Hey, I'm interested in fielding your opinions on the application of utilitarianism to drugs. The obvious hypothetical application comes from the classic political novel Brave New World. In the words of Wikipedia,

Wikipedia says:All members of society are conditioned in childhood to hold the values that the World State idealizes. Constant consumption is the bedrock of stability for the World State; everyone is encouraged to consume the ubiquitous drug, soma. Soma is a mild hallucinogen that makes it possible for everyone to be blissfully oblivious. It has no short-term side effects and induces no hangover; long-term abuse leads to death by respiratory failure.

My first question is "Is a lack of political freedom an excessive price to pay for such pleasure?"

If you have not read Brave New World, or if for some other reason that example does not work for you, I can recall a similar example from a man's stand-up routine. He said in quite colourful language, that he wished that in the future, people should be allowed to lie in baths of protein with a wire running into the brain constantly stimulating sexual pleasure centres. So is this sort of situation something you'd consider desirable?

I won't pre-empt your responses except by saying that your approach to these situation might depend on your conception of utility. If hedonistic pleasures like food, sex and drugs count as utility, then soma and the protein bath sound fairly desirable. That's not necessarily the case for someone who understands utility to mean a deeper wellbeing or satisfaction of preferences.

RyanCarey wrote:He said in quite colourful language, that he wished that in the future, people should be allowed to lie in baths of protein with a wire running into the brain constantly stimulating sexual pleasure centres. So is this sort of situation something you'd consider desirable?

I won't pre-empt your responses except by saying that your approach to these situation might depend on your conception of utility. If hedonistic pleasures like food, sex and drugs count as utility, then soma and the protein bath sound fairly desirable. That's not necessarily the case for someone who understands utility to mean a deeper wellbeing or satisfaction of preferences.

I draw a strong line between the two situations of hedonism and stimulation of pleasure centres. The electronic stimulation of the pleasure centres of our brain *has* to count as utility, however that's measured. There is, surely, no way for a person to be happier. As for the other example - I'm willing to cede that a life spent eating chocolate and drinking champagne might not be as 'enjoyable' as other forms of lives - this isn't quite what you were getting at, but I think one key difference is that a life spent doing the things that make an individual ahppy in the short term will not necessarily make him happy in the long term. But with soma and other related hypothetical drugs, I would advocate their use - iirc, lab rats chose to press buttons activating their pleasure centres for long enough that they died of starvation, as they preferred the pleasure to food.
Whether one specific individual should be allowed to take this route is a different question; my life would be noticeably worse if a family member or close friend chose to do this. I've got no idea how much utility an individual gains versus how much his contacts would lose from his decision to remove himself from the population - until the option exists for *all* individuals to electrocute their pleasure centres [when it would make sense to take it] then it's more of a grey area.

I did think when I read it that BNW was a utopia, not a dystopia, and I haven't changed my mind since...

Joe

David Pearce has written a pretty good commentary on Brave New World, arguing that's it's not a particularly nice place to live in and that it's a strawman of utilitarianism that shouldn't perturb us. I agree on the second point, though I'm not actually convinced that it's particularly unpleasant on the whole - Huxley tries to turn us against it by writing the entire thing from the perspective of the (emotionally) worst-off person in it, which is a pretty cheap trick. If the most miserable people in this world gave us their diary, it would look hellish by comparison to Huxley's 'dystopia'.

Jinksy wrote: Huxley tries to turn us against it by writing the entire thing from the perspective of the (emotionally) worst-off person in it, which is a pretty cheap trick.

Hm. I was chatting to an English student about this recently and she made basically the same point, but from an English student's POV that authorial intent is key, rather than a philosopher's POV that the book is only relevant as a way of ensuring that we're talking about the same kind of hypothetical world with a drug to make people happy. I definitely agree with you in that the least happy person on Earth is much, much less happy than any BNW citizens.

I'm enjoying David's commentary. Very good reading.

David said:As perfect pleasure-drugs go, soma underwhelms. It's not really a utopian wonderdrug at all. It does make you high. Yet it's more akin to a hangoverless tranquilliser or an opiate - or a psychic anaesthetising SSRI like Prozac - than a truly life-transforming elixir. Third-millennium neuropharmacology, by contrast, will deliver a vastly richer product-range of designer-drugs to order.

