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How to Use the Experience Machine

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2015

EDEN LIN
EDEN LIN*
Affiliation:
Rutgers University, Newark [email protected]
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Abstract

The experience machine was traditionally thought to refute hedonism about welfare. In recent years, however, the tide has turned: many philosophers have argued not merely that the experience machine doesn't rule out hedonism, but that it doesn't count against it at all. I argue for a moderate position between those two extremes: although the experience machine doesn't decisively rule out hedonism, it provides us with some reason to reject it. I also argue for a particular way of using the experience machine to argue against hedonism – one that appeals directly to intuitions about the welfare values of experientially identical lives rather than to claims about what we value or claims about whether we would, or should, plug into the machine. The two issues are connected: the conviction that the experience machine leaves hedonism unscathed is partly due to neglect of the best way to use the experience machine.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 28 , Issue 3 , September 2016 , pp. 314 - 332
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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References

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17 De Brigard, ‘If You Like It’, pp. 44, 46–50; Kawall, ‘Mental State Theories’, pp. 382–3.

18 There is overlap between this group of commentators and the previous one. For many believe that the role of the claim that we wouldn't plug in is to show that we value something besides how our lives feel from the inside.

19 Hewitt, ‘Intuitions about the Experience Machine’, pp. 338–41.

20 Barber, ‘Hedonism and the Experience Machine’, p. 262.

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24 Weijers, ‘Nozick's Experience Machine Is Dead’, pp. 525–6, 528–9.

25 Others speak instead of basic intrinsic goodness (badness), but this creates the misleading impression that it is analytic that how basically good a particular thing is supervenes on its intrinsic features.

26 This is compatible with the controversial view that if you currently have a future-oriented desire whose object obtains in the future, that object can be basically good for you now. (See Bruckner, Donald, ‘Present Desire Satisfaction and Past Well-Being’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 91 (2013), pp. 15–29 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Dorsey, Dale, ‘Desire-satisfaction and Welfare as Temporal’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 16 (2013), pp. 151–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.) For even though the time at which the object obtains is in the future, the time at which it is basically good is now.

27 We can leave open the possibility of posthumous benefits and harms by stipulating that, by a person's total lifetime well-being, we mean the total amount of welfare that she accrues during her life. This amount is wholly determined by how basically good or bad for her during her life all of the things that are good or bad for her are.

28 Feldman proposes hedonistic views on which the basic prudential value of a pleasure is determined in part by other factors, such as the truth value of its object. Feldman, Fred, Pleasure and the Good Life (Oxford, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. But as others have argued, it is doubtful that such views are genuine versions of hedonism: see Olsaretti, Serena, ‘The Limits of Hedonism: Feldman on the Value of Attitudinal Pleasure’, Philosophical Studies 136 (2007), pp. 409–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Zimmerman, Michael J., ‘Feldman on the Nature and Value of Pleasure’, Philosophical Studies 136 (2007), pp. 425–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I explain how a variant on the present argument can be used to argue against such views in Lin, Eden, ‘Pluralism about Well-Being’, Philosophical Perspectives 28 (2014), pp. 127–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 140–5, 146–7.

29 Crisp, Reasons and the Good, p. 118. Heathwood comes close: he discusses an argument in which it is claimed that, if you were ‘just taking yourself into account’, you would prefer a life in the real world to an experientially identical life in an experience machine. Heathwood, Chris, ‘Welfare’, The Routledge Companion to Ethics, ed. Skorupski, John (London, 2010), pp. 645–55Google Scholar, at 649–50. Feldman, ‘What We Learn’, pp. 80–1, considers a lifetime comparison argument that appeals directly to intuitions about welfare, but in which the life in the experience machine is hedonically superior.

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31 Weijers and Schouten, ‘Recent Responses to the Experience Machine’, pp. 466–7.

