"Pain and Pleasure in Philosophy" by Joseph Mendola | CAS Inquire

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A recording of the talk "Pain and Pleasure in Philosophy" by Joseph Mendola for CAS Inquire.

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[00:00:03.840]Hello, and welcome to the College of Arts and Sciences
[00:00:07.560]Inquire Lecture Series.
[00:00:09.330]Tonight's talk, "Pain and Pleasure in Philosophy".
[00:00:13.280]And we'll begin after this short message from Dean Button.
[00:00:20.130]Welcome to the second year of CAS Inquire.
[00:00:23.280]This is sure to be an exciting series
[00:00:24.920]with the theme pleasure and pain.
[00:00:27.060]My apologies for not being with you in person this evening,
[00:00:29.700]however, I look forward
[00:00:30.740]to watching the recording of Dr. Mendola's presentation.
[00:00:34.270]Given the essential role that pleasure and pain has had
[00:00:37.020]in the history of human consciousness
[00:00:38.790]and in our reflection on all of life,
[00:00:40.940]it is fitting that this year's series
[00:00:42.560]begins with a philosophical discussion
[00:00:44.930]of the very nature of pleasure and pain
[00:00:46.760]and its role in the good life.
[00:00:48.890]The CAS Inquire program is such a wonderful embodiment
[00:00:51.300]of the identity and mission
[00:00:52.720]of the College of Arts and Sciences.
[00:00:54.520]The CAS Inquire program engages important and timely ideas
[00:00:58.080]through an interactive and multi disciplinary series
[00:01:01.010]of public lectures and small seminars
[00:01:03.470]exploring the emerging topics of broad societal interests.
[00:01:07.240]CAS Inquire students play a leadership role
[00:01:09.620]in planning, organizing and facilitating the program,
[00:01:12.690]co-creating their educational experience in the process.
[00:01:16.010]Enjoy today's presentation and discussion
[00:01:18.020]and I look forward to seeing you all in person
[00:01:19.940]at the second presentation of the series
[00:01:21.880]on October 5th with Dr. Casey Kelly.
[00:01:27.240]Hi, I'm Dr. Taylor Livingston,
[00:01:29.170]and I'm the director of the Inquire program.
[00:01:32.100]Thank you to Dean Button for the message
[00:01:34.020]and thank you all for coming this evening
[00:01:36.270]and thank you to those who are joining us via Zoom.
[00:01:39.800]It's the first installment
[00:01:41.000]of this year's Inquire lecture series
[00:01:42.890]with the topic pleasure and pain.
[00:01:45.060]And although the topic for this series
[00:01:47.100]was chosen before the global pandemic,
[00:01:49.580]it is particularly apt.
[00:01:51.280]For example, I'm sure we've all experienced the pleasure
[00:01:54.940]at the beginning of getting to work from home in our pajamas
[00:01:59.200]and the pain
[00:02:00.350]as it's continued to work from home in our pajamas,
[00:02:04.730]and especially if you have loved ones or small children
[00:02:07.990]who are also joining you and working from home.
[00:02:11.250]Tonight's lecture by Dr. Joseph Mendola
[00:02:13.710]who's a professor of philosophy
[00:02:15.940]introduces our series
[00:02:17.670]through the exploration of pain and pleasure
[00:02:20.280]as philosophical concepts.
[00:02:22.320]Dr. Mendola is the author of several books
[00:02:25.150]including "Human Thought", "Goodness and Justice",
[00:02:28.350]and most recently, "Experience and Possibility".
[00:02:31.610]After his talk,
[00:02:32.530]Dr. Mendola will take questions from the audience,
[00:02:35.770]you can please raise your hand if you're in person
[00:02:38.700]and someone will bring a microphone to you.
[00:02:40.700]If you're joining us via Zoom,
[00:02:43.100]you can submit questions through the Q&A function
[00:02:46.000]and I will ask them on your behalf.
[00:02:49.790]And I hope that you will all join me
[00:02:52.370]in welcoming Dr. Joseph Mendola.
[00:03:05.230]Thank you for coming on this beautiful day.
[00:03:08.760]A couple of preliminary points before I begin,
[00:03:11.810]it seemed like it was a good idea
[00:03:14.010]to give the CAS Inquire students an introduction
[00:03:18.790]to some of the questions in the history of philosophy.
[00:03:21.550]And some of the answers
[00:03:22.580]they received in the history of philosophy
[00:03:24.380]just so they could have
[00:03:25.260]these sort of framework questions in mind
[00:03:27.590]to think about over the course of the series.
[00:03:30.110]So I'm not really gonna be introducing
[00:03:31.930]my idiosyncratic views about pleasure and pain
[00:03:34.760]and its role in the good life here,
[00:03:36.020]but more giving people
[00:03:37.720]a sense of the questions they've been asked,
[00:03:40.160]the range of answers they've been given
[00:03:41.930]in the history of philosophy,
[00:03:43.660]and some resources to think about them
[00:03:46.110]as you move through the series.
[00:03:49.190]The other point to make
[00:03:50.080]is I'm gonna be giving you a few examples
[00:03:53.340]as I go through different philosophers
[00:03:55.540]who've had different views on these topics
[00:03:57.760]that you might look into.
[00:03:59.420]And there's a very well developed discussion of these topics
[00:04:03.740]across all the different traditions of philosophy,
[00:04:08.230]very developed Chinese tradition,
[00:04:10.040]very developed Indian tradition, for instance,
[00:04:12.610]but I'm gonna give you examples
[00:04:14.090]from the tradition I know best
[00:04:15.500]which is the Western tradition
[00:04:16.780]beginning with Plato and Aristotle and so forth.
[00:04:19.840]Anyway, that's the preliminaries.
[00:04:22.620]There are really two clusters of questions
[00:04:24.223]that we're gonna talk about
[00:04:25.730]as indicated I think at the title for this,
[00:04:28.050]there's questions about the nature of pleasure and pain
[00:04:31.154]that have been asked in the traditions,
[00:04:32.900]and there's questions about the role of pleasure and pain
[00:04:36.570]in the good life and ethics.
[00:04:38.070]And I'm gonna concentrate
[00:04:39.220]on the first cluster of questions at the beginning
[00:04:41.470]and then move on to the second cluster.
[00:04:45.050]So the first cluster is,
[00:04:46.270]what is the nature of pleasure and pain?
[00:04:48.610]What is the nature of pleasure and pain?
[00:04:50.390]And there's a series of different questions
[00:04:52.260]we can ask about this that have been asked in the tradition
[00:04:54.660]that focus on different aspects of the nature
[00:04:57.730]and also different answers that have been given
[00:05:00.120]in each of those sub questions.
[00:05:03.100]And the first sub question
[00:05:05.110]is really about the general nature, you could say,
[00:05:07.870]of pleasure and pain.
[00:05:09.950]And here, before we even get into the meat of it,
[00:05:12.850]there are two sort of preliminary points
[00:05:14.740]to bear in mind I think that are worth thinking about.
[00:05:20.390]One issue, for instance,
[00:05:21.700]if we talk about the nature of pleasure,
[00:05:23.540]the general nature of pleasure,
[00:05:25.290]and we find that people disagree about what pleasure is.
[00:05:29.240]Sometimes you may suspect that the disagreement
[00:05:31.870]is just about what the word means, right?
[00:05:35.020]Maybe the word is ambiguous and it's used,
[00:05:37.690]it has sort of different meanings
[00:05:39.130]and people who are disagreeing
[00:05:40.500]are really just focusing on one meaning or another,
[00:05:43.470]or maybe the word has a sort of single meaning
[00:05:46.930]and people just disagree about what the meaning is.
[00:05:49.500]So the disputes or some of the disputes
[00:05:51.400]might just be about words.
[00:05:53.740]On the other hand,
[00:05:55.710]the disputes or some of the disputes about what pleasure is,
[00:05:58.790]what the general nature of pleasure is,
[00:06:01.090]might be disputes about something out there in the world,
[00:06:03.570]pleasure.
[00:06:04.890]And it's disagreements
[00:06:06.110]about what that thing out in the world is.
[00:06:08.130]So there could be disagreements about the words
[00:06:11.140]or there could be disagreements about the things.
[00:06:13.720]I'm just gonna presume that the disagreements
[00:06:16.280]that we're gonna be talking about
[00:06:17.570]are disagreements about this thing,
[00:06:19.120]pleasure in the world and not just about the words.
[00:06:21.850]But maybe I'm oversimplifying
[00:06:23.540]so you wanna bear that in mind as we go through.
[00:06:26.420]Second sort of preliminary point is this,
[00:06:31.950]you could treat pain and pleasure in very different ways.
[00:06:35.300]It might be that pain and pleasure
[00:06:37.120]are very different kinds of phenomena
[00:06:39.690]or they might be really very similar in certain ways
[00:06:43.970]so that you could easily
[00:06:45.310]talk about them both at the same time.
[00:06:47.920]There certainly have been philosophers
[00:06:49.620]who think they're very different kinds of cases.
[00:06:51.770]For instance, some people say,
[00:06:54.340]pain is a sensation and pleasure is not a sensation.