Jinksy, would you justify BNW with a response at all, other than to accuse it of strawman tactics and deception?

RyanCarey wrote:Jinksy, would you justify BNW with a response at all, other than to accuse it of strawman tactics and deception?

It didn't strike me as deceitful, though the strawman charge seems fair. It wouldn't inspire me to write much, if that's what you mean, mainly because it wasn't that good a novel. I'd happily babble about The Outsider for a while simply because I enjoyed reading it, but where anti-utilitarian philosophy is concerned, the experience machine and repugnant conclusion give me more pause (and the latter much more so than the former).

As for well-written and insightful philosophical fiction, I've yet to find anything that beats The Cyberiad.

Lintillus wrote:where anti-utilitarian philosophy is concerned, the experience machine and repugnant conclusion give me more pause (and the latter much more so than the former).

I don't know what I have to say about the experience machine, but I think that I have somewhat of a theory on the repugnant conclusion. [Using classical utilitarianism including positive and negative wellbeing] I don't think the repugnant conclusion is as bad as it intuitively seems to be. It tells us to imagine millions of lives barely worth living. We intuitively dislike this scenario because:
1) We aren't good at imagining billions of instances. This was explained really well in an experiment which assessed people's ability to assign value to things. In this experiment, people were asked to put a value on a number of birds lives. The scenario was 'we want to put nets over oil ponds to stop birds from drowning in them'. What resulted was that people gave the same value to the birds, no matter how many birds there were.

Kahneman, one of the scientists said:Basically you're representing the whole set by a prototype incident, and you evaluate the prototype incident. All the rest are like that.

I think that we use this same way of thinking about the repugnant conclusion.
2) The word 'barely worth living' makes us think of a level of wellbeing that is actually lower than zero. It makes us think of people who are verging on killing themselves. But when someone decides to kill themselves, this is not merely a life barely worth living. It involves suicide. It's evolutionary outrage. There are checks in our system which tell us even if you are feeling down, stay alive. And so people who decide to kill themselves probably have a level of well being which is outrageously below zero.
So we try to imagine lots of instances of slightly above zero happiness, but realistically, we just imagine one instance of happiness far below zero. It's no wonder we find the conclusion repugnant.

I agree, and I've long felt that the so-called Repugnant Conclusion is a misnomer.

Oh - and the Cyberiad? I'm selling all values of philosophy...light entertainment; nothing more.

RyanCarey wrote:1) We aren't good at imagining billions of instances...

2) The word 'barely worth living' makes us think of a level of wellbeing that is actually lower than zero. It makes us think of people who are verging on killing themselves. But when someone decides to kill themselves, this is not merely a life barely worth living. It involves suicide. It's evolutionary outrage. There are checks in our system which tell us even if you are feeling down, stay alive. And so people who decide to kill themselves probably have a level of well being which is outrageously below zero.
So we try to imagine lots of instances of slightly above zero happiness, but realistically, we just imagine one instance of happiness far below zero. It's no wonder we find the conclusion repugnant.

(sorry about delayed response, I kept forgetting this thread)

As you say, the net zero happiness life, if there's any such thing, is bound to be well above the point where we're so miserable we overcome our evolutionary program enough to kill ourselves. But you can't make the repugnant conclusion go away by just setting a high zero point.

If, for eg, we say that someone has to be consistently cheerful to be above the zero point, then we imply that anyone who isn't cheerful quite as often as we'd like would be better off not existing - ie we'd be doing them a favour by killing them.

Since we have powerful instrumental reasons to oppose killing people whenever they seem slightly below the zero point, that might not be such a worrying inference. But more troubling, IMO, would be the reverse repugnant conclusion. This would say, if we set the bar of 0 happiness too high, that it would be far worse for sufficiently high numbers of moderately cheerful people to exist than for a much smaller number of people to constantly suffer the worst torture you can imagine.

That's not necessarily a reason to reject totalising utilitarianism, but I think it should keep us from getting sanguine about the repug conclusion.

You make a point almost as confusing as it is thought-provoking, Arepo. If I could summarise,
The repugnant conclusion: It is disgusting that utilitarianism might prefer a barely above zero many to a far above zero few.
The reverse repugnant conclusion: The zero is set disgustingly high. How dare we assign negative value to people who do not want to kill themselves. Population will be made to small.

