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Response to Thought Experiment 84: The Pleasure Principle

3/17/2017

4 Comments

 
Picture
High and low pleasures. Which is which again?
This week's thought experiment is based solely on a premise from utilitarianism that I think is fatally flawed. Therefore, before we can explore and answer the question that is being raised in the experiment, I first need to go back and explain how the roots of this branch of moral philosophy need to be fixed.

John Stuart Mill's book Utilitarianism first appeared as a series of three articles published in Fraser's Magazine in 1861, but the articles were collected and reprinted as a single book in 1863. To this day, it remains:

"the most famous defense of the utilitarian view ever written and is still widely assigned in university ethics courses around the world. Largely owing to Mill, utilitarianism rapidly became the dominant ethical theory in Anglo-American philosophy. ... Though heavily criticized both in Mill's lifetime and in the years since, Utilitarianism did a great deal to popularize utilitarian ethics and was the most influential philosophical articulation of a liberal humanistic morality that was produced in the nineteenth century."

In this small 44-page book, Mill's theory of morality is grounded in a particular “theory of life…namely, that pleasure, and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends.” Mill believed that pleasure was equal to happiness, and that it was "the only thing humans do and should desire for its own sake. Since happiness is the only intrinsic good, and since more happiness is preferable to less, the goal of the ethical life is to maximize happiness."

This was published a couple of years after Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859), but Mill had obviously not digested that work. Pleasure or freedom from pain are NOT ends in themselves, they are means towards something else. They are signposts for how to act towards survival! And this is the fatal flaw in utilitarianism. Pleasure / happiness is not desired for its own sake. One can quite easily pleasure themselves (not a euphemism) directly into the ground unless they take some kind of long-term view that allows them to balance pleasure and pain towards....survival. Mill should have been able to see this flaw. After all, he argued that:

"
traditional moral rules such as 'Keep your promises' and 'Tell the truth' have been shown by long experience to promote the welfare of society. Normally we should follow such 'secondary principles' without reflecting much on the consequences of our acts. As a rule, only when such second-tier principles conflict is it necessary (or wise) to appeal to the principle of utility directly."

But this "principle of utility" is clearly just another "secondary principle" since it often comes into conflict with itself. Happiness / pleasure cannot be used as a guide
on its own because there are all sorts of pleasures for all sorts of reasons, many of which need to be followed and many of which need to be ignored. Therefore, there must be a more fundamental principle to guide wise judgment about these types of pleasure. Mill should have seen this, but instead of finding a guiding principle, he just tried to assert what "higher and lower pleasures" are. That brings us to this week's thought experiment.

--------------------------------------------------
     It's just typical — you wait years for a career breakthrough then two opportunities turn up at once. Penny had finally been offered two ambassadorial positions, both at small South Sea Island states of similar size, geology, and climate. Raritaria had strict laws which prohibited extra-marital sex, drink, drugs, popular entertainments and even fine food. The country permitted only the "higher pleasures" of art and music. Indeed, it actually promoted them, which meant it had world-class orchestras, opera, art galleries, and "legitimate" theatre.
     Rawitaria, by contrast, was an intellectual and cultural desert. It was nonetheless known as a hedonists' paradise. It had excellent restaurants, a thriving comedy and cabaret circuit, and liberal attitudes to sex and drugs.
     Penny did not appreciate having to choose between the higher pleasures of Raritaria and the lower ones of Rawitaria, for she enjoyed both. Indeed, a perfect day for her would combine good food, good drink, high culture, and low fun. Choose she must, though. So, forced to decide, which would it be? Beethoven or Beef Wellington? Rossini or Martini? Shakespeare or Britney Spears?

Source: Utilitarianism by John Stuart Mill (1863).

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 250.
---------------------------------------------------


In ​Baggini's discussion of this thought experiment, he writes:

In which of these odd little countries is it easier to live a good life? You might think that it is merely a question of preference. ... If it is simply a matter of taste and disposition, however, then why do the higher pleasures attract government subsidies when the lower ones are more often than not heavily taxed? If the pleasure we gain from listening to a Verdi opera is worth no more than the pleasure of listening to Motörhead, then why aren't seats at rock gigs subsidised as much as those at the Royal Opera House? ... The suspicion is that this is just preference, snobbery, or elitism dressed up as an objective argument. The problem exercised John Stuart Mill, the utilitarian philosopher, who thought that the goal of morality was to increase the greatest happiness of the greatest number. The problem he faced was that his philosophy seemed to value a life full of shallow and sensual pleasures above that of a life with fewer, but more intellectual ones. The contented cat would have a better life than a troubled artist. The solution was to distinguish between the quality as well as the quantity of pleasure. A life full only of lower pleasures was worse than one with even just a few higher ones. This still leaves the problem of justification: why is it better? Mill proposed a test. We should ask what competent judges would decide. Those who had tasted both higher and lower pleasures were the best placed to determine which were superior. And as the labels "higher" and "lower" suggest, he knew how he thought they would choose.