[00:06:58.810]They say this because they think for instance,
[00:07:01.530]there seemed to be specific
[00:07:03.010]neuro sensory receptors called nociceptors
[00:07:06.020]involved in our experience of pain,
[00:07:08.250]but there's no obvious equivalent sensory receptor cells
[00:07:11.370]involved in our experience of pleasure.
[00:07:13.310]So maybe these are really different phenomena,
[00:07:16.450]pain and pleasure,
[00:07:17.283]it's really a very disjunctive topic, it's not one topic.
[00:07:21.070]But again, I'm gonna simplify things
[00:07:23.140]and just presume that they're more or less the same
[00:07:26.480]and I'm gonna just talk mostly about the case of pleasure.
[00:07:29.900]So we've got two simplifying assumptions
[00:07:33.171]before we even begin,
[00:07:35.060]one is that pain and pleasure can be treated similarly,
[00:07:37.890]I'm gonna focus on pleasure,
[00:07:39.870]and the other is that we're really talking
[00:07:41.870]about things out in the world
[00:07:43.380]and not just about the words and ambiguities in the words.
[00:07:46.150]So, with those presumptions,
[00:07:48.980]here's our first sort of real meaty question
[00:07:52.470]about the nature of pain.
[00:07:55.440]And there are three sort of traditions
[00:07:57.560]that differ in their response,
[00:07:59.400]their answer to this general question
[00:08:01.320]of what's the general nature of pleasure
[00:08:03.550]that I'm gonna focus on first.
[00:08:06.500]Basically, some people say pleasure is a sensation.
[00:08:10.730]There's another tradition which says,
[00:08:12.320]no, pleasure is not a sensation, it's an attitude,
[00:08:15.140]we're gonna talk about what that means,
[00:08:17.480]and then there's a third everything else sort of tradition
[00:08:21.920]that might think that pleasure is sort of a mixture
[00:08:25.290]in various ways of attitudes or sensations
[00:08:27.780]or maybe it's complex in other ways.
[00:08:30.110]So we're gonna talk about three different very broad answers
[00:08:33.090]to the question of what's the general nature of pleasure.
[00:08:36.140]And I'm gonna start out with a sensation tradition.
[00:08:40.060]So, there's a long tradition of philosophers
[00:08:43.840]including famous people
[00:08:45.540]like John Locke, David Hume, Jeremy Bentham
[00:08:49.440]who've claimed that pleasure
[00:08:50.740]is a specific sort of sensation.
[00:08:54.910]Sensations are such things as our experience of blue
[00:08:58.630]or the taste of a pineapple
[00:09:00.100]that we in some sense get through our senses,
[00:09:03.340]and they're distinguished by how they feel.
[00:09:05.450]And the experience of a pineapple's taste
[00:09:09.760]is very different from the experience of seeing blue.
[00:09:13.330]And some people have thought
[00:09:14.860]that there's an experience of pleasure
[00:09:17.240]that's quite analogous to those cases
[00:09:19.330]which is an essential part of what pleasure is.
[00:09:23.180]They think that pleasure is a certain kind of sensation
[00:09:26.550]and it has a characteristic sensory feel.
[00:09:29.440]So that's the sensation tradition.
[00:09:32.990]Even when people agree that pleasure is a sensation,
[00:09:37.290]and actually, here's a place
[00:09:38.680]where that difference between pain and pleasure may show
[00:09:41.140]'cause as I said,
[00:09:42.240]more people think pain is a sensation
[00:09:44.173]than think pleasure is, but I'm ignoring that.
[00:09:47.700]Even when people agree that pleasure is a sensation,
[00:09:51.800]there's lots to disagree about.
[00:09:54.640]They can disagree about the nature of the sensation
[00:09:57.320]or they can disagree about how unified the sensation is.
[00:10:00.380]So let me give you some examples of that.
[00:10:03.120]Even if you're in the sensation tradition,
[00:10:05.110]you think pleasure is a sensation,
[00:10:06.980]here's some questions inside that big answer to think about.
[00:10:12.670]Bentham, Jeremy Bentham, for instance,
[00:10:15.010]sort of notoriously thought
[00:10:17.630]that there's one type of sensation
[00:10:21.532]that's what's pleasure is.
[00:10:23.130]And then it comes in numerical units
[00:10:25.310]that some people have called hedons.
[00:10:28.410]And that there's a certain numerical way
[00:10:31.810]in which you can compare the pleasures of different people.
[00:10:36.230]And that for instance,
[00:10:37.900]a sort of less intense pleasure that lasts longer
[00:10:41.710]can be the same in total hedon amount
[00:10:45.130]as a more intense pleasure that lasts a shorter period.
[00:10:49.460]And so that you can actually theoretically assign quantities
[00:10:53.670]to the amount of hedons of pleasure
[00:10:55.710]that different people have and compare that.
[00:10:57.790]So I have 23 and somebody else has 45.
[00:11:01.490]So that's one view if you think pleasure is of sensation,
[00:11:04.370]maybe it's numerically arithmatizable in that way.
[00:11:08.660]On the other hand to say the least,
[00:11:10.530]this is a controversial view
[00:11:12.250]and many people who think sensation is a pleasure
[00:11:14.660]think it's not at all like something
[00:11:17.070]with that kind of arithmetical structure.
[00:11:19.640]For instance, they may think
[00:11:20.836]there are very different kinds of pleasures
[00:11:23.000]that are all sensations that differ even in their feeling
[00:11:26.340]and not just in their numerical intensity.
[00:11:29.210]Maybe the pleasure,
[00:11:31.080]the sensation pleasure you get from reading poetry
[00:11:34.080]or the sensation pleasure you get from scratching an itch
[00:11:38.110]is a different kind of sensation in some way
[00:11:42.778]even though it's a sensation in both instances.
[00:11:46.340]Here's one kind of example of an analogy of that case,
[00:11:51.190]there's lots of different reds,
[00:11:53.800]there's scarlet and there's fire engine red
[00:11:56.380]and various other reds you could name.
[00:11:58.720]And our experiences of those different reds
[00:12:00.810]are somewhat different,
[00:12:01.820]but they're all experiences of red.
[00:12:04.030]So maybe the experiences
[00:12:05.790]of different kinds of pleasures sensations are like that,
[00:12:09.720]they are as similar as all reds
[00:12:12.250]but they're yet different the way different reds are
[00:12:14.700]in their feel or their experience.
[00:12:16.840]Or maybe the sensations of pleasure are real
[00:12:20.450]and present in all cases and essential to what pleasure is,
[00:12:24.800]but the differences between the sensations of pleasures
[00:12:27.720]are much bigger and more significant
[00:12:30.330]than the differences between different kinds of reds.
[00:12:33.200]So those are all a bunch of questions you can think about
[00:12:35.910]if you think pleasure is a sensation,
[00:12:37.790]that's one big view, pleasure is a sensation,
[00:12:41.090]and then different views within it.
[00:12:43.750]Now let's look at another very contrasting tradition,
[00:12:47.320]that's the attitude tradition.
[00:12:50.320]The philosophers in the attitude tradition
[00:12:52.510]think basically pleasure is not a sensation,
[00:12:55.780]it's rather a certain kind of attitude.
[00:12:57.800]And let me explain what that idea is
[00:12:59.930]before coming back to the case of pleasure.
[00:13:04.870]Consider someone who believes
[00:13:06.540]that two plus two is equal to four
[00:13:09.470]or that it's gonna rain tomorrow, rain on Friday,
[00:13:13.250]they have two of what are called
[00:13:15.090]propositional attitudes by philosophers,
[00:13:18.200]that was terminology introduced by Bertrand Russell,
[00:13:21.110]you may have heard of.
[00:13:23.360]And there are two propositions there
[00:13:24.890]that two plus two is equal to four
[00:13:27.530]and that it will rain on Friday.
[00:13:29.940]And in both instances,
[00:13:31.110]I mention there's a relation of belief
[00:13:33.510]that somebody has to those propositions.
[00:13:35.790]So that's a propositional attitude,
[00:13:37.160]it's a belief whose object is a proposition.
[00:13:40.990]And there are other kinds of propositional attitudes,
[00:13:43.710]it's not just believing that such and such is the case,
[00:13:46.060]but there's hoping that such and such is the case
[00:13:48.380]and desiring that such and such is the case.
[00:13:51.100]So there are different kinds of psychological attitudes
[00:13:53.330]you can have
[00:13:54.357]that involve different
[00:13:55.190]psychological relations to propositions.
[00:13:58.870]There are also other kinds of psychological relations
[00:14:01.530]to things that aren't propositions
[00:14:03.030]like when you perceive something like you perceive the door,
[00:14:05.970]there's a kind of psychological relation of perceiving
[00:14:08.890]that you have to the door.
[00:14:11.260]In all those cases, there's a kind of relation
[00:14:13.730]and then an object of the relation
[00:14:16.787]that the person with the attitude
[00:14:17.990]is related to in a certain way.
[00:14:20.910]You believe a proposition, you see the door.
[00:14:25.890]And what's true in the attitude tradition
[00:14:29.090]of thinking about pleasure is,
[00:14:30.920]pleasure is a certain kind of psychological attitude,
[00:14:34.750]sorta kind of like perceiving, sorta kinda like believing,
[00:14:38.340]sorta kind of like desiring
[00:14:40.340]that you can have towards different objects,
[00:14:43.030]maybe different propositions
[00:14:44.450]or different things in the world.
