another so, trivially, if you replace looking at painting 1 with looking at painting 2 you've lost the experience of pleasure while having qualia 1 instead of 2. And I guess I'm not sure what more is supposed to be claimed by this non-fungibility thesis than this trivial fact.
I mean at some level you do have to engage in tradeoffs so is the non-fungibility claim meant to suggest that somehow the correct kind of tradeoffs don't track what we think of as pleasure?
--
But maybe you would agree with all this, I just don't think a non-fungibility claim really presents a strong counterargument. I think all the action is in the question of supervenience -- or something very much like it. If you replace your wife with a robot and replace her husband with a robot as well so the qualitative experiences remain unchanged (or even just unchanged in what seem like relevant ways) does that make a moral difference?
I'm willing to bite that bullet and say no but at least that argument seems like it has coherent bite in a way the non-fungibility doesn't -- it just feels like an attempt to refuse to acknowledge the need for tradeoffs.
> "I guess I'm not sure what more is supposed to be claimed by this non-fungibility thesis than this trivial fact."
The key idea is that we can distinguish between two very different kinds of equally-valued trade-offs:
(1) Fungible trade-offs between two (merely descriptively distinct) ways of realizing one and the same final value, vs
(2) Non-fungible trade-offs between two normatively distinct final values.
Examples of (1) include things like a choice between a $20 bill vs two tens. Or between a left-foot massage and an equally pleasant right-foot massage. In these cases, the goods in question seem entirely *fungible*, or normatively indistinguishable, even though they are descriptively distinct. So I characterize them as involving one and the same token good (aggregate money in the first case; generic pleasure in the second) which can be realized via either of two "constitutive means".
Examples of (2) include things like a choice between saving Bob vs Sally. Or (I'm now suggesting) between the desirable experience of happy family life vs the desirable experience of philosophical understanding. It seems (to me at least) that it would be a *mistake* to treat these trade-offs as equivalent to those in group (1). Examples of type (2) are intuitively *not* fungible, or such that the replacement of one by an equally-valued other is a matter of strict "indifference". Instead of indifference, the replacement of a non-fungible good calls for *ambivalence*. (Or so I argue in 'Value Receptacles'.)
Non-fungibility is a substantive (non-trivial) normative claim. It reflects whether you ought to have *separate* ultimate desires for each distinct good. For fungible goods, by contrast, it would be a normative mistake to separately value each instance; you should only care about the aggregate. (What kind of weird money fetishist would care separately about each dollar bill?)
Ok we do have a disagreement but I guess this part just gets back to our deep disagreement as to how to even understand morality/normative claims at all.
Tho I guess I agree that maybe I shouldn't call what I'm taking about morality at all and should use another name and simply call myself a moral anti-realist. I just don't buy the idea of a relationship between attitudes/valuing/whatever that has the right features at all -- I don't believe there is a principled relationship between physical state/qualia and expressed/believed propositions so there couldn't be the kind of objectively prefered relationship needed to make the kind of claims you see as moral/normative claims true in the realist sense -- but I know that's an unusual view and now I understand what you mean here on the usual understanding.
On second thought it's less about supervenience per se than causal dependence. Depending on your views about causation (eg are u a Humean) this might or might not make a difference.
I mean I think it's pretty intuitive that it wouldn't make a difference if you weren't physically interacting with your wife but you were both in the matrix with appropriate causal interactions.
It's something about whether or not your actions really have the effect you think they do.
And I think there are some interesting analogies here to traditional religious solutions to the problem of human evil (eg why not give us all our own world where we can't hurt anyone else).
I agree that what matters is causal rather than narrowly "physical" interaction -- a shared Matrix seems unobjectionable to me. That's to say that, according to my values, the fundamental nature of our shared reality is fungible: you could replace atoms with bits, and I wouldn't think that anything (of any normative significance whatsoever) was lost.
By contrast, if I no longer had *any real interaction* of any kind with my wife (being in isolated experience machines), then I think there has been a real loss. Hedonism denies this -- it sees all possible causes of the experience as fungible -- which strikes me as completely unbelievable.
