Abstractionists claim that the only bearers of intrinsic value are abstract, necessarily existing states of affairs. I argue that abstractionism cannot succeed. Though we can model concrete goods such as lives, projects, and outcomes with abstract states, conflating models of goods with the goods themselves has surprising and unattractive consequences. I suggest that concrete states of affairs or facts are the only bearers of intrinsic value. I show how this proposal can overcome the concerns lodged against abstractionism and, in the (...) process, reconnect us with the good. (shrink)

Quand nous lisons un livre passionnant, quand nous passons une bonne soirée avec des amis ou quand nous dégustons des mets raffinés, nous nous trouvons parfois dans un état de plaisir. La notion de plaisir traverse de nombreux champs de recherche en philosophie. Une question centrale reste sans doute celle de sa nature : qu’est-ce donc que le plaisir ? Pour y répondre, une comparaison avec d'autres entités mentales plus familières se révèle fructueuse, et permet de mettre à jour ses (...) spécificités propres. La définition du plaisir doit rendre compte de sa diversité, puisque le plaisir semble toujours se présenter sous des formes multiples : qu'y a-t-il de commun parmi toutes les instances de plaisir ? Par ailleurs, le plaisir semble souvent avoir un objet, ce qui soulève une série de questions : Quel type de chose peut être un objet du plaisir ? Dans quelle mesure l'objet du plaisir constitue-t-il le plaisir lui-même ? Plus généralement, quelle est la nature du lien entre le plaisir et son objet ? Ces questions seront abordées dans la Section 1. Au-delà de ces questions définitionnelles, des questions plus spécifiques se posent concernant la manière dont on peut rendre compte du plaisir dans une optique naturaliste : dans quelle mesure le plaisir est-il une entité qui s’intègre dans une image unifiée du monde dans lequel on vit ? Puisqu'il est généralement entendu que la science manifeste cette ambition unificatrice, comment peut-on rendre compte du plaisir de manière scientifique ? La Section 2 est dédiée à ces questions. Une des principales difficultés rencontrées est que le plaisir ne semble pas neutre. Il paraît plutôt avoir une valeur affective positive, dans un sens qui reste bien sûr à éclaircir. Cette valeur se manifeste d'abord dans le fait que le plaisir est susceptible d'orienter nos actions et réactions : nous sommes typiquement attirés par le plaisir, de la même manière que nous cherchons à éviter la souffrance. C'est l'aspect motivationnel du plaisir. La valeur affective du plaisir semble cependant aller au-delà de son rôle motivationnel, pour donner lieu à des caractéristiques normatives. Non seulement le plaisir motive certaines actions, mais il les justifierait aussi, en fournissant des raisons d'agir qui semblent valides. Plus encore, le plaisir semble bon pour nous, ou nous faire du bien. Il semble donc avoir une valeur prudentielle, en ce qu'il contribuerait à rendre notre vie meilleure. Cela pourrait alors justifier son intégration dans le domaine de la morale. Ces considérations seront l’objet de la Section 3. (shrink)

Desires matter. What are desires? Many believe that desire is a motivational state: desiring is being disposed to act. This conception aligns with the functionalist approach to desire and the standard account of desire's role in explaining action. According to a second influential approach, however, desire is first and foremost an evaluation: desiring is representing something as good. After all, we seem to desire things under the guise of the good. Which understanding of desire is more accurate? Is the guise (...) of the good even right to assume? Should we adopt an alternative picture that emphasizes desire's deontic nature? What do neuroscientific studies suggest? -/- Essays in the first section of the volume are devoted to these questions, and to the puzzle of desire's essence. In the second part of the volume, essays investigate some implications that the various conceptions of desire have on a number of fundamental issues. For example, why are inconsistent desires problematic? What is desire's role in practical deliberation? How do we know what we want? -/- This volume will contribute to the emergence of a fruitful debate on a neglected, albeit crucial, dimension of the mind. (shrink)