I suppose the repugnant conclusion is harnessing the image of near-suicidal people living. Then the reverse-RC flips the whole scenario on its head. It then focusses on the idea of utilitarians enforcing happiness or killing people in their sleep against their will. How one ethical system can be demonised on the basis of two opposite false conclusions, I don't know. It almost defies belief.

I suppose we should enjoy the fact that the repugnant conclusion is one intuitive objection to utilitarianism in which we're accused of overvaluing life. It's almost some sort of ironic joke:
Q: What's wrong with the repugnant conclusion?
A: It fails to portray utilitarians as blood-sucking babykillers

I'm not sure it'll catch on

I don't think people generally use the RC to demonise util (I was about to say 'I don't think anyone has', but there's always one) - it was first conceived (as far as I know) by Derek Parfit in Reasons and Persons. The book is basically an argument for some sort of aggregative consequentialism, but Parfit pointed out that each version had its issues.

Most utilitarians I've spoken to about it seem to share your and TraderJoe's attitudes - a shrug and a 'what's so bad about that?' I still have issues with the idea that non-existence is worse than happy existence, but if there's a logical way to resolve them that isn't simply accepting TU, I haven't thought of it yet.

Arepo wrote:the experience machine and repugnant conclusion give me more pause (and the latter much more so than the former).

Note that part of the appeal to DU is that is deals with both of these, indeed uses them in support of DU against happiness based utils. Sill I imagine that other non-DU or non-PS utilitarians here think they can deal with these? Hence from a broad utilitarian perspective these are not fatal to the utilitarian project.

RyanCarey wrote:Hey, I'm interested in fielding your opinions on the application of utilitarianism to drugs. The obvious hypothetical application comes from the classic political novel Brave New World. In the words of Wikipedia,

This has been classically dealt with in Nozick's experience machine but drugs or wireheading work equally well here.

In DU inner satisfaction and external fulfilment are not co-extensive they can diverge. So a desire can be fulfilled but the possessor of the desires does not gain the expected satisfaction or possibly any - it could be disappointing etc. DU is focused on actual (external) fulfilment not illusory (internal) satisfactions.

Most people's position on the experience machine is to sacrifice their own happiness for the greater happiness of others - their loved ones etc. From a DU perspective it is not about happiness but about desires that tend to fulfil other desires. The choice is made on that basis and so there is no sacrifice of utility as there is with inner happiness satisfaction utils.

faithlessgod wrote:Most people's position on the experience machine is to sacrifice their own happiness for the greater happiness of others - their loved ones etc. From a DU perspective it is not about happiness but about desires that tend to fulfil other desires. The choice is made on that basis and so there is no sacrifice of utility as there is with inner happiness satisfaction utils.

The experience machine example presupposes no-one else minding what you do. If you'd cause your family great distress by plugging it in, then it's not going to be obvious to anyone from any utilitarian background that you should do so.

Arepo wrote:

faithlessgod wrote:Most people's position on the experience machine is to sacrifice their own happiness for the greater happiness of others - their loved ones etc. From a DU perspective it is not about happiness but about desires that tend to fulfil other desires. The choice is made on that basis and so there is no sacrifice of utility as there is with inner happiness satisfaction utils.

The experience machine example presupposes no-one else minding what you do. If you'd cause your family great distress by plugging it in, then it's not going to be obvious to anyone from any utilitarian background that you should do so.

Sorry there are different versions of the experience machine thought experiment, I was referring to a less typical one that Fyfe uses.

Sticking just to the original Nozick version I would rephrase the above as many people's position on the experience machine is to sacrifice their own guaranteed satisfaction for the riskier but more rewarding actual fulfilment of their desires. From a DU perspective this makes sense as utility is not about inner satisfaction (happiness) but about desire fulfilment, which can include a desire for happiness or satisfaction, just it is not the only end, which the experience machine clearly illustrates.

I just read the Wikipedia article on experience machine and I find the idea of living in a virtual world completely and utterly repulsive. I don't even want to think about it any more. I'm going to play World of Warcraft to get my mind off of it.