Right, but what seems like the significant objection there and the one I want to take seriously is the relationship between experiences and their cause. I just don't see the strength of the argument that doesn't mention this and just points to the fact we have different kinds of pleasure.
I mean, if you grant the idea that the causal relationship is irrelevant I don't see how would be more attractive to deny hedonism because there are different kinds of pleasure. At that point it seems you've bitten the only interesting bullet and picking net pleasure as the way to trade off between those kinds of pleasure seems unobjectionable.
--
I expect we may be saying the same things and I'm just less polite/humble so rather than saying it's not enough I want to call the mere non-fungibility of pleasure argument (viewing this as not incorporating the causal issues) as totally unpersuasive.
Just to clarify, I'm thinking of the dialectic as follows:
(A) Hedonism seems objectionable because it treats our loved ones as fungible with any other source of pleasure. (Replace a loving relationship with sufficient candy-induced gustatory pleasure, and traditional hedonism says there are no grounds for even pro tanto regret. fwiw, I find this to be a stronger objection than the experience machine. Hedonism's verdict here just seems *insane*.)
(B) Possible response: develop a version of hedonism on which sufficiently qualitatively distinct pleasures count as morally distinct (i.e. non-fungible) final goods.
(C) Note a real advantage of this new view: it no longer implies that relationships can be replaced with candy, without at least pro tanto grounds for regret. (Enough candy might make it overall worthwhile, but that claim isn't *so* crazy.)
(D) Finally, note that even the new view is still subject to a form of fungibility objection. For it still implies that we can (without regret) replace a real relationship causing experience Q1 with convincing robots or experience machines causing Q1. And that still seems pretty unbelievable (at least to me).
It sounds like maybe you're questioning step (C), i.e. whether the new view ("non-fungible hedonism") has any distinctive advantages over traditional hedonism? I think it does, as indicated above. Alternatively, perhaps you're just pointing out that (D) is so obvious that it's hard to see anyone being troubled by (A) without *also* being troubled by (D), so there's no real constituency of people who would be especially impressed by the new view. That could well be right!
I think if you are not biting the bullet on the experience machine, you aren't really a hedonist anymore. If you think hedons are not fungible to hedons caused by x(the real world experience) then you aren't a hedon.
You’re being distracted by your strong and accurate intuitions about the real world, specifically that not seeing your actual loved ones again would be bad. Take the hypotheticals seriously on their own terms. If by stipulation the experience machine makes you and your loved ones happy that you hooked yourselves up and said goodbye forever in flesh-land, and (again by stipulation) there is absolutely zero difference to you between being in the experience machine and being in flesh-land except that the experience machine makes you and your loved one feel like and believe you have an objectively better existence, then I think your moral intuition should not object to valuing the pleasure derived. How sad would it be if we created an individual heaven on earth for every human being to inhabit, and most people rejected it because they weren’t imaginative enough to see that upon taking a leap of faith and hooking themselves up, they would never ever regret it. Not that this could be even a remote worry any time soon. Perfect experience machines are definitely not just around the corner.
I can assure you I am very capable of understanding hypotheticals. I think it would be very sad if the future contained no real interaction or achievement, but merely blissed-out wireheaders who didn't even realize what they were missing. (You may have different values; that's fine.)
Sad for whom? Not for future humanity. Values disconnected from experiences of goodness or badness strike me as 100% hollow. We might as well posit value preferences over what happens to rocks and other unfeeling objects. (Apologies if my original comment seemed to impugn your ability to take hypotheticals seriously generally. That was not my intent.)
I think it's sad for those individuals to be trapped in a dream world (however pleasant the dream may be), and never get to *interact* with others or *do* anything genuinely meaningful.