[00:14:46.750]So people in the attitude tradition about pleasure,
[00:14:49.220]they say, pleasure is a certain attitude,
[00:14:53.820]at least in the simplest case, call it enjoyment,
[00:14:56.840]call it enjoyment as one of them does,
[00:14:58.610]one of the people in this tradition does.
[00:15:01.740]You can enjoy a meal,
[00:15:04.373]you can enjoy that something's occurred,
[00:15:06.740]you can enjoy that you're doing a certain thing.
[00:15:10.910]And these people claim, those are all cases of pleasure,
[00:15:14.400]pleasures are all enjoyments
[00:15:16.100]and they're enjoyments of certain objects,
[00:15:18.120]propositions, facts, things that you do, so forth and so on.
[00:15:22.130]You can enjoy many different things,
[00:15:24.520]many different kinds of things,
[00:15:26.030]all of those count is pleasures,
[00:15:27.720]they count as pleasures
[00:15:28.770]because they're unified
[00:15:29.920]by the sheer of the attitude involved.
[00:15:33.430]Some philosophers who thought that
[00:15:34.963]were in the medieval tradition,
[00:15:36.323]there's a philosopher recently retired at UMass
[00:15:39.870]called Fred Feldman
[00:15:40.750]who's probably the most prominent
[00:15:42.740]contemporary version of that.
[00:15:45.320]But all these people are in the attitude tradition.
[00:15:50.460]The attitude people
[00:15:53.240]obviously differ from the sensation people.
[00:15:56.650]They don't think pleasure is a sensation,
[00:15:58.140]they think it involves an attitude toward another object.
[00:16:00.690]And we'll talk about some of the reasons
[00:16:02.540]to prefer one or the other views in a second
[00:16:04.580]and that general way,
[00:16:06.380]but the attitude people disagree among themselves too
[00:16:09.740]just like the sensation people do.
[00:16:12.050]So they may think
[00:16:13.730]that there's lots of different kinds of attitudes
[00:16:15.960]involved in being pleased in something.
[00:16:18.890]Or they might think, here's another dispute that they have,
[00:16:21.880]they might think the attitude
[00:16:24.509]is so to speak rudimentary kind of attitude
[00:16:27.580]that like squirrels and babies can have,
[00:16:30.560]babies can enjoy things, squirrels can enjoy things.
[00:16:34.040]Whereas other people in this tradition
[00:16:35.780]seem to think that the attitude of enjoyment
[00:16:38.310]that is involved in pleasure
[00:16:40.170]is very fancy and sophisticated.
[00:16:42.920]People say things like,
[00:16:45.620]enjoying something involves being pleased about it
[00:16:48.400]and being pleased about it
[00:16:49.530]involves treating it as a positive reason
[00:16:51.800]to continue action.
[00:16:53.690]That's actually a quote from someone recently.
[00:16:56.800]That would mean you've got to be capable
[00:16:58.920]of thinking of something as a reason through action
[00:17:01.670]to actually have pleasure.
[00:17:03.900]And that would seem to suggest
[00:17:05.340]that squirrels probably can't do something so fancy,
[00:17:08.950]couldn't have pleasures.
[00:17:10.470]So there's a lot of different views
[00:17:12.500]in the attitude tradition.
[00:17:14.700]Obviously if you're in the sensation tradition,
[00:17:17.160]you're likely to think squirrels
[00:17:18.680]can have the sensation of pleasure.
[00:17:20.900]Sensation doesn't seem
[00:17:22.220]like a very sophisticated kind of thing
[00:17:24.280]that you'd need fancy psychological capacities to have.
[00:17:29.230]But if you're in the attitude tradition,
[00:17:30.940]you may well think squirrels and babies
[00:17:33.260]can't enjoy in the relevant fancy sense
[00:17:36.720]and hence they can't feel pleasure in the relevant sense.
[00:17:40.570]Obviously, that's one controversy
[00:17:42.530]which has been distinguish the traditions.
[00:17:46.630]But there are lots of different issues
[00:17:48.610]between the sensation and the attitude tradition.
[00:17:52.430]The main, just to give you some sense
[00:17:54.710]of the main supports for the different sides,
[00:17:58.590]the main intuitive support for the attitude tradition
[00:18:01.450]is it there seem to be some very pleasurable states,
[00:18:05.170]I don't know, like being newly and successfully in love
[00:18:08.670]or having achieved a long sought for goal,
[00:18:12.010]a very pleasant experience state,
[00:18:15.070]very pleasurable situation.
[00:18:17.210]That don't involve essentially
[00:18:18.640]any particular sort of sensation at all, right?
[00:18:24.040]That's something in favor of the attitude tradition.
[00:18:27.300]On the other hand, there's other kinds of cases
[00:18:30.470]which the people who favor the sensation tradition
[00:18:33.070]tend to float up as things that favor their side.
[00:18:38.060]For instance, pleasant moods,
[00:18:40.500]seems like you can be in a very pleasant mood,
[00:18:43.460]but moods don't have objects
[00:18:45.220]in the way enjoyments usually do, right?
[00:18:48.060]What's the object of your mood?
[00:18:49.560]Well, sometimes there's an object,
[00:18:50.920]but just a general mood of pleasure
[00:18:54.310]doesn't seem always to have an object.
[00:18:56.500]Here's another case which they use,
[00:18:58.230]this so called morphine pain,
[00:19:01.870]philosophers call it morphine pain.
[00:19:03.460]It's a situation where because of brain injury
[00:19:06.020]or drugs of certain kinds,
[00:19:07.510]you report that you actually feel the pain
[00:19:10.220]but you don't care.
[00:19:12.560]The caring is the attitude which seems to be absent here
[00:19:17.590]that the attitude tradition would want,
[00:19:19.890]it seems more like it must be a sensation in that case.
[00:19:23.380]So, there's the two main traditions, very conflicting,
[00:19:28.900]pain is a sensation, or sorry, pleasure is a sensation
[00:19:32.240]and pleasure is an attitude.
[00:19:33.810]Some of the reasons
[00:19:34.840]why some people are in one tradition or the other
[00:19:37.780]and some of the disputes inside of the traditions.
[00:19:41.010]There's also a third view,
[00:19:42.820]and maybe in light of the things we've talked about already,
[00:19:46.020]you may be tempted by the third view,
[00:19:48.150]that's a kind of mixed view
[00:19:50.030]or mixed or more complicated view,
[00:19:51.653]call it the mixed tradition.
[00:19:54.690]And people in the mixed tradition say different things
[00:19:57.130]but one thing they sometimes say is,
[00:19:59.075]there are different kinds of pleasures.
[00:20:01.180]Some pleasures are sensations,
[00:20:03.500]some pleasures involve attitudes,
[00:20:05.230]that's one kind of mixed view.
[00:20:08.240]Another thing they sometimes say is,
[00:20:11.060]each pleasure involves a mixture of sensation and attitude.
[00:20:17.180]There's a philosopher Henry Sidgwick who thought,
[00:20:21.640]pleasures all involved the following thing,
[00:20:23.650]there's a certain sensation that you like for its own sake,
[00:20:27.060]doesn't matter what the sensation is,
[00:20:29.010]but if it's a sensation you like for its own sake,
[00:20:31.570]we're gonna be talking
[00:20:32.403]about that particular idea in a minute.
[00:20:34.600]There's a pleasure you like for its own sake,
[00:20:37.200]it's a pleasure, that's what makes it a pleasure.
[00:20:39.560]It's a sensation that you like for its own sake.
[00:20:42.200]So in that view, every time there's a pleasure,
[00:20:44.330]there's a mixture of attitude and sensation involved.
[00:20:47.620]Another philosopher you may have heard of, John Stuart Mill,
[00:20:51.380]thought pleasures are sensations
[00:20:55.210]but they have this important feature
[00:20:57.270]which he called their quality
[00:21:00.130]which is also a very important aspect of them
[00:21:03.170]that's due to attitudes.
[00:21:05.070]So he thought pleasures could differ in quality,
[00:21:08.150]he thought there were high quality and low quality pleasures
[00:21:11.810]and he thought what made pleasures high quality
[00:21:15.040]is that generally
[00:21:15.940]people preferred them even in smaller amounts
[00:21:18.237]and that preference is an attitude.
[00:21:20.120]So that's another way you can mix together
[00:21:23.100]the other two main ideas of the other two traditions.
[00:21:27.000]And finally, there are views like Aristotle's
[00:21:29.770]which are so complicated
[00:21:31.210]it's even hard to fit their relation,
[00:21:34.170]fix their relations to these other traditions.
[00:21:36.700]Aristotle seems to have thought
[00:21:39.050]that there are different kinds of pleasures
[00:21:41.610]that are intrinsic to the successful completion
[00:21:44.380]of different kinds of activities.
[00:21:46.230]So there are different human activities,
[00:21:47.900]there's like eating and reading poetry and winning races.
[00:21:54.600]And he thought, somehow each of those activities
[00:21:58.050]when they're successfully performed,
[00:22:00.440]they have a certain kind of pleasure they generate
[00:22:02.810]that's intrinsic to the activity and can't be pulled out it
[00:22:06.160]the way a sensation could or an attitude.