Now we see, however, that the choice is a false one. Pleasure is not an intrinsic end goal, so higher and lower pleasures do not exist intrinsically. Sensual pleasures can sometimes lead to survival, and sometimes lead toward extinction. Intellectual pleasures can also lead us in either direction. At the end of my blog post on John Stuart Mill, I pointed out that "there is a fatal flaw in utilitarianism in that by proclaiming the endpoint of morality as "maximizing happiness for the greatest number," it can too easily lead to overpopulation and a crashing of the planet's ecosystems [which is known as the repugnant conclusion] because not enough attention is being paid to the actual objective basis for morality—the long-term survival of life." That goal is no secondary principle. Life can have pleasure or not have pleasure. It cannot have survival or not have survival. If it has no survival, there is nothing left. I discussed this at length in my reply to the repugnant conclusion, but I ended with this:

​Welfare, well-being, flourishing, eudaimonia...whatever you want to call it...it does matter, but it is NOT paramount. Survival is paramount, and therefore decisive. You can have all the thriving you want, but only AFTER your morals point life towards survival. If well-being were the ultimate and decisive value, whose well-being would be worth marching everything else to extinction? When an issue A supervenes upon issue B, issue B is more fundamental. The issue A of well-being can only be satisfied if the issue B of existence is met. Survival / existence is the most fundamental attribute we must build our morality upon.

So, Raritaria or Rawitaria? It doesn't really matter. Penny should flip a coin if she has to, but then immediately foster diplomatic relations between the two island nations which leads them both to reorganise their laws around a new fundamental principle based on evolutionary philosophy rather than utilitarianism.
4 Comments
John A. Johnson
3/18/2017 05:27:34 pm

Indubitably, one needs to survive in order to be happy. Also, evolutionary theory suggests that emotions evolved as signals as to whether our behaviors and circumstances are promoting survival of our genes.These are good arguments for asserting that pleasure or other forms of happiness are not what we should be striving toward, but, rather, useful information for the ultimate goal, which is the preservation of genes.

At the same time, I can't imagine thinking that mere survival is a sufficient description of our ultimate goal. I would say that the goal of life should be a life worth living, not just the survival of life. And part of what makes life worth living is some degree of happiness. Another way of saying this is that I could not recommend living life in X manner if X manner resulted in a life with zero happiness, or, even worse, much pain and suffering without compensating happiness.

So, I agree that survival is in some sense fundamental, but it is an insufficient reason to choose among courses of action.

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Ed Gibney link
3/18/2017 07:31:56 pm

Well, first, I would agree that happiness is of course a secondary goal. Possible even THE secondary goal. But also, if someone or something is "living a life that's not worth living," then they aren't really acting towards long-term survival and something needs to change. I do think of happiness as an ingredient of survival. So that's why I think survival--in the most robust sense, not merely balanced temporarily on a knife edge--provides plenty of guidance for the right course of action. Survival entails quite a lot when you expand it to the needs for life in general over evolutionary timeframes. It entails everything really.

Reply
John A. Johnson
3/18/2017 08:09:29 pm

In the real world I suppose that a person who is experiencing little or even no happiness is usually in danger of not surviving. That's what the emotional system is all about: signalling us whether or not we are on a course toward survival. Nonetheless, I can imagine a scenario in which a group of ruthless overseers.have enslaved another group of people who are forced to work for their overseers without receiving anything in return except a prison cell to sleep and barely adequate food and medical care. They are allowed to reproduce only to produce new slaves that will replace them today. So their leaves are totally joyless and dreary, constituting "lives not worth living." And yet they survive and even reproduce.

I would also say that situations approximating my hypothetical example has actually occurred from time to time in human history. That is why I would rather not make happiness a secondary goal and assume that survival necessarily implies enough happiness to make life worth living. Why not use a formulation like "survival with enough happiness to make life worth living" instead of just survival as the goal?

As far as the "life in general" formulation, I still have questions about inter-species predation, which has been a fact of life throughout the evolution of life. From the perspective of life in general, predation is just fine, even necessary, for life to continue. But ask any prey if it is good to be eaten to keep a predator alive.

Ed Gibney link
3/19/2017 09:23:08 am

Again, I would say those sci-fi slave situations are not robust survival situations, and I think that would be pretty obvious to all involved. The sci-fi slaves may put up with large amounts of suffering as long as there was hope that they could overcome their lords someday. They would look for every single opportunity to change things or take any opportunity to off themselves if there was truly no hope. The lords would know they are in a very tenuous position where everything must be guarded to the point of paranoia at all times. I can talk solely about long-term survival as the goal and easily judge that situation as morally bad. There are also discussions you can have about moral means that favour cooperation without exploiting others too. But the final end has to be survival.

The reason I don't make "survival with enough happiness to make life living" as the goal, is that this is no longer objective. What is happiness? What is enough? Those are highly subjective. Also, where would you draw the line at adding in secondary goals? Is it survival + happiness + food + shelter + oxygen + art + friendship + maslow's self actualization + etc. etc.? I'm happy to talk about all that stuff as the best way to live a life, but the end goal is a simple binary objective measure. Survival. Agree that we must start there (as opposed to living for God or heaven, or eudaimonia, or nothing, or whatever), and then we can all continue the conversation.

This conversation would eventually lead to a talk about predation and that's an interesting one to have. From the perspective of life in general, you could say that predation *has* happened and *is* necessary, but not that it *must* happen and *ought* to happen. Predation is currently necessary because herbivore vegetarians don't consciously keep their numbers in check. Could life ever evolve naturally or be engineered by us to remove the need for predation? Theoretically, yes. Would that be preferable to a world with predation? From a standpoint of reduced suffering, probably yes. Are we anywhere near understanding ecosystems and self-control to make that happen? Absolutely not. Are there morally better choices we can make right now about vegetarianism, veganism, animal welfare, re-wilding, etc. to make a world more filled with cooperative robust survival? Yes. All of which I love to talk about, because morality is hard and we need better guides to understand it.

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