I think there are at least three important steps up from rocks. One is adding sentience, which you focus on: the ability to feel pleasure and pain. That gets us chickens and other simple beasts. The second adds caring: really *wanting* the world to be a certain way, as when mammalian parents care about their children, and mourn their deaths. This strikes me as involving a big jump in value: elephants and whales are able to appreciate valuable states of the world in a way that chickens, seemingly, cannot. A third step adds rational agency, the ability to critically *reflect* on our values, choose goals, and act so as to achieve them. This opens up yet greater vistas of value that only humans, so far, have access to.
Hedonism, in treating us as glorified chickens, comes too close to treating us like rocks. It at least appreciates the importance of that first vital step, granting *some* moral significance. But it neglects the next two, that many of us (quite reasonably) value even more.
I'm on board with pleasures being non-fungible. One obvious consequence, though, is that it interferes with maximization: fungibility is what allows the value of pleasures to be *quantified*, and therefore allows a straightforward mathematical decision procedure to select between them (intrapersonally and interpersonally). Without fungibility it's harder to calculate what constitutes *the greatest* good for the greatest number. Are you okay with that consequence?
I don't think that follows. People often seem to assume that fungibility and commensurability necessarily go together, but that assumption strikes me as entirely baseless. Whether or not pleasures can "quantified" (based on intensity, duration, etc.) is independent of whether we value them fungibly or non-fungibly. The non-fungible hedonist can still say that you should always overall prefer the greater pleasure. Their qualitative distinctions merely make a difference to when pro tanto regret is warranted; not to determining what is overall most worth doing.
Of course, since I've never been a hedonist to begin with, I'm generally accepting of the point that it can be hard to calculate (or measure) aggregate welfare. But I think it's a separate issue.
Hm, I see. I probably wouldn't go with your definition of fungibility - I think the term implies commensurability - but if you're going to define it strictly in terms of whether there's regret, then this makes sense.
I feel like there is a bit of slippage here between whether something is lost and whether things are on net worse.
Obviously, different equally pleasurable experiences have different properties. At the simplest level the visual qualia differ when looking at one painting rather than another so, trivially, if you replace looking at painting 1 with looking at painting 2 you've lost the experience of pleasure while having qualia 1 instead of 2. And I guess I'm not sure what more is supposed to be claimed by this non-fungibility thesis than this trivial fact.
I mean at some level you do have to engage in tradeoffs so is the non-fungibility claim meant to suggest that somehow the correct kind of tradeoffs don't track what we think of as pleasure?
--
But maybe you would agree with all this, I just don't think a non-fungibility claim really presents a strong counterargument. I think all the action is in the question of supervenience -- or something very much like it. If you replace your wife with a robot and replace her husband with a robot as well so the qualitative experiences remain unchanged (or even just unchanged in what seem like relevant ways) does that make a moral difference?
I'm willing to bite that bullet and say no but at least that argument seems like it has coherent bite in a way the non-fungibility doesn't -- it just feels like an attempt to refuse to acknowledge the need for tradeoffs.
> "I guess I'm not sure what more is supposed to be claimed by this non-fungibility thesis than this trivial fact."
The key idea is that we can distinguish between two very different kinds of equally-valued trade-offs:
(1) Fungible trade-offs between two (merely descriptively distinct) ways of realizing one and the same final value, vs
(2) Non-fungible trade-offs between two normatively distinct final values.
Examples of (1) include things like a choice between a $20 bill vs two tens. Or between a left-foot massage and an equally pleasant right-foot massage. In these cases, the goods in question seem entirely *fungible*, or normatively indistinguishable, even though they are descriptively distinct. So I characterize them as involving one and the same token good (aggregate money in the first case; generic pleasure in the second) which can be realized via either of two "constitutive means".
Examples of (2) include things like a choice between saving Bob vs Sally. Or (I'm now suggesting) between the desirable experience of happy family life vs the desirable experience of philosophical understanding. It seems (to me at least) that it would be a *mistake* to treat these trade-offs as equivalent to those in group (1). Examples of type (2) are intuitively *not* fungible, or such that the replacement of one by an equally-valued other is a matter of strict "indifference". Instead of indifference, the replacement of a non-fungible good calls for *ambivalence*. (Or so I argue in 'Value Receptacles'.)