[00:22:09.030]So there's three complex traditions
[00:22:11.870]of thinking about what pleasure is
[00:22:15.060]and then complex disputes within the tradition.
[00:22:18.510]That's their first question and the three answers.
[00:22:21.840]So just to get an initial sense of where people are,
[00:22:24.590]you're gonna change your view about this
[00:22:26.290]probably over the semester and as you think about it,
[00:22:28.777]I'm just curious to see,
[00:22:30.840]how many people if they have to guess,
[00:22:33.340]pleasure is a sensation.
[00:22:36.080]How many, be brave, be brave,
[00:22:38.890]how many people think pleasure is an attitude?
[00:22:41.960]An attitude?
[00:22:43.960]That's got a few more.
[00:22:45.080]How about a mixed tradition?
[00:22:46.730]Yeah, the mixed tradition is complicated,
[00:22:49.030]you got a lot of maneuvering room in there.
[00:22:50.780]But that's just initial sense of where people are.
[00:22:54.230]Some sensation theorists, some attitude theorists,
[00:22:57.550]some mix theorist here today.
[00:23:01.040]Oh, let's see, where are we?
[00:23:05.680]Okay.
[00:23:11.020]There's like a second main question
[00:23:14.520]in our first cluster of questions
[00:23:16.610]about the nature of pleasure
[00:23:17.690]that I'm gonna skip over really fast.
[00:23:21.110]And that really focused on a lot.
[00:23:22.700]But I wanna mention it to you
[00:23:24.040]just because it involves introducing
[00:23:26.010]this notion or this idea that's gonna be important to us.
[00:23:29.630]The second cluster, the second question you can ask is,
[00:23:34.410]what's the sort of hidden essence of pleasure?
[00:23:38.290]It's like a psychological theory about pleasure.
[00:23:40.700]So for instance, I give you an example,
[00:23:42.450]Plato seems to have thought
[00:23:45.170]that every time you feel a pleasure,
[00:23:46.960]it's only because
[00:23:47.820]first you were in a situation that was like a deficit,
[00:23:50.950]you were thirsty or you were hungry
[00:23:54.220]or you wanted something you didn't have,
[00:23:56.950]and then when the deficit goes away, you feel a pleasure.
[00:24:01.470]He also himself raised some cases
[00:24:04.030]that raised problems through that,
[00:24:05.810]like when you run into some beautiful site
[00:24:07.900]you were not expecting and it's pleasant
[00:24:09.707]but there's no deficit.
[00:24:11.490]So there's a theory,
[00:24:13.020]a theory that appears Plato once had about what pleasure is,
[00:24:16.320]and there are lots of different theories
[00:24:18.040]in the history of philosophy.
[00:24:20.130]I would say nowadays at least,
[00:24:22.180]maybe the philosophers
[00:24:23.013]should sieve those questions to the psychologists
[00:24:25.530]so I'm not gonna go into that cluster of issues,
[00:24:29.680]maybe not everyone would agree with me about that.
[00:24:31.840]But there's one issue of this kind I wanna mention to you
[00:24:34.537]'cause it matters to the rest of what we gotta talk about.
[00:24:38.150]And that's the role of pleasure in motivation.
[00:24:42.000]There's a lot of different roles
[00:24:44.630]pleasure and pain might have in motivation
[00:24:46.870]that are more or less complex.
[00:24:49.160]But there's one very simple idea that's been popular
[00:24:52.330]at some times in the history of philosophy
[00:24:53.663]that I wanna mention.
[00:24:56.020]And that's the idea
[00:24:57.540]that pleasure is the only thing we intrinsically desire,
[00:25:01.240]the only thing we desire for its own sake,
[00:25:03.650]or maybe pleasure in the absence of pain
[00:25:07.030]is the only thing we desire for its own sake.
[00:25:09.840]What's that idea of desiring things for their own sake,
[00:25:14.630]or something being a good,
[00:25:16.370]it's an intrinsic good
[00:25:17.670]that's properly wanted for its own sake?
[00:25:20.200]Well, the basic idea which goes back to Aristotle is this,
[00:25:24.650]we want some things for their own sake
[00:25:28.200]and we want some things
[00:25:29.350]only for the sake of other things we get out of them.
[00:25:34.100]Most people, if they wanna go to the dentist
[00:25:36.720]probably don't wanna go to the dentist for its own sake,
[00:25:40.310]they wanna go to the dentist
[00:25:41.560]for what they're gonna get out of it
[00:25:42.950]which is levitation of their pain
[00:25:45.240]or healthy teeth or something like that.
[00:25:49.160]Maybe even lectures,
[00:25:50.570]I mean, maybe some people go to lectures for their own sake,
[00:25:53.470]but probably most people don't go to lectures
[00:25:55.760]for its own sake,
[00:25:56.800]you go to the lecture for the sake of what you get out of it
[00:25:59.340]one way or the other.
[00:26:00.770]So the idea is,
[00:26:02.620]there's some things you want for their own sake
[00:26:06.140]and some other things you only want
[00:26:07.890]for the sake of what you get out of them.
[00:26:10.720]And what some people have claimed
[00:26:13.000]in the history of philosophy
[00:26:14.640]is that the only thing people want for its own sake
[00:26:19.140]is their own pleasure,
[00:26:20.490]or maybe that and the absence of pain.
[00:26:23.310]So that would mean is everything else that you want,
[00:26:27.270]you want only as a means somehow,
[00:26:29.530]an indirect means to your own pleasure
[00:26:31.850]or the alleviation of your own pain.
[00:26:34.760]This used to be a sort of popular view in philosophy
[00:26:37.360]a couple hundred years,
[00:26:38.210]but nowadays,
[00:26:39.150]most philosophers don't take this very seriously.
[00:26:42.180]And the reason is, it seems like they're these cases
[00:26:45.030]where people do things
[00:26:46.520]like sacrifice themselves for other people
[00:26:50.099]or pursue a project that matters to them
[00:26:53.700]even though it's some cost to their pleasure.
[00:26:56.120]So it doesn't really seem that plausible to claim
[00:26:59.470]that pleasure is the only thing people want
[00:27:03.010]for its own sake.
[00:27:03.980]But that has been a view and I wanna mention that to you
[00:27:07.130]'cause it will matter to us as we go on.
[00:27:08.970]So that was the second cluster.
[00:27:11.780]It's hidden nature of pain and pleasure.
[00:27:14.420]I'm not gonna talk much about that.
[00:27:16.600]But the third question
[00:27:19.100]in our first cluster about the nature of pain
[00:27:21.260]is something I think
[00:27:22.230]which philosophers may still have something to say about
[00:27:25.730]and that I ask you to think about.
[00:27:31.290]Let's see.
[00:27:38.539]We're not doing too badly here.
[00:27:42.530]And this requires a little bit of background too
[00:27:45.030]and I'm gonna ask you a first question
[00:27:47.830]where you stand on this third question,
[00:27:50.860]where there are two answers,
[00:27:51.870]and then I'm gonna ask you a second question
[00:27:53.980]where do you stand
[00:27:54.813]on this third question in the first cluster.
[00:27:59.160]And it's really this second one we're headed to
[00:28:01.100]but let's start with the first one, first sub question.
[00:28:05.430]There are people
[00:28:06.380]that are called dualists in philosophy of mind,
[00:28:08.870]you may be familiar with this,
[00:28:10.150]and there are people called physicalist
[00:28:11.890]or materialists in philosophy.
[00:28:14.040]Philosophy of mind
[00:28:14.873]is the part of philosophy which studies the mind.
[00:28:17.890]So about the mind, some philosophy,
[00:28:20.300]some people are dualists and some people are physicalists.
[00:28:23.260]What does that mean?
[00:28:24.810]Well, basically, it means the physicalist is one who thinks
[00:28:29.630]that all the psychological phenomena there are
[00:28:32.150]are somehow constituted out of the kinds of things
[00:28:35.280]that physics and chemistry study,
[00:28:38.270]neurons and their activity, that sort of thing.
[00:28:41.630]So somehow, all the psychological facts that there are
[00:28:45.500]are ultimately constituted by physical things,
[00:28:47.980]that's the physicalist view.
[00:28:50.774]There's nothing more really to our psychologies
[00:28:54.170]but physical facts.
[00:28:56.940]The dualist.
[00:28:58.440]And there's an early famous physicalist is Thomas Hobbes,
[00:29:02.640]maybe you've heard of him.
[00:29:04.920]The dualist is someone who thinks,
[00:29:08.070]well, no, there are at least some psychological phenomena,
[00:29:13.050]some psychological facts,
[00:29:16.080]which cannot be constituted by the physical.
[00:29:19.340]They're called dualist because they think
[00:29:21.100]there's two basic kinds of things in the universe,
[00:29:24.480]the physical, and some things that are non physical,
[00:29:28.170]including some of these psychological things
[00:29:30.290]which they think can't be built out of the physical.
[00:29:32.870]So these people, the dualists,
[00:29:34.750]Descartes is a famous example of them
[00:29:37.180]from the history of philosophy,
[00:29:39.200]they think that some psychological states that you're in
[00:29:43.500]cannot be delivered by the physical,
[00:29:46.090]there has to be something more to you
[00:29:47.713]that have these states than just physical facts.
[00:29:51.660]Now, one immediate question
[00:29:54.250]is whether we're physicalist or dualists
[00:29:56.500]so let's just get a preliminary thing.