Seriously, though. There's not really any significant difference between virtual reality and consensus reality. Folk physics works okay on both if you look at it from a more abstract point of view, but horribly on both from a less abstract point of view. In reality, there's no such thing a solid, or even a particle. There's just a bunch of entangled wave-forms. Virtual reality is designed by us, but considering we have designed so much of consensus reality that you have to drive for a while to find anything particularly natural besides the sky, and even then you have to go outside, that doesn't mean much.

DanielLC wrote:you have to drive for a while to find anything particularly natural besides the sky, and even then you have to go outside, that doesn't mean much.

Anyone else get an image of Daniel driving through a bunch of terraced houses when they read this?

Anyway, I think the disdain the experience machine idea presents us with isn't so much that it's virtual as that it guarantees success. You might not think that any worse a concept, though...

Arepo wrote:Anyway, I think the disdain the experience machine idea presents us with isn't so much that it's virtual as that it guarantees success. You might not think that any worse a concept, though...

Rather it provides the illusion of guaranteed success (or is it the guaranteed illusion of success?). Some might be happy with this over the reality of non-guaranteed success, others are not. That is all this thought experiment is meant to show - the unpalatable conclusion of happiness alone = illusion of success is better than the reality of success.

What do you mean, guarantees success? I know that in video games, some people, though not every one, care about a challenge, and want a game where they'll lose and have to start over many times. Presumably, the experience machine would work the same way. If you could have everything you'd ever want, you may want a challenge, and choose to live in a complete distopia. It's not that you're choosing something you don't like; you just like distopias.

DanielLC wrote:What do you mean, guarantees success?

Was this addressed to me or Arepo? I was responding Arepo's formulation, that is all.

DanielLC wrote: I know that in video games, some people, though not every one, care about a challenge, and want a game where they'll lose and have to start over many times. Presumably, the experience machine would work the same way. If you could have everything you'd ever want, you may want a challenge, and choose to live in a complete distopia. It's not that you're choosing something you don't like; you just like distopias.

As I understand the experience machine does give you whatever you to make you happy - whether the path is easy or a challenge. The problem is that this happiness is driven by an illusion which some find sufficient because all they want is to feed that inner psychological state, whereas as others regard this as insufficient and need that the world has to actually change in order to evoke and justify such feelings - with the greater uncertainty that this can actually happen. (In DU this is the question of asking is satisfaction alone sufficient or is fulfilment necessary?)

Faithlessgod wrote: others regard this as insufficient and need that the world has to actually change...

Well surely, if people want change in their experience machine, they can have it. If they want realism, they can have that too. If their idea of an ideal world was exactly the world we had at the moment with a flourishing Africa and free beverages, they could have that. Of course they could!

a tangent: it reminds me of a story I read from VS Ramachandran about a man who was masochistic (he enjoyed causing himself pain). He initially used to wake up early to take cold showers but he stopped because he enjoyed it too much. Linking back to the topic at hand, I say that if these cold showers contribute to this man's wellbeing, then he should take them. If he does not, then he should not. It all depends his flourishing as a human being.

DanielLC wrote:What do you mean, guarantees success? I know that in video games, some people, though not every one, care about a challenge, and want a game where they'll lose and have to start over many times. Presumably, the experience machine would work the same way. If you could have everything you'd ever want, you may want a challenge, and choose to live in a complete distopia. It's not that you're choosing something you don't like; you just like distopias.

As far as I can remember, Nozick's experience machine is a relatively basic construct that puts you in a world in which you have numerous material successes. (also, inexplicably, it required you to re-emerge every couple of years to reprogram it or something equivalent)

We can imagine a more flexible version of the machine easily enough, but then we're talking about something slightly different from Nozick's conception.

RyanCarey wrote:

Faithlessgod wrote: others regard this as insufficient and need that the world has to actually change...

Well surely, if people want change in their experience machine, they can have it. If they want realism, they can have that too. If their idea of an ideal world was exactly the world we had at the moment with a flourishing Africa and free beverages, they could have that. Of course they could!

Sorry this seems to miss the point of Nozick's thought experiment. You know in advance of entering that there are no real effects and you know that you will forget this once you have entered the machine, so that, then, you will believe they are real. The experience machine prevents you finding out that your beliefs are false - but you don't then know this - but otherwise appears as real as the real world.

The basic question is are experiences the be all and end all? If you are focused on inner connative happiness then one would say yes, otherwise one would say no. This highlights a problem of hedonic utility.

faithlessgod wrote:The basic question is are experiences the be all and end all? If you are focused on inner connative happiness then one would say yes, otherwise one would say no. This highlights a problem of hedonic utility.