Non-fungibility is a substantive (non-trivial) normative claim. It reflects whether you ought to have *separate* ultimate desires for each distinct good. For fungible goods, by contrast, it would be a normative mistake to separately value each instance; you should only care about the aggregate. (What kind of weird money fetishist would care separately about each dollar bill?)
Further background:
* https://www.philosophyetc.net/2009/08/equal-vs-identical-value.html
* https://www.philosophyetc.net/2018/07/constitutive-instrumentality-response.html
* https://philpapers.org/rec/CHAVR
Ok we do have a disagreement but I guess this part just gets back to our deep disagreement as to how to even understand morality/normative claims at all.
Tho I guess I agree that maybe I shouldn't call what I'm taking about morality at all and should use another name and simply call myself a moral anti-realist. I just don't buy the idea of a relationship between attitudes/valuing/whatever that has the right features at all -- I don't believe there is a principled relationship between physical state/qualia and expressed/believed propositions so there couldn't be the kind of objectively prefered relationship needed to make the kind of claims you see as moral/normative claims true in the realist sense -- but I know that's an unusual view and now I understand what you mean here on the usual understanding.
On second thought it's less about supervenience per se than causal dependence. Depending on your views about causation (eg are u a Humean) this might or might not make a difference.
I mean I think it's pretty intuitive that it wouldn't make a difference if you weren't physically interacting with your wife but you were both in the matrix with appropriate causal interactions.
It's something about whether or not your actions really have the effect you think they do.
And I think there are some interesting analogies here to traditional religious solutions to the problem of human evil (eg why not give us all our own world where we can't hurt anyone else).
I agree that what matters is causal rather than narrowly "physical" interaction -- a shared Matrix seems unobjectionable to me. That's to say that, according to my values, the fundamental nature of our shared reality is fungible: you could replace atoms with bits, and I wouldn't think that anything (of any normative significance whatsoever) was lost.
By contrast, if I no longer had *any real interaction* of any kind with my wife (being in isolated experience machines), then I think there has been a real loss. Hedonism denies this -- it sees all possible causes of the experience as fungible -- which strikes me as completely unbelievable.
Right, but what seems like the significant objection there and the one I want to take seriously is the relationship between experiences and their cause. I just don't see the strength of the argument that doesn't mention this and just points to the fact we have different kinds of pleasure.
I mean, if you grant the idea that the causal relationship is irrelevant I don't see how would be more attractive to deny hedonism because there are different kinds of pleasure. At that point it seems you've bitten the only interesting bullet and picking net pleasure as the way to trade off between those kinds of pleasure seems unobjectionable.
--
I expect we may be saying the same things and I'm just less polite/humble so rather than saying it's not enough I want to call the mere non-fungibility of pleasure argument (viewing this as not incorporating the causal issues) as totally unpersuasive.
Just to clarify, I'm thinking of the dialectic as follows:
(A) Hedonism seems objectionable because it treats our loved ones as fungible with any other source of pleasure. (Replace a loving relationship with sufficient candy-induced gustatory pleasure, and traditional hedonism says there are no grounds for even pro tanto regret. fwiw, I find this to be a stronger objection than the experience machine. Hedonism's verdict here just seems *insane*.)
(B) Possible response: develop a version of hedonism on which sufficiently qualitatively distinct pleasures count as morally distinct (i.e. non-fungible) final goods.
(C) Note a real advantage of this new view: it no longer implies that relationships can be replaced with candy, without at least pro tanto grounds for regret. (Enough candy might make it overall worthwhile, but that claim isn't *so* crazy.)
(D) Finally, note that even the new view is still subject to a form of fungibility objection. For it still implies that we can (without regret) replace a real relationship causing experience Q1 with convincing robots or experience machines causing Q1. And that still seems pretty unbelievable (at least to me).