[00:29:57.920]How many physicalists?
[00:30:00.730]How many dualists?
[00:30:01.990]Okay, it's evenly.
[00:30:04.500]But that's not exactly where we need to go,
[00:30:07.250]what we're after is the link
[00:30:08.750]between the relation to that question
[00:30:10.833]and the question about pleasure, all right?
[00:30:14.710]And here's how that link works.
[00:30:16.570]And I'm gonna ask you again
[00:30:18.270]after we talk about the link where you stand on that issue.
[00:30:23.140]Depending on what your view about what pleasure is,
[00:30:26.220]which we've already talked about,
[00:30:27.660]whether it's a sensation or an attitude
[00:30:29.870]or some complex thing,
[00:30:31.980]that may interact with this issue of whether you,
[00:30:35.680]with your dualism or your physicalism in a certain way,
[00:30:38.660]let me explain this.
[00:30:41.910]Descartes thought he was a dualist,
[00:30:45.640]perhaps the most famous dualist,
[00:30:47.800]Descartes thought that propositional attitudes
[00:30:50.630]like enjoying that you wanna race, fancy things like that,
[00:30:54.970]cannot be had by merely physical beings.
[00:30:59.870]He thought that it was the,
[00:31:01.070]so to speak fancy stuff that we do psychologically
[00:31:04.910]that required the dualism.
[00:31:07.910]So obviously, if you have an attitude view
[00:31:11.670]of what pleasure is
[00:31:14.980]and you think like Descartes
[00:31:17.370]that attitudes require the dualism,
[00:31:21.040]you're gonna think
[00:31:22.253]that pleasure involves resources that the dualist deploy,
[00:31:26.990]you're gonna think that a physical thing,
[00:31:29.930]it's a purely physical thing, it couldn't feel pleasure,
[00:31:33.570]perhaps 'cause it can't have an attitude
[00:31:35.270]which is what pleasure is.
[00:31:37.660]But on the other hand,
[00:31:38.890]maybe you think, pleasure is a sensation.
[00:31:43.240]Well, how does that interact with the dualism?
[00:31:45.720]Well, it depends on the form of the dualism.
[00:31:48.550]Descartes seems to have thought
[00:31:50.640]that sensations were things which didn't require dualism,
[00:31:54.930]the physical things could have sensations.
[00:31:57.360]But here's the interesting thing.
[00:31:59.530]I don't know those of you who are dualist why you're dualist
[00:32:02.730]but most of the contemporary dualist who are dualists
[00:32:06.460]are dualists not because they think
[00:32:08.100]the physical can't do fancy things
[00:32:09.880]like believe and desire and talk,
[00:32:13.100]which is what Descartes thought,
[00:32:14.850]they think that physical things
[00:32:18.030]can't have sensations of a certain kind.
[00:32:22.940]So I wanna talk about that aspect of contemporary dualism,
[00:32:26.650]the more contemporary form of why they think that
[00:32:29.400]and how that relates to this issue
[00:32:31.070]about the whether they can feel pleasure,
[00:32:34.478]whether creatures that are physical can feel pleasure.
[00:32:38.930]So the most contemporary dualist,
[00:32:41.960]I'm motivated by cases like this,
[00:32:45.200]consider what it's like to experience pleasure
[00:32:48.420]or consider what it's like to taste a pineapple
[00:32:51.950]or consider what it's like to see blue.
[00:32:55.040]The what it's like, focus on that.
[00:32:58.190]And they say things like this, they say these dualist,
[00:33:02.223]well, it's let's like something to be you now, right?
[00:33:04.970]To experience what you experience now.
[00:33:06.670]And when you have different experiences,
[00:33:08.570]when you taste a pineapple or you see blue,
[00:33:10.730]there's a difference in the what it's like to be you.
[00:33:13.410]It's a crucial part of what those sensations are.
[00:33:16.770]But they say things like,
[00:33:18.310]but it's not like anything to be this podium presumably,
[00:33:21.960]it's like something to be you
[00:33:24.230]probably like something to be a squirrel,
[00:33:26.980]not like anything to be this podium.
[00:33:29.670]And the what it's like
[00:33:31.020]involves these nature of these sensations you experience
[00:33:35.780]and what it's like to experience them.
[00:33:37.890]This is the topic
[00:33:39.010]instead of the vexed topic of consciousness,
[00:33:41.390]philosophers called the topic of phenomenal consciousness,
[00:33:44.150]the topic of qualia if you've heard that jargon,
[00:33:47.040]but it doesn't matter.
[00:33:49.520]Contemporary dualist are often dualist because they think
[00:33:52.860]the physical can't deliver the what it's like.
[00:33:55.970]And they use arguments like this
[00:33:57.620]to try to convince you of that.
[00:33:59.670]They claim that you could have
[00:34:02.610]an absolutely exact physical duplicate,
[00:34:05.840]meaning something that's absolutely identical to you
[00:34:09.100]in physical ways
[00:34:11.330]down to the motion of the tiniest particle
[00:34:13.250]making up your neurons.
[00:34:15.500]And they claim such a thing, a physical duplicate of you,
[00:34:20.030]could yet be what they call sometimes
[00:34:22.470]a philosophical zombie,
[00:34:23.860]have you heard that sort of jargon?
[00:34:26.440]Or a qualia invert, have you heard that kind of jargon?
[00:34:29.830]Let me explain the jargon.
[00:34:32.040]A philosophical zombie is not like a movie zombie,
[00:34:35.150]the movie zombies look different from us
[00:34:37.180]and move in odd ways.
[00:34:38.740]The philosophical zombie,
[00:34:40.150]your philosophical zombie physical twin
[00:34:43.320]would act just like you,
[00:34:45.980]physically they're just like you,
[00:34:47.620]presumably the way they physically are
[00:34:49.490]constraints their behavior so they behave just like you,
[00:34:52.520]but there's no what it's like for the philosophical zombie.
[00:34:55.080]The lights aren't on inside,
[00:34:57.090]it's not like anything to be them.
[00:34:58.710]They say it's like something to be them if you ask them,
[00:35:02.050]but it really is, there's no phenomenal consciousness.
[00:35:05.240]That's a philosophical grounding.
[00:35:07.750]What's a qualia invert?
[00:35:11.010]Well, take a case like this,
[00:35:12.410]the child's color wheel
[00:35:13.940]goes from red to orange to like yellow
[00:35:17.220]to green to blue and purple and then back up to red.
[00:35:21.780]A qualia invert might be a color qualia invert
[00:35:24.090]where we take the blue yellow axis in that color wheel
[00:35:27.750]and imagine somebody's experience
[00:35:29.500]is flipped around on the yellow blue axis,
[00:35:31.600]so they see red where you see green and vice versa.
[00:35:36.230]Sometimes people claim
[00:35:38.510]your physical duplicate could be a qualia invert,
[00:35:42.988]at least they have qualia unlike the zombie,
[00:35:44.920]at least it's like something to be them.
[00:35:46.780]But it's not like what it is to be you,
[00:35:48.640]it's inverted based in color.
[00:35:51.630]When you see red,
[00:35:52.680]they have the experience you have when you see green,
[00:35:55.410]so forth and so on.
[00:35:57.470]So they're claiming, here's some possible cases,
[00:36:01.130]you have a physical duplicate exactly physically like you,
[00:36:06.170]it might not have any what it's like at all
[00:36:08.390]or it's what it's like might be inverted in some way.
[00:36:11.140]And they say that's possible,
[00:36:12.350]we can coherently conceive it,
[00:36:14.570]because we can coherently conceive it, it's possible.
[00:36:18.000]And then they conclude,
[00:36:19.480]because it's possible for there to be a situation
[00:36:23.180]where your physical stuff
[00:36:25.070]is not sufficient to deliver your what it's like,
[00:36:28.480]but it isn't in reality either.
[00:36:30.670]So they move from this possible case to the actual case.
[00:36:34.630]Now, there's a lot of controversial points in that
[00:36:36.890]you might not like
[00:36:38.400]arguing about what's coherently conceivable,
[00:36:41.260]arguing from that to what's possible,
[00:36:43.020]arguing from that to what's actual.
[00:36:46.110]But here's another case they use
[00:36:48.230]which sometimes motivates their view
[00:36:50.580]a little better for people
[00:36:51.750]'cause it's not a hypothetical case,
[00:36:52.973]it's a real case, it's a real life case.
[00:36:55.840]Bats, you've heard about bats.
[00:36:58.040]And bats, many kinds of bats have kind of sonar.
[00:37:03.560]They chirp and they have these asymmetrical ears
[00:37:06.440]and they hear the way the chirp comes back.
[00:37:10.602]And through that, is that hearing,
[00:37:13.140]through that hearing, through that sonar,
[00:37:15.630]they're able to do
[00:37:16.940]what seemed to be amazing things in the dark
[00:37:19.240]like they can tell that there's a certain kind of bug
[00:37:22.140]going in a certain direction at a certain kind of speed.
[00:37:24.800]Try to imagine hearing that.
[00:37:27.380]Well, these people claim you can't imagine hearing that,
[00:37:30.450]it's too alien, it's too far away.
[00:37:33.150]They say you can never as a human ever be in position
[00:37:36.420]to know what it's like to be a bat who uses its sonar,
[00:37:40.130]when it uses its sonar.