It's only a problem for HU if you a) find the idea of entering such a machine repulsive and b) believe that our intuitive responses should inform our ethics. Many HUs reject a, b or both.

This post was going to be yet another defence of util against the experience machine. But instead, I think I'll comment that I do think the experience machine can recommend 'wellbeing' util over 'pleasure' util:
The idea that constant pleasure is not so enjoyable as the experience of ups and downs is a trendy idea. I don't know whether it's true, but let's suppose it is. Suppose even one person in the world has a significant craving for varied experience. For this person, utility is not just sex, food and drugs.

I can see no reason why the feeling from satisfaction of preferences cannot be rated side-by-side with the feelings from eating tasty foods and similar. I can't see any great argument in favour of that narrow conception of utility.

Arepo wrote:

faithlessgod wrote:The basic question is are experiences the be all and end all? If you are focused on inner connative happiness then one would say yes, otherwise one would say no. This highlights a problem of hedonic utility.

It's only a problem for HU if you a) find the idea of entering such a machine repulsive and b) believe that our intuitive responses should inform our ethics. Many HUs reject a, b or both.

I was already making a critical level argument. For you to mention an intuitive level argument and then dismiss it is a non sequitur.
So, are you saying an HU would enter the EM? If yes, that is not HU since they are not concerned with maximising H, only their subjective and, in this case, illusory experience of HU increasing, that is their personal H really does go up, but not utilitarian H in the real world (apart from the contribution their personal H makes of course).

RyanCarey wrote:This post was going to be yet another defence of util against the experience machine.

"Util" does not need to be defended against the EM. Only subjective psychological versions of U are being challenged - that is sterotypical hedonic and eudomonic utils.

RyanCarey wrote: But instead, I think I'll comment that I do think the experience machine can recommend 'wellbeing' util over 'pleasure' util:

Well-being is not being challenged here, e.g. objective preference satisfaction and/or desire fulfilment theories of well-being are fine here.

RyanCarey wrote:The idea that constant pleasure is not so enjoyable as the experience of ups and downs is a trendy idea. I don't know whether it's true, but let's suppose it is. Suppose even one person in the world has a significant craving for varied experience. For this person, utility is not just sex, food and drugs. I can see no reason why the feeling from satisfaction of preferences cannot be rated side-by-side with the feelings from eating tasty foods and similar. I can't see any great argument in favour of that narrow conception of utility.

This argument does not work, since it relies - regardless of constant pleasure or not, a red herring IMHO - on feelings as highlighted above. Anyway "the feelings from eating tasty foods and similar" is just a few of "the feeling from satisfaction of preferences", they are not treated side by side, as the former is a sub-set of the latter.

The EM is about the value of such feelings - however formulated into a util - being triggered based on illusions versus actual fulfilment in reality.

faithlessgod wrote:I was already making a critical level argument. For you to mention an intuitive level argument and then dismiss it is a non sequitur.

Then I'm confused. What problem do you think the EM highlights for HU, and why is it problematic?

So, are you saying an HU would enter the EM?

If they had no family or friends (and or their family/friends had already gone in) and the machine didn't use resources that could be better spent elsewhere, and they didn't think they could contribute significantly more to other people outside the machine than in, then an HU might well get in. Otherwise, they probably wouldn't.

Arepo wrote:Then I'm confused. What problem do you think the EM highlights for HU, and why is it problematic?

The issue is over inner satisfaction versus external fulfilment, that is different versions of well-being, that is it.
The benefit of external fulfilment/preference satisfaction is that it directly and simply deals with many of the standard criticisms - them good old thought experiments - that assume a simplistic act-utilitarianism and subjective satisfaction utility.

Going back to the core issue here over drugs as a means to happiness or satisfaction, the EM thought experiment highlights the problems of the use of a happiness utility that is only about states of consciousness and not about states of the world. That is this theme is a non-issue for desire fulfilment and objective preference satisfaction as models of well-being.

PS IMHO The far more interesting issue is evaluation-focus or act-focus, that was brought up in the Desire Utilitarianism thread and many did not seem to understand it. (I see Toby Ord is now a member here and he promotes world consequentialism which is a different take on these different evaluands.) But maybe this is for another thread.