It sounds like maybe you're questioning step (C), i.e. whether the new view ("non-fungible hedonism") has any distinctive advantages over traditional hedonism? I think it does, as indicated above. Alternatively, perhaps you're just pointing out that (D) is so obvious that it's hard to see anyone being troubled by (A) without *also* being troubled by (D), so there's no real constituency of people who would be especially impressed by the new view. That could well be right!
I think if you are not biting the bullet on the experience machine, you aren't really a hedonist anymore. If you think hedons are not fungible to hedons caused by x(the real world experience) then you aren't a hedon.
Yes, that part of my post is precisely explaining why I *reject* hedonism (even of the slightly-improved variety introduced earlier in the post).
You’re being distracted by your strong and accurate intuitions about the real world, specifically that not seeing your actual loved ones again would be bad. Take the hypotheticals seriously on their own terms. If by stipulation the experience machine makes you and your loved ones happy that you hooked yourselves up and said goodbye forever in flesh-land, and (again by stipulation) there is absolutely zero difference to you between being in the experience machine and being in flesh-land except that the experience machine makes you and your loved one feel like and believe you have an objectively better existence, then I think your moral intuition should not object to valuing the pleasure derived. How sad would it be if we created an individual heaven on earth for every human being to inhabit, and most people rejected it because they weren’t imaginative enough to see that upon taking a leap of faith and hooking themselves up, they would never ever regret it. Not that this could be even a remote worry any time soon. Perfect experience machines are definitely not just around the corner.
I can assure you I am very capable of understanding hypotheticals. I think it would be very sad if the future contained no real interaction or achievement, but merely blissed-out wireheaders who didn't even realize what they were missing. (You may have different values; that's fine.)
Sad for whom? Not for future humanity. Values disconnected from experiences of goodness or badness strike me as 100% hollow. We might as well posit value preferences over what happens to rocks and other unfeeling objects. (Apologies if my original comment seemed to impugn your ability to take hypotheticals seriously generally. That was not my intent.)
I think it's sad for those individuals to be trapped in a dream world (however pleasant the dream may be), and never get to *interact* with others or *do* anything genuinely meaningful.
I think there are at least three important steps up from rocks. One is adding sentience, which you focus on: the ability to feel pleasure and pain. That gets us chickens and other simple beasts. The second adds caring: really *wanting* the world to be a certain way, as when mammalian parents care about their children, and mourn their deaths. This strikes me as involving a big jump in value: elephants and whales are able to appreciate valuable states of the world in a way that chickens, seemingly, cannot. A third step adds rational agency, the ability to critically *reflect* on our values, choose goals, and act so as to achieve them. This opens up yet greater vistas of value that only humans, so far, have access to.
Hedonism, in treating us as glorified chickens, comes too close to treating us like rocks. It at least appreciates the importance of that first vital step, granting *some* moral significance. But it neglects the next two, that many of us (quite reasonably) value even more.
Hmmm, thanks for that break down. Worth mulling over for me.
I'm on board with pleasures being non-fungible. One obvious consequence, though, is that it interferes with maximization: fungibility is what allows the value of pleasures to be *quantified*, and therefore allows a straightforward mathematical decision procedure to select between them (intrapersonally and interpersonally). Without fungibility it's harder to calculate what constitutes *the greatest* good for the greatest number. Are you okay with that consequence?
I don't think that follows. People often seem to assume that fungibility and commensurability necessarily go together, but that assumption strikes me as entirely baseless. Whether or not pleasures can "quantified" (based on intensity, duration, etc.) is independent of whether we value them fungibly or non-fungibly. The non-fungible hedonist can still say that you should always overall prefer the greater pleasure. Their qualitative distinctions merely make a difference to when pro tanto regret is warranted; not to determining what is overall most worth doing.
Of course, since I've never been a hedonist to begin with, I'm generally accepting of the point that it can be hard to calculate (or measure) aggregate welfare. But I think it's a separate issue.
Hm, I see. I probably wouldn't go with your definition of fungibility - I think the term implies commensurability - but if you're going to define it strictly in terms of whether there's regret, then this makes sense.
Revealed preference suggest that something cannot be replaced by other thing when given the chance you decide not replacing.