[00:37:41.790]It's completely beyond human knowledge
[00:37:44.020]no matter how much we develop, how much we learn,
[00:37:47.010]we'll never know what it's like to be a bat.
[00:37:50.010]But then they say,
[00:37:51.520]well, but if we spend enough money and time on it,
[00:37:54.330]surely we can figure out all there is to know physically
[00:37:57.890]about the bat sonar neurophysiology.
[00:38:01.780]So they say, we can, maybe eventually we will know
[00:38:05.000]all the facts there are to know about bat sonar physically,
[00:38:11.490]but we won't know the what it's like for that.
[00:38:13.720]And so that must be a different kind of fact.
[00:38:16.640]A fact we cannot know unlike the facts we can.
[00:38:20.060]So contemporary dualists
[00:38:21.970]are often motivated by cases like that
[00:38:24.530]which are worth thinking about.
[00:38:26.650]And then see how that applies to our question.
[00:38:30.560]These people are gonna say,
[00:38:32.810]if they think pleasure is a sensation
[00:38:35.950]and if they think
[00:38:37.290]it's a crucial part of the sensation of pleasure,
[00:38:39.497]the what it's like,
[00:38:40.740]that wonderful what it's like that's part of pleasure,
[00:38:43.147]and that awful what it's like that's part of pain,
[00:38:46.480]they're gonna say, physical things,
[00:38:49.020]purely physical things without that dualist extra stuff
[00:38:52.880]could never feel pleasure or pain, right?
[00:38:55.870]They're gonna think pleasure and pain
[00:38:57.520]require something more than the physical.
[00:39:01.470]So, depending on your view of pain and pleasure,
[00:39:04.430]whether it's an attitude, whether it's a sensation,
[00:39:06.980]depending on whether you're a dualist
[00:39:08.450]and depending on what you're a dualist about,
[00:39:11.490]attitudes or sensations,
[00:39:13.750]you may have a different view
[00:39:15.130]about what the nature of pleasure and pain is
[00:39:17.380]and its relation to things like the mind body problem.
[00:39:20.490]Notice actually one brief thing before we go on,
[00:39:24.620]the pain pleasure qualia invert doesn't seem very plausible.
[00:39:28.590]Imagine someone is physically just like you
[00:39:31.370]but allegedly their experiences of pain and pleasure
[00:39:34.930]are inverted,
[00:39:35.763]or imagine the pain zombie, the pain and pleasure zombie.
[00:39:38.870]So you've got some creature writhing there on the floor
[00:39:41.510]that's your physical duplicate.
[00:39:43.630]Is it really plausible
[00:39:44.780]to think we don't know they're in pain?
[00:39:46.540]So maybe these cases can be run against,
[00:39:48.750]if you think about pain and pleasure,
[00:39:49.980]maybe they can be run against the dualist.
[00:39:51.920]But the main point of saying all this is just to say,
[00:39:55.210]look how intertwined and interrelated
[00:39:59.060]philosophical questions are.
[00:40:00.940]If you start thinking about one of these issues,
[00:40:03.500]you're gonna end up thinking about the others as well.
[00:40:07.350]Anyway, that's all I'm gonna say
[00:40:08.780]about the nature of pleasure and pain.
[00:40:10.260]So let me go on now to our other set of questions,
[00:40:14.800]the role of pleasure in the good life
[00:40:16.610]and the role of pleasure in ethics, okay?
[00:40:19.630]And I'm gonna divide that up into two questions
[00:40:21.830]and give you each three answers to think about
[00:40:23.960]and then we'll be done.
[00:40:26.590]So, there are different philosophical theories of what it is
[00:40:31.120]for a human being to lead a good and flourishing life.
[00:40:35.660]And there are different philosophical traditions
[00:40:38.020]of thinking about what's the relationship
[00:40:40.120]between a good life and ethics, right and wrong, morality.
[00:40:46.560]I'm gonna focus on the second thing first.
[00:40:49.290]So some people think a flourishing good life by necessity
[00:40:57.100]essentially involves moral activity, moral action,
[00:41:01.230]proper activity.
[00:41:02.630]They're gonna say,
[00:41:03.463]people like Aristotle and Plato thought this,
[00:41:06.180]if you've got somebody that's immoral,
[00:41:09.060]if what they do is immoral,
[00:41:11.190]then they cannot lead a good life.
[00:41:14.580]Leading a moral life is an essential part of a good life.
[00:41:18.380]They have a fancy view
[00:41:20.460]about what a flourishing or good life is for people
[00:41:22.890]and they say, it's fancy in that it requires this morality,
[00:41:26.930]it's part of it,
[00:41:27.763]and it's a morality isn't part of it,
[00:41:29.100]it's not a flourishing good life,
[00:41:30.620]it's not a good life, period.
[00:41:31.940]It can't be
[00:41:33.220]'cause it lacks an essential feature of the good life.
[00:41:36.570]Well, obviously, if you think
[00:41:38.310]morality is an essential part of the good life,
[00:41:41.160]you can see what the relationship
[00:41:42.710]between a good flourishing life and morality is,
[00:41:45.410]it's very tight.
[00:41:47.349]You can't have a good life without moral activity,
[00:41:50.160]properly moral activity.
[00:41:52.180]But that's only one tradition.
[00:41:53.510]It's an old tradition,
[00:41:54.730]it's called the virtue-based tradition
[00:41:56.710]for reasons we don't have to talk about,
[00:41:59.060]but that's one tradition in ethics.
[00:42:01.740]There are two other traditions in ethics though
[00:42:04.000]that are very well developed.
[00:42:06.570]There is so called consequentialist tradition,
[00:42:08.970]maybe you've heard of this one.
[00:42:10.810]And it says that right actions,
[00:42:13.120]morally right actions are made morally right,
[00:42:17.500]morally wrong actions are made morally wrong
[00:42:20.080]by their consequences, by what they lead to.
[00:42:24.090]And they frequently say,
[00:42:25.710]the kind of consequences that matter positively
[00:42:30.510]for the evaluation of an action is right
[00:42:33.130]are the amount of wellbeing
[00:42:34.630]it generates for people in general.
[00:42:36.780]So they tend to say things like this,
[00:42:39.890]if an act is one which makes people a lot worse off,
[00:42:45.080]it's not the right thing to do, it's immoral.
[00:42:47.010]If an action makes people a lot better off,
[00:42:50.020]it's the right thing to do, it's what morality demands.
[00:42:53.000]Now, notice these consequentialist think
[00:42:55.450]there's also a tight connection
[00:42:57.030]between wellbeing and right action,
[00:43:01.350]but the connection is different,
[00:43:03.100]it's the right action leads to a good life,
[00:43:05.850]it leads to good lives for people in general.
[00:43:08.510]So there's still a kind of tight conceptual connection
[00:43:12.220]between flourishing and good lives and moral action,
[00:43:16.410]but it's more indirect
[00:43:17.560]than in the case of a virtue-based tradition.
[00:43:21.620]One more case, the so called deontologist,
[00:43:26.170]they differ quite radically from the consequentialist
[00:43:29.650]about what makes their actions morally right.
[00:43:31.340]They tend to say things, consequences don't matter,
[00:43:35.000]it's the intrinsic nature of the act,
[00:43:37.280]it's a murder, it's a lie, it's a, I don't know,
[00:43:41.050]it's an act of gratitude
[00:43:43.090]that determines what its moral status is
[00:43:45.150]whether it's right or wrong,
[00:43:46.640]and it has nothing to do with the consequences,
[00:43:48.450]they often say.
[00:43:50.450]Well, you might think, what do these people think?
[00:43:52.750]What role do these people think the good life has in ethics
[00:43:56.480]in determining what's right or wrong?
[00:43:57.910]Well, the interesting thing is they almost always say,
[00:44:00.990]among the kinds of acts that are morally wrong
[00:44:03.530]are harming people fortuitously,
[00:44:06.170]and among the acts that are morally required
[00:44:08.470]is helping people in certain kinds of circumstances.
[00:44:11.900]And harming people involves harming them
[00:44:14.470]in regards to how well off they are
[00:44:16.240]probably to their wellbeing,
[00:44:18.840]and helping them seems to involve their wellbeing.
[00:44:21.700]So, notice all these three traditions of ethics
[00:44:25.550]think that wellbeing matters, right?
[00:44:28.960]The virtue-based tradition thinks it matters
[00:44:31.210]because without moral activity, you can't lead a good life,
[00:44:34.520]it's an essential part of it.
[00:44:36.200]The consequentialist thinks,
[00:44:38.590]what matters positively to the consequences of an action
[00:44:41.570]which determines whether it's right or wrong
[00:44:43.160]is whether it generates wellbeing for people generally.
[00:44:47.010]And the deontologist even will say,
[00:44:50.320]if acts are harmful to people's wellbeing,
[00:44:55.900]it's an injury and that's the wrong kind of thing to do.
[00:44:59.190]So all the three traditions
[00:45:01.530]think there's a role for wellbeing.
[00:45:03.150]You know what I'm gonna do next,
[00:45:04.460]I'm gonna talk about wellbeing in pleasure
[00:45:06.580]to get us back to our link with pleasure in ethics.