Some sensory experiences are pleasant, some unpleasant. This is a truism. But understanding what makes these experiences pleasant and unpleasant is not an easy job. Various difficulties and puzzles arise as soon as we start theorizing. There are various philosophical theories on offer that seem to give different accounts for the positive or negative affective valences of sensory experiences. In this paper, we will look at the current state of art in the philosophy of mind, present the main contenders, critically (...) compare and contrast them. In particular, we want to examine how they handle the reason-giving power of affective states. We will look into two representationalist proposals (Evaluativism and Imperativism) and a functionalist proposal, and argue that, contrary to their own advertisements, the representationalist proposals don’t have good accounts of why and how sensory affect can motivate, rationalize, and justify subsequent behavior and intentional mental activity. We will show that our own functionalist proposal does a much better job in this regard, and that when the representationalist proposals are modified to do a better job, they fare better not because of their representationalist credentials but due to their functionalist ones. (shrink)

It is widely held that it is only contingent that the sensation of pain is disliked, and that when pain is not disliked, it is not intrinsically bad. This conjunction of claims has often been taken to support a subjectivist view of pain’s badness on which pain is bad simply because it is the object of a negative attitude and not because of what it feels like. In this paper, I argue that accepting this conjunction of claims does not commit (...) us to this subjectivist view. They are compatible with an objectivist view of pain’s badness, and with thinking that this badness is due to its phenomenal quality. Indeed, I argue that once the full range of options is in view, the most plausible account of pain is incompatible with subjectivism about value. (shrink)

Most philosophers since Sidgwick have thought that the various forms of pleasure differ so radically that one cannot find a common, distinctive feeling among them. This is known as the heterogeneity problem. To get around this problem, the motivational theory of pleasure suggests that what makes an experience one of pleasure is our reaction to it, not something internal to the experience. I argue that the motivational theory is wrong, and not only wrong, but backwards. The heterogeneity problem is the (...) principal source of motivation for this, otherwise, highly counterintuitive theory. I intend to show that the heterogeneity problem is not a genuine problem and that a more straightforward theory of pleasure is forthcoming. I argue that the various experiences that we call pleasures all feel good. (shrink)

For many people, among the first experiences they have of things as being valuable are experiences of things as possessing sentimental value. Such is the case in childhood where treasured objects are often among the first things we experience as valuable. In everyday life, we frequently experi- ence apparent sentimental value belonging to particular garments, books, cards, and places. Philosophers, however, have seldom discussed sentimental value and have also tended to think about value generally in a way that makes it (...) difficult for sentimental value to be a real kind of value. (shrink)

Violation pornography is pornography where the depicted behavior includes unjust sexual acts, e.g., rape. In this paper I argue that it is unclear whether the enjoyment of violation pornography is bad for the viewer. My essay has three parts. First, I set out an account of flourishing. I adopt a composite account, whereby flourishing is a function of the degree to which an individual has pleasure and various objective-list elements. Objective-list elements are things (e.g., knowledge and meaningful relationships) that make (...) my life go better independently of their effects on pleasure and desire-fulfillment. In the next two parts, I relate violation pornography to each component of flourishing. Thus, in the second part, I explore whether violation pornography promotes or hinders pleasure. In the third part I explore whether pornography is compatible with these objective-list elements, particularly virtue. (shrink)

Experientialist accounts of wellbeing are those accounts of wellbeing that subscribe to the experience requirement. Typically, these accounts are hedonistic. In this article I present the claim that hedonism is not the most plausible experientialist account of wellbeing. The value of experience should not be understood as being limited to pleasure, and as such, the most plausible experientialist account of wellbeing is pluralistic, not hedonistic. In support of this claim, I argue first that pleasure should not be understood as a (...) broad term to describe valuable experiences generally. I then analyze responses to the main argument against a monistic view on the value of experience: the philosophy of swine objection. I argue that such responses deviate from the central hedonistic view that only pleasure and pain matter for wellbeing. I then argue that the argument can be avoided on a pluralistic account, and formulate a plausible candidate for an account of pluralistic experientialism, in which, besides pleasure, non-hedonic aspects of experience like novelty, compassion, and aesthetic value also contribute to wellbeing. (shrink)

Starting from a distinction between intrinsic and final value, I explore the implications of the supervenience of final value on extrinsic properties regarding moral status. I make a case for ‘extrinsic moral status’ based on ‘extrinsic final value’. I show that the assumption of ‘moral individualism’, that moral status supervenes merely on intrinsic properties, is misguided, and results from a conflation of intrinsic with final value. I argue that at least one extrinsic property, namely vulnerability, can be the basis of (...) both final value and moral status, and that dependence on such extrinsic properties is compatible with the requirement of agent-neutrality. (shrink)

