I am a meta-ethical hedonist, yet I can’t accept your framing in the second sentence—“In particular, they say, we have a certain type of direct epistemic access to the goodness of pleasure and the badness of pain – access that we don’t have to other candidate values.” I don’t elevate pleasure/pain above other values, I reduce other values to pleasure/pain. If “truth” is something that keeps people from entering the pleasure machine, that is because they value the pleasure of truth more than their estimate of the pleasure derivable by the machine plus the pain of committing oneself to a lie. Due to such a significant framing issue so early on, I decided to not read further as it seems you are not addressing my version of hedonism. But I appreciate your efforts regardless! Keep up the good work.
I am a meta-ethical hedonist, yet I can’t accept your framing in the second sentence—“In particular, they say, we have a certain type of direct epistemic access to the goodness of pleasure and the badness of pain – access that we don’t have to other candidate values.” I don’t elevate pleasure/pain above other values, I reduce other values to pleasure/pain. If “truth” is something that keeps people from entering the pleasure machine, that is because they value the pleasure of truth more than their estimate of the pleasure derivable by the machine plus the pain of committing oneself to a lie. Due to such a significant framing issue so early on, I decided to not read further as it seems you are not addressing my version of hedonism. But I appreciate your efforts regardless! Keep up the good work.