[00:45:08.757]But first, let me ask you, you got to guess where you stand,
[00:45:14.950]how many people are virtue-based ethics
[00:45:18.994]in their inclination,
[00:45:19.827]they think that the moral life
[00:45:22.180]is an essential part of the good life?
[00:45:24.900]Anybody think that?
[00:45:25.840]A few people.
[00:45:27.820]That's a high tonal tradition.
[00:45:30.440]Any consequentialist who think?
[00:45:33.000]Okay, how about deontologists?
[00:45:36.030]Are you deontologist
[00:45:37.160]who think that harming is bad and helping is good?
[00:45:40.880]Then you've got a role too.
[00:45:42.450]So it looks like one thing to think about,
[00:45:44.913]a very interesting thing to think about
[00:45:46.530]is where you stand in those traditions.
[00:45:48.790]But another thing to think about is,
[00:45:51.510]despite all the differences in that tradition,
[00:45:54.800]pretty much everybody agrees wellbeing matters to ethics.
[00:45:57.710]Now, I'm gonna talk about wellbeing.
[00:46:00.040]There are three traditions about wellbeing as well.
[00:46:03.970]The first one is called hedonism.
[00:46:07.680]And it's the view
[00:46:09.070]that the only thing that's intrinsically good,
[00:46:11.910]the only thing that intrinsically matters in a good life
[00:46:14.420]is pleasure.
[00:46:16.990]May be the absence of pain.
[00:46:18.930]So they're gonna say,
[00:46:20.590]what makes a life good is the pleasure in it,
[00:46:22.630]what makes a life bad is the pain in it.
[00:46:24.970]And nothing else really matters in the end.
[00:46:27.920]Everything else only matters,
[00:46:29.480]remember, we talked about this before,
[00:46:30.910]only as a means to the pleasure and pain in the life.
[00:46:35.030]That's one view about what wellbeing is.
[00:46:37.270]And it identifies wellbeing with pleasure.
[00:46:40.610]So that's one role pleasure can have in the good life.
[00:46:44.250]Now, there aren't a lot of hedonist anymore,
[00:46:48.020]there aren't that many hedonist anymore.
[00:46:52.030]Most philosophers are now in two other traditions.
[00:46:54.840]One is called the desire-based tradition.
[00:46:57.370]The desire-based tradition says,
[00:47:00.410]you lead a good life when you get what you want,
[00:47:03.160]whatever it is,
[00:47:04.400]you lead a bad life when you don't get what you want.
[00:47:08.380]And so they root pleasure,
[00:47:10.410]they root wellbeing in the satisfaction of desire.
[00:47:14.220]Connection back to an old question we talked about.
[00:47:16.780]Remember, if you think that pleasure
[00:47:19.510]is the only thing intrinsically that we desire,
[00:47:21.740]there's gonna be a collapse
[00:47:22.940]between the desire-based view and the hedonist view.
[00:47:25.570]But if you don't think that, if you think,
[00:47:27.200]no, we want things ultimately other than pleasure,
[00:47:29.440]they're gonna recommend different lives,
[00:47:31.090]the desire-based view and the hedonist view.
[00:47:34.170]Here's a third view,
[00:47:36.120]here's a third view so called objectivist view.
[00:47:40.674]Objectivist view says,
[00:47:42.630]there are certain things
[00:47:43.640]that are good and bad for people in their lives, period,
[00:47:47.480]and it doesn't matter whether they want them or not,
[00:47:50.720]and it doesn't matter whether it gives them pleasure or not,
[00:47:53.370]they're just good for them, period.
[00:47:56.230]They say things like,
[00:47:57.440]health matters to people or healthy limbs
[00:48:00.270]or maybe knowledge or true belief or achievement.
[00:48:04.000]And those things matter to a good life.
[00:48:05.567]And it doesn't matter what the person's desires are,
[00:48:08.800]those things are objectively good for them,
[00:48:10.670]make for a better life.
[00:48:13.190]Well, there are these different traditions.
[00:48:17.730]And you can think about which of the families you belong in,
[00:48:22.540]whether you're a hedonist, whether you're an objectivist,
[00:48:24.990]or whether you're a desire-based theorists.
[00:48:26.970]Here's the kind of case that people think about,
[00:48:29.270]talk about sometimes to think about those cases.
[00:48:32.826]It's Robert Nozick's Experience Machine.
[00:48:35.950]So imagine there's this machine, very hypothetical,
[00:48:38.770]imagine there's this machine
[00:48:41.440]and you know these things I'm gonna tell you are true
[00:48:44.220]which you wouldn't really in any real case
[00:48:46.240]but let's say you do,
[00:48:48.090]you can hook up to the machine.
[00:48:50.500]And if you hook up to the machine,
[00:48:51.730]you're gonna bliss out for the rest of your life,
[00:48:54.890]feel huge amounts of pleasure and no pain.
[00:48:59.870]And in particular, you're gonna do it in a particular way,
[00:49:02.500]it's not you're just gonna be in a daze,
[00:49:04.520]rather, you're gonna think as you're in this machine,
[00:49:08.160]that you're leading the most wonderfully imaginable life
[00:49:11.180]you could have in fantasy.
[00:49:13.200]Think of the things you most want, right,
[00:49:16.230]and the machine will make you think
[00:49:18.710]those things are all true.
[00:49:21.260]You wanna be president?
[00:49:22.093]You'll be president as it we're in the machine.
[00:49:24.810]It'll seem to you like you're the president
[00:49:28.600]while you're in the machine.
[00:49:31.030]But you won't be.
[00:49:32.940]Another, there's a third thing as part of this setup,
[00:49:36.850]let's assume, you'll be worried about what's gonna happen
[00:49:39.590]to your projects out there in the world
[00:49:41.430]and the people you care about,
[00:49:42.810]and let's just assume as part of the setup,
[00:49:45.870]we're gonna assure that everybody else in your life
[00:49:49.280]is gonna actually be better off if you hook up, okay?
[00:49:53.140]So if you hook up, you're gonna maximum amount of pleasure
[00:49:55.400]much more than in reality,
[00:49:58.260]it's gonna seem deep but it's not gonna be true
[00:50:01.380]that your wildest desires are gonna be satisfied, right?
[00:50:06.120]When in reality, of course, not all of them will be.
[00:50:09.270]And everybody, the rest of the people in your life,
[00:50:12.500]the rest of your projects will all be better satisfied.
[00:50:16.310]How many people would hook up?
[00:50:20.190]Yeah, how many of you would not hook up?
[00:50:25.376]Interestingly,
[00:50:26.577]the vast majority of people would not hook up,
[00:50:29.930]they are interesting age differences.
[00:50:32.000]Apparently, people who are younger have a tendency,
[00:50:35.200]more people who are younger say they would hook up
[00:50:38.330]than people who are older.
[00:50:40.690]So there are variations between.
[00:50:42.640]But if you say no, you wouldn't hook up,
[00:50:44.920]it's probably 'cause you think
[00:50:46.260]other things matter than pleasure.
[00:50:49.260]And you might think that what matters
[00:50:51.230]is whether your desires are really satisfied
[00:50:55.220]which is what the desire satisfaction tradition
[00:50:58.093]says you should think.
[00:51:00.750]Or maybe it's because you think
[00:51:03.130]the problem with being in the machine
[00:51:05.650]is it's all a fantasy
[00:51:06.760]and your beliefs are all false
[00:51:08.410]and you're living in fool's paradise
[00:51:10.000]and that's not a good way to be,
[00:51:11.320]even if it's a pleasant way to be.
[00:51:14.360]If you think you shouldn't be in the machine
[00:51:16.530]because some of your desires aren't really satisfied,
[00:51:19.080]you probably have a desire-based view
[00:51:20.780]or something like that.
[00:51:22.630]And if you think no, you shouldn't be in the machine
[00:51:25.450]just 'cause there'll be false beliefs
[00:51:27.110]and you're really laying on a slab and it's all,
[00:51:29.840]that's what Aristotle would have said about the case.
[00:51:32.550]He actually said,
[00:51:33.870]no one can flourish and be asleep all the while.
[00:51:36.070]And that's like what you would be
[00:51:37.380]if you were in the machine.
[00:51:38.570]If you hold that view, maybe you're an objectivist.
[00:51:42.100]So there's three different views.
[00:51:44.040]Let me just ask you where you are.
[00:51:47.140]Did I already ask you this?
[00:51:47.973]No.
[00:51:49.579]Objectivists, people with good feelings,
[00:51:52.170]whether they like it or not.
[00:51:54.220]Desire-based, what people want.
[00:51:57.100]Quite a few.
[00:51:58.190]Any hedonist?
[00:52:00.160]Okay, we got a mixture, we got a mixture.
[00:52:03.070]And obviously there are lots of disputes
[00:52:05.010]within these in these traditions.
[00:52:08.370]And let me link the two questions we've just thrown out
[00:52:11.730]about wellbeing and the good life and then we'll be done.
[00:52:16.610]Remember, all the ethical traditions, all three,
[00:52:20.740]whether you're a deontologists,
[00:52:22.910]whether you're a virtue-based theorist,
[00:52:24.680]or whether you're a consequentialist,
[00:52:26.790]thinks that wellbeing matters to ethics, right?
[00:52:30.930]To morality.