[This is the penultimate version, please send me an email for the final version]. Some sensations are pleasant, some unpleasant, and some are neither. Furthermore, those that are pleasant or unpleasant are so to different degrees. In this essay, I want to explore what kind of a difference is the difference between these three kinds of sensations. I will develop a comprehensive three-level account of sensory pleasure that is simultaneously adverbialist, functionalist and is also a version of a satisfied experiential-desire (...) account. (shrink)

Some philosophers have claimed that pleasures and pains are characterized by their particular or . Most contemporary writers reject this view: they hold that hedonic states have nothing in common except being liked or disliked (alternatively: pursued or avoided) for their own sake. In this article, I argue that the hedonic tone view has been dismissed too quickly: there is no clear introspective or scientific evidence that pleasures do not share a phenomenal quality. I also argue that analysing hedonic states (...) in terms of liking or wanting is implausible. If it is correct that pleasures and pains are not united by any particular hedonic tone, we should instead simply conclude that there are several different hedonic tones. This pluralistic understanding of the hedonic tone view has generally been overlooked in the literature, but appears to be fairly plausible as a philosophical account of pleasure and pain. (shrink)

This dissertation is structured in such a way as to gradually home in on the true theory of welfare. I start with the whole field of possible theories of welfare and then proceed by narrowing down the options in a series of steps. The first step, undertaken in chapter 2, is to argue that the true theory of welfare must be what I call a partly response independent theory. First I reject the entirely response independent theories because there are widely-shared (...) intuitions suggesting that some psychological responses are indeed relevant to welfare. Then I reject the entirely response dependent theories because there are other central intuitions suggesting that our welfare is not determined solely by our psychological responses. Thus I reach the preliminary conclusion that welfare must involve some response independent (or objective) component. The next step is to consider the most promising theories in the partly response independent category. In particular, I formulate, refine and ultimately reject what seem to be the main monistic theories that have been proposed in this category. In chapter 4, I reject the Adjusted-Enjoyment Theories of Welfare because they cannot account for the claim that a life containing no pleasure or pain can still contain a positive amount of welfare (e.g. if it’s a particularly successful life). Then in chapters 5-7, I discuss Desire Satisfaction theories of welfare. I argue that even the most promising of these theories – e.g. Worthiness Adjusted Desire Satisfactionism – are problematic because they cannot accommodate the claim that a life containing no success with respect to worthwhile projects can still contain a positive amount of welfare (e.g. if it’s a particularly pleasant life). Finally, I suggest that in order to accommodate the intuitions that led to the rejection of all these other theories of welfare, what is needed is a multi-component theory. In the final chapter, I formulate a multi-component theory that is particularly promising. Not only does it avoid the problems of the monistic theories discussed earlier, but, by incorporating a number of novel mathematical devices, it avoids problems that undermine several other initially promising multi-component theories of welfare. (shrink)

This paper argues against hedonistic theories of happiness. First, hedonism is too inclusive: many pleasures cannot plausibly be construed as constitutive of happiness. Second, any credible theory must count either attitudes of life satisfaction, affective states such as mood, or both as constituents of happiness; yet neither sort of state reduces to pleasure. Hedonism errs in its attempt to reduce happiness, which is at least partly dispositional, to purely episodic experiential states. The dispositionality of happiness also undermines weakened nonreductive forms (...) of hedonism, as some happiness-constitutive states are not pleasures in any sense. Moreover, these states can apparently fail to exhibit the usual hedonic properties; sadness, for instance, can sometimes be pleasant. Finally, the nonhedonistic accounts are adequate if not superior on grounds of practical and theoretical utility, quite apart from their superior conformity to the folk notion of happiness. (shrink)

In the recent well-being literature, various theory-free accounts of well-being have been proposed to ground informative evaluations of policies’ welfare implications without relying on any specifi...