32 Moreover, notice that the comparison argument cannot be thought to beg the question simply because its premises cannot all be true unless its conclusion is true: for all valid arguments are like this, but not all valid arguments beg the question. Nor can it be thought to beg the question simply because any reason to doubt its conclusion would also be a reason to doubt that all of its premises are true: once again, all valid arguments are like this. These familiar points are made in Jackson, Frank, Conditionals (Oxford, 1987), pp. 100–1Google Scholar.

33 See Pryor, James, ‘What's Wrong with Moore's Argument?’, Philosophical Issues 14 (2004), pp. 349–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Pryor argues that an argument can provide justification for its conclusion even if it is dialectically ineffective relative to certain audiences.

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36 Again, I am assuming an understanding of hedonism on which it straightforwardly entails the second premise. See n. 28.

37 Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter, ‘Begging the Question’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 77 (1999), pp. 174–91, at 182–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I am focusing here on uses of arguments for the purpose of audience justification, i.e. trying to show the audience that they have a reason to believe the conclusion. Sinnott-Armstrong says that when the purpose is arguer justification (i.e. showing that the arguer has a reason to believe the conclusion), what matters is whether the arguer would have any reason to believe the premise if he didn't already believe the conclusion and didn't already have some reason to believe the conclusion. What I say below could straightforwardly be adapted to show that the comparison argument wouldn't beg the question even if it were used for arguer justification.

38 Silverstein, ‘In Defense of Happiness’, pp. 293–8; Crisp, Reasons and the Good, pp. 120–2; and Hewitt, ‘Intuitions about the Experience Machine’, pp. 343–7. Only Silverstein makes the strong claim that such an argument can show that anti-hedonistic intuitions have no evidential force. Arguments of this kind are also discussed in Sobel, David, ‘Varieties of Hedonism’, Journal of Social Philosophy 33 (2002), pp. 240–56, at 244–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 Silverstein, ‘In Defense of Happiness’, pp. 293–6.

40 Silverstein, ‘In Defense of Happiness’, p. 296.

41 Silverstein, ‘In Defense of Happiness’, p. 299.

42 See Street, Sharon, ‘A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value’, Philosophical Studies 127 (2006), pp. 109–66, at 155CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Street claims that a dilemma analogous to her Darwinian dilemma for value realism ‘could be constructed using any kind of causal influence on the content of our evaluative judgements’.

43 Silverstein, ‘In Defense of Happiness’, p. 297.

44 This assumes the falsity of the reductive view that to be a basic good just is to be something that plays the role vis-à-vis our desires that Silverstein says is played by pleasure. I find this view implausible, but I cannot prove that it is false here. Silverstein and other defenders of hedonism against the experience machine do not endorse such a view.

45 Silverstein only considers a version of the experience machine argument in which the fact that we desire things besides pleasure is thought to count against hedonism. Perhaps his claim is that any advocate of this version of the argument should regard the truth of the psychological story about desire formation as evidence that pleasure is the only basic good, since any such advocate already posits a tight connection between what we desire and what is basically good for us. Whether or not he is right about this, I maintain that the truth of his psychological story would not in fact support hedonism.

46 Similarly, the putative fact that we have the evaluative outlook that we do because it enhances reproductive fitness doesn't show that the judgement that reproductive fitness is good is more reliable than the rest of our evaluative judgements. Street, ‘Darwinian Dilemma’, argues that the evolutionary influence on our evaluative outlook undermines realism about value altogether; she doesn't claim that it supports a view on which reproductive fitness is the sole, or central, good.

47 For a similar point about some attempts to use evolutionary debunking arguments against certain views in normative ethics, see Kahane, Guy, ‘Evolutionary Debunking Arguments’, Noûs 45 (2011), pp. 103–25CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

48 I thank Gwen Bradford, Richard Yetter Chappell, Fred Feldman, Daniel Greco, Chris Heathwood, Frank Jackson, Guy Kahane, Adam Lerner, Errol Lord, Barry Maguire, Gideon Rosen, Matthew Silverstein, Daniele Sgaravatti, Pablo Stafforini, and an anonymous referee.