Non-Fungible Hedonism
A subtle improvement, as far as it goes?
My previous post explained how the strongest objection to totalism can be at least partly mitigated once we mark significance with attitudes. I’m now wondering whether a similar move could help against the strongest objection to hedonism: that equally-pleasant goods aren’t all fungible. We shouldn’t be indifferent to the possibility of our loved ones being secretly replaced by robots, for example.
Hedonism is most naturally conceived as holding that, at least within an individual life, different pleasures are fungible. What matters (for you) is just the aggregate pleasure you experience, not what particular experiences you have. There is no “separateness of pleasures”, on the orthodox account.
But we could deny this. On a pluralist (objective list) account of well-being, it’s very natural to think that the different types of goods are non-fungible, such that an overall worthwhile trade-off may still occasion some regret. (Compare Parfit’s pro tanto regret that he didn’t pursue poetry, despite being overall happy with his life of philosophy.)
We could imagine a non-fungible hedonist who claims that sufficiently qualitatively distinct kinds of pleasures constitute distinct final goods. To accommodate Parfit’s regret, for example, they may claim that the pleasures of philosophy and of poetry are normatively distinct (or worth desiring separately, not just as two possible means to one and the same end of generic pleasure).
Likewise, experiences of family life, or of loving relationships, may be valued separately from other kinds of desirable experiences. Further, experiences of specific relationships with particular people may be valued separately from those of other relationships. That seems important, for not viewing your loved ones as entirely replaceable.
But I think it still doesn’t go far enough. Even the “non-fungible” hedonist still only values the subjective experience, and not the reality underlying it. So any other sufficiently reliable means to securing that same qualitative experience (from a convincing robot-swap to a full-blown experience machine) will be normatively indistinguishable from maintaining a loving relationship, as far as hedonism is concerned. That seems a pretty objectionable degree of fungibility, even from the most “non-fungible” form of hedonism we can find.1
In short: non-fungible hedonism can allow that something is lost if a happy marriage is “replaced” with another, noticeably different (but equally happy) one. But nothing is lost if you and your spouse are both put in (isolated) experience machines, and never interact again, so long as your respective streams of conscious experience are unaffected by the transition. And that seems very wrong to me. For all the challenges associated with value pluralism, I literally cannot believe that there would be nothing regrettable about never again truly interacting with your loved ones.
Unless you can further individuate experiences, not just by their subjective qualitative character, but also by their external causes. But there seems no motivation internal to hedonism for doing that.
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?
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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 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.