A lot of qualitatively very different sensations can be pleasant or unpleasant. The Felt-Quality Views that conceive of sensory affect as having an introspectively available common phenomenology or qualitative character face the “heterogeneity problem” of specifying what that qualitative common phenomenology is. In contrast, according to the Attitudinal Views, what is common to all pleasant or unpleasant sensations is that they are all “wanted” or “unwanted” in a certain sort of way. The commonality is explained not on the basis of (...) phenomenology but by a common mental, usually some sort of conative, attitude toward the sensation. Here I criticize both views and offer an alternative framework that combines what is right in both while avoiding their unintuitive commitments. The result is the reductive (psychofunctionalist) adverbial sensory modification view of pleasure and displeasure. (shrink)

Compare your pain when immersing your hand in freezing water and your pleasure when you taste your favourite wine. The relationship seems obvious. Your pain experience is unpleasant, aversive, negative, and bad. Your experience of the wine is pleasant, attractive, positive, and good. Pain and pleasure are straightforwardly opposites. Or that, at any rate, can seem beyond doubt, and to leave little more to be said. But, in fact, it is not beyond doubt. And, true or false, it leaves a (...) good deal more to be said: about the nature of sensory affect; its relations to perception, motivation, and rationality; its value; and the mechanisms underlying it. Much is said about these matters in the contributions that follow. Here, in this introductory essay, we map the dialectical landscape and locate our contributors’ papers within it. (shrink)

In traditional decision theory, utility is regarded as a mathematical representation of preferences to be inferred from agents hedonic experiences. Some go as far as to contend that utility is literally computed by specific neural areas and urge economists to complement or substitute their notion of utility with some neuro-psychological construct. In this paper, I distinguish three notions of utility that are frequently mentioned in debates about decision theory and examine some critical issues regarding their definition and measurability. Moreover, I (...) provide various empirical and conceptual reasons to doubt that economists should base decision theoretic analyses on some neuro-psychological notion of utility. (shrink)

Se expone cr.ticamente una interpretación reciente del hedonismo epic.reo, según la cual este podr.a comprenderse como hedonismo actitudinal. Esta lectura conlleva ciertas tensiones internas y descuida el sentido fundamental del epicure.smo, esto es, que se trata de una teor.a del bienestar prudencial. Al examinar solo este aspecto, se omiten ciertos problemas secundarios, como la legitimidad de interpretar de manera actitudinal una doctrina asentada en el atomismo.

Pleasure, in the inclusive usages most important in moral psychology, ethical theory, and the studies of mind, includes all joy and gladness — all our feeling good, or happy. It is often contrasted with similarly inclusive pain, or suffering, which is similarly thought of as including all our feeling bad. Contemporary psychology similarly distinguishes between positive affect and negative affect.[1..

RESUMEN Se expone críticamente una interpretación reciente del hedonismo epicúreo, según la cual este podría comprenderse como hedonismo actitudinal. Esta lectura conlleva ciertas tensiones internas y descuida el sentido fundamental del epicureismo, esto es, que se trata de una teoría del bienestar prudencial. Al examinar solo este aspecto, se omiten ciertos problemas secundarios, como la legitimidad de interpretar de manera actitudinal una doctrina asentada en el atomismo. ABSTRACT The paper offers a critical review of a recent interpretation of Epicurean hedonism, (...) according to which the latter could be understood as an attitudinal hedonism. Such reading implies certain internal tensions and neglects the fundamental meaning of Epicureanism as a theory of prudential well-being. By focusing exclusively on one aspect, that reading omits certain secondary issues, such as the legitimacy of an attitudinal interpretation of a doctrine grounded in atomism. (shrink)

I aim to show that (i) there are good ways to argue about what has intrinsic value; and (ii) good ethical arguments needn't make ethical assumptions. I support (i) and(ii) by rebutting direct attacks, by discussing nine plausible ways to argue about intrinsic value, and by arguing for pains intrinsic badness without making ethical assumptions. If (i) and (ii) are correct, then ethical theory has more resources than many philosophers have thought: empirical evidence, and evidence bearing on intrinsic value. With (...) more resources, we can hope to base all of our moral beliefs on evidence rather than on, say, emotion or mere intuition. (shrink)

The students and colleagues of Roderick Chisholm admired and respected Chisholm. Many were filled not only with admiration, but with affection and gratitude for Chisholm throughout the time we knew him. Even now that he is dead, we continue to wish him well. Under the circumstances, many of us probably think that that wish amounts to no more than this: we hope that things went well for him when he lived; we hope that he had a good life.

