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.
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
So, is the ‘pleasure of truth’ somehow more meaningful than the pleasure provided by the machine? Objectively, the pleasure from the machine is greater than that from the truth, which suggests that there’s something more than just pleasure. Doesn’t this contradict the views of meta-ethical hedonism?
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.
So, is the ‘pleasure of truth’ somehow more meaningful than the pleasure provided by the machine? Objectively, the pleasure from the machine is greater than that from the truth, which suggests that there’s something more than just pleasure. Doesn’t this contradict the views of meta-ethical hedonism?