Faithlessgod wrote:the problems of the use of a happiness utility that is only about states of consciousness and not about states of the world.

Can you nameany of these?

RyanCarey wrote:

Faithlessgod wrote:the problems of the use of a happiness utility that is only about states of consciousness and not about states of the world.

Can you nameany of these?

The Experience Machine!
and its lack of objectivity

See the 'inverted experience machine' argument
http://www.unc.edu/~brigard/Xmach.pdf
for an important challenge to Nozick.

Hmm, it's an interesting talking point, David. (I've read up to the section on status quo bias).

As the writer says

On the one hand, there are those who claim that the intuition elicited by Nozick’s thought-experiment does not necessarily undermine hedonism. They usually offer some account as to why people’s alleged preference for reality ends up supporting, rather than conflicting with, their favored version of hedonism.

On the other hand, there are those who believe that Nozick’s thought-experiment works just fine; indeed, that the intuition it elicits demonstrates not only that hedonism is false (at least in the weak sense of revealing that pleasurable experiences are not the only thing that matter to us), but also that, should they have to choose between pleasure and reality, people would prefer the latter

This writer argues against Nozick's experience machine by trying to beat it at its own game. He explains that our preference to stay outside Nozick's machine is partially due to a bias towards the status quo.

But ultimately, this passage is of limited interest to me because I don't believe in arguing against Nozick's experience machine at its own game. That is, I don't believe consulting our intuition will help us to answer philosophical questions. As useful as intuition is, I think Nozick is creating scenarios so alien to us that our intuition is not reliably pointing us in the correct direction. It's not unlike how while we can deal with the newtonian motion of a tennis ball really competently at a subconscious level, understanding quantum mechanics takes years of practice and involves more conscious and critical thinking.

But ultimately, this passage is of limited interest to me because I don't believe in arguing against Nozick's experience machine at its own game. That is, I don't believe consulting our intuition will help us to answer philosophical questions. As useful as intuition is, I think Nozick is creating scenarios so alien to us that our intuition is not reliably pointing us in the correct direction. It's not unlike how while we can deal with the newtonian motion of a tennis ball really competently at a subconscious level, understanding quantum mechanics takes years of practice and involves more conscious and critical thinking.

Whilst I too am dubious about arguments from intuition I am not sure that it applies here. Surely it is the case the some people take one option and others would the other and that is sufficient to demonstrate that hedonism is false. Whilst the sci-fi scenario is in practical somewhat terms alien to us is is sufficiently comprehensible to be useful and I cannot recall now but I have read seen a number of real world examples which are similar to the various of the experience machine arguments whether of the Nozick, Smart or Fyfe variety. Finally I am not sure about sure about the premise of your tennis ball argument, regardless of how you use it here, since we do not sub-consciously calculate Newtonian mechanics in playing tennis, we employ a number of heuristics and do not unconsciously solve any second order differential equations or equivalent.

Hi FG,

Surely it is the case the some people take one option and others would the other and that is sufficient to demonstrate that hedonism is false.

I think this mini-argument is unsound, if I've understood it right. It seems to be of the form,

1) Hedonistic ethics imply that people always prefer to maximise their happiness.
2) People don't always prefer to maximise their happiness.
-> Hedonistic ethics implies something false.

But 1) itself is false. Hedonistic ethics are normally constructed normatively, as descriptions of what people 'should' do, rather than what they actually do. Showing that they don't do it no more falsifies the claim that they should than showing that people are sometimes vicious falsifies the claim that they should be virtuous - the claims are orthogonal.

I also think 2) is too vague, because the concept of a preference encompasses too many things:

a) The act of claiming you would prefer x.
b) The act of bringing x about.
c) The belief that you would be more content if x were the case.
d) The belief that you would be more content if you thought x were the case.
e) The fact that you would be more content if x were the case.
f) The fact that you would be more content if you thought x were the case.

And probably others too. If a form of preference ethics is based on some of these, it turns out to be a hedonistic ethic in disguise.

Regarding what Arepo just quoted, it demonstrates that people won't always do what would make them happier. This just proves that hedonic utilitarianism isn't the same as preference utilitarianism. It doesn't show which is right.

That's what I said, albeit in about 10 times as many words