A set of arguments shows that either the Repugnant Conclusion and its variants are true or the better-than relation isn't transitive. Which is it? This is the most important question in population ethics. The answer will point the way to Parfit's elusive Theory X.

Social grooming is an important element of social life in terrestrial primates, inducing the putative benefits of β-endorphin stimulation and group harmony and cohesion. Implicit in many analyses of grooming (e.g. biological markets) are the assumptions of costs and benefits to grooming behaviour. Here, in a review of literature, we investigate the proximate costs and benefits of grooming, as a potentially useful explanatory substrate to the well-documented ultimate (functional) explanations. We find that the hedonic benefits of grooming are well documented. (...) However, we did not find convincing evidence for costs. If proximate costs do exist, they might consist of energetic, cognitive, opportunity costs, or some combination of all of these. Nonetheless, there remains the possibility that grooming costs are negligible, or even that the provision of allogrooming is rewarding in itself. We suggest empirical research to resolve this issue. (shrink)

In this thesis I am going to explore the relationship between happiness and imprisonment. I will discuss three theories of happiness - hedonism, life satisfaction theories and emotional states theories. I will argue that the main problem of these theories is that they take happiness to consist only of psychological states. Because of this, I will turn my attention towards those theories that evaluate happiness in terms of how well life is going for the person who is living it. I (...) will argue that my Aristotelian account is the most plausible way to understand the relationship between happiness and imprisonment. This is because it takes into account both the external circumstances and the psychological and emotional life of pnsoners. Through this thesis, I will show that my account of happiness in prison accomplishes three tasks: i) it solves the problems encountered by the other theories of happiness in the evaluation of prisoners' happiness, ii) it does not suffer from two of the main objections to the other objectivist theories of happiness, and iii) it can help us to investigate the happiness of prisoners empirically more accurately. (shrink)

Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues have made an interesting discovery about people's preferences. In several experiments, subjects underwent two separate ordeals of pain, identical except that one ended with an added amount of diminishing pain. When asked to evaluate these episodes after experiencing both, subjects generally preferred the longer episode--even though it had a greater objective quantity of pain. These data raise an ethical question about whether to respect such preferences when acting on another's behalf. John Broome thinks that it (...) is wrong to add extra pain in order to satisfy a person's preference for a better ending. His explanation for this intuition is that pain is intrinsically bad. I argue against this explanation, and raise several doubts about the moral intuition Broome endorses. In doing so, I offer alternate interpretations of Kahneman's data, and show that these each yield different values which are relevant to the ethical question. (shrink)

Several authors have recently advocated a so-called new case for paternalism, according to which empirical findings from distinct decision sciences provide compelling reasons in favour of paternalistic interference. In their view, the available behavioural and neuro-psychological findings enable paternalists to address traditional anti-paternalistic objections and reliably enhance the well-being of their target agents. In this paper, I combine insights from decision-making research, moral philosophy and evidence-based policy evaluation to assess the merits of this case. In particular, I articulate and defend (...) three complementary arguments that, I claim, challenge even the best available calls for such case. In doing so, I identify the main justificatory challenges faced by the new paternalists and explicate the implications of these challenges for the ongoing philosophical debate about the justifiability of paternalistic interference. (shrink)

The issue of the time of intrinsic value focuses on the time during which a state has a level of intrinsic value. This is distinct from the time that desert makes a state of affairs good or bad (time of desert) and the time that statements about desert are true or false (time of the desert statement). To arrive at this conclusion, I assumed that intrinsic value is a function of desert-adjusted well-being. Both desert and well-being should be understood as (...) contemporaneous properties that occur at a particular moment in time. Hence, the time of intrinsic value is a point in time since the relevant property occurs at a point, albeit one that refers to the past. This result is significant because it relates to the dual-ledger account of intrinsic value. On one version of this account, desert is treated as similar to credits and well-being as similar to debits. It thus presents a tidy and intuitively appealing account of intrinsic value at a time and across times and persons. (shrink)