[00:52:33.370]And notice that if you,
[00:52:35.800]despite your different views about whether hedonism,
[00:52:39.770]desire-based theory or objectivism is true,
[00:52:42.310]the following thing is also true.
[00:52:44.950]One of the things we desire almost all of us
[00:52:47.760]is our own pleasure in the absence of pain.
[00:52:50.610]So even if you're a desire-based person,
[00:52:52.720]you're gonna think pleasure and pain matter,
[00:52:54.630]they're just not gonna be
[00:52:55.463]the only thing that matters, right?
[00:52:58.130]And almost all the objectivists think,
[00:53:01.450]pleasure and pain matters too.
[00:53:03.400]So they think
[00:53:04.233]that somebody's pursuing pain for its own sake,
[00:53:05.813]there's something wrong with them
[00:53:08.120]because they're not leading the life a human should,
[00:53:10.270]they're pursuing pain.
[00:53:12.190]And so all three of the traditions about wellbeing
[00:53:15.840]think that pleasure and pain matter for wellbeing,
[00:53:19.230]and all three of the ethics traditions
[00:53:21.020]thinks that wellbeing matters to ethics.
[00:53:24.850]And so I can conclude in the following way.
[00:53:28.355]There's a lot of dispute in philosophy
[00:53:30.920]about a lot of different topics,
[00:53:33.090]but almost all ethicists
[00:53:36.250]agree that pain and pleasure matters in ethics.
[00:53:41.250]And of course,
[00:53:42.083]the question of how to lead a good life matters
[00:53:44.640]even if ethics doesn't matter.
[00:53:47.390]So that means that almost all philosophers agree
[00:53:51.120]that pain and pleasure which is the topic of this series
[00:53:54.700]is a very important topic.
[00:53:56.900]And you won't find a lot of things
[00:53:58.340]that all philosophers agree at.
[00:54:00.820]So that's it.
[00:54:03.080]Questions?
[00:54:09.850]I guess we get some remote maybe
[00:54:11.947]and some in person and maybe we won't get any.
[00:54:23.613]Is there anybody here with a question?
[00:54:25.350]Let's start with non philosophers.
[00:54:30.930]Somebody's gonna go with a microphone or something.
[00:54:33.790]Okay, all right.
[00:54:35.500]Should I stand for you or should--
[00:54:37.716]Whatever you like, whatever gives you pleasure.
[00:54:42.450]If half the world
[00:54:45.700]hooked themselves up to the same machine
[00:54:48.610]and they were all living the same dream
[00:54:53.200]and they were all having their own dreams
[00:54:55.700]come true in that way,
[00:54:57.830]would you hook yourself up to that machine?
[00:54:59.500]Would I hook myself up?
[00:55:00.750]I don't think I'd hook myself up, that's the answer.
[00:55:05.320]Does that mean I shouldn't hook myself up?
[00:55:07.300]I don't know,
[00:55:08.133]I might just be afraid of doing it or something.
[00:55:11.489]I don't have a strong view of myself about whether I should.
[00:55:14.620]I can tell you I wouldn't.
[00:55:17.380]But part of your question I think,
[00:55:19.820]I think you're thinking about the situation
[00:55:23.590]where it's not just one person hooked up,
[00:55:26.370]you're thinking about a situation
[00:55:27.630]where a bunch of people are hooked up.
[00:55:30.070]And you were allowing in the case as it were,
[00:55:33.030]the dreams go in different directions, right?
[00:55:36.480]But in that, it's a relevant thing to think about,
[00:55:38.980]but think about a case
[00:55:39.813]where they all go in the same direction.
[00:55:42.580]And so somehow, we all have coordinated dreams
[00:55:45.590]where somehow miraculously
[00:55:49.540]the machine is thought of a fantasy we can share, right?
[00:55:53.660]Where we all get what we most want.
[00:55:56.690]And then, we could all hook up together
[00:56:01.080]and live much better lives than we seemed to,
[00:56:04.219]that would be a situation that might be a little different.
[00:56:06.420]I mean, you could wonder
[00:56:07.930]if that's much different than reality in some relevant ways,
[00:56:11.470]there have been some philosophers who have thought,
[00:56:13.890]because of their commitments,
[00:56:15.890]our family and commitments and so forth,
[00:56:18.000]that the way the world works,
[00:56:19.770]that that wouldn't be much different from reality,
[00:56:21.920]or in fact, would be what reality is really like,
[00:56:24.300]there isn't any difference between that of any relevant time
[00:56:27.420]to check between what's actually true
[00:56:30.650]and what seem to be true to all of us
[00:56:34.240]in this shared fantasy.
[00:56:36.790]So that's the thing to think about I think a lot.
[00:56:39.187]But you were focused on the fact
[00:56:41.450]that the fantasies went differently, right?
[00:56:45.000]Is that's the idea?
[00:56:46.180]And so was the idea that you,
[00:56:50.460]because you weren't sharing this world
[00:56:53.810]with the other people,
[00:56:55.140]that would be a relevant factor.
[00:56:56.994]Yeah, yeah.
[00:56:59.337]Yeah?
[00:57:00.554]It maybe so.
[00:57:01.810]Maybe what we worry about most in entering the machine
[00:57:06.170]is that our experience
[00:57:07.340]would be divorce from those of the other people
[00:57:09.270]so that if we all got in there together
[00:57:11.010]so to speak in a coordinated way,
[00:57:12.900]there wouldn't be anything wrong.
[00:57:14.810]That's a possibility.
[00:57:17.280]Thank you.
[00:57:18.290]Do you have more?
[00:57:28.020]Thank you.
[00:57:29.860]Would you argue that pain and pleasure work together,
[00:57:33.720]that one can't exist without the other?
[00:57:38.800]Well, I'm trying to avoid my answers.
[00:57:44.250]If you wanna know my answers,
[00:57:45.790]there's a book in the library called "Human Interest"
[00:57:49.010]where it'll say the answers to those questions.
[00:57:53.080]Clearly, there's some views on what pain and pleasure are
[00:57:58.040]that would require if you have one, you have the other.
[00:58:01.030]But there are lots of views which don't.
[00:58:03.220]So for instance,
[00:58:04.240]there are certainly many people in the history of philosophy
[00:58:07.280]who are sensation-based about pain
[00:58:11.320]but attitude-based about pleasure.
[00:58:14.420]And they could say, well, then the issue will be,
[00:58:16.330]can you have the enjoyment added to say
[00:58:19.710]without there being any pains?
[00:58:22.294]On the surface, you can,
[00:58:24.150]but maybe if you push that,
[00:58:25.680]maybe the hidden essence of enjoyment
[00:58:28.520]is somehow something that requires pain, right?
[00:58:33.060]It doesn't seem obvious to me, let me put it this way,
[00:58:36.770]that you couldn't have one without the other.
[00:58:39.130]And maybe it would be a better place,
[00:58:40.760]the world would be a better place
[00:58:41.910]if we only had the one and not the other.
[00:58:44.230]The world we live in, there's both things involved.
[00:58:48.839]Do you think you couldn't have one without the other?
[00:58:51.070]I think you couldn't know
[00:58:53.100]what one was without the other?
[00:58:55.360]Are you thinking about the existence of God
[00:58:58.380]and the problem of evil maybe?
[00:59:01.660]Kind of.
[00:59:02.493]Like if there was only pleasure,
[00:59:04.630]you would never recognize pain
[00:59:06.910]because it's kind of like a dichotomous relationship.
[00:59:10.850]Yeah, that's a link between these topics and other ones.
[00:59:14.160]One of the traditional,
[00:59:15.980]there's various traditional arguments
[00:59:17.150]for the existence of God
[00:59:18.400]and there's some traditional arguments
[00:59:19.630]against the existence of God.
[00:59:21.297]And one of the traditional arguments
[00:59:22.130]against the existence of God is that problem of evil,
[00:59:24.810]which is that there's evil in the world
[00:59:26.520]and it doesn't seem like it's necessary
[00:59:29.040]and so it doesn't seem like the world
[00:59:30.810]could be the creation of a benevolent creator and so forth.
[00:59:34.790]And some people have argued against that
[00:59:37.050]on the basis that the pain that's in the world
[00:59:40.440]is required as a sort of precondition
[00:59:43.240]for the goodness in the world like with pleasure.
[00:59:45.500]So that's one kind of connection some people have drawn.
[00:59:48.900]That's controversial.
[00:59:49.960]All those points are obviously controversial.
[01:00:00.600]Good to see you again.
[01:00:03.730]So when speaking versus like a hedonist
[01:00:05.470]versus like an objectivist view,
[01:00:07.820]and kind of going back to like the hookup argument,
[01:00:11.490]or example, I should say,
[01:00:13.740]how would escapism fit in that
[01:00:16.340]where you're living in reality
[01:00:17.700]but you do things to avoid
[01:00:19.860]like the kind of cold hard face with reality?
[01:00:21.950]Are you thinking like control Experience Machine
[01:00:25.733]instead of like,
[01:00:27.280]are you thinking of a situation
[01:00:28.390]where you can enter the Experience Machine for five hours,
[01:00:32.970]it's timed and then you come out again,
[01:00:34.540]and you might do it as a vacation or as a recreation?
[01:00:37.780]Right, like me going to play Xbox
[01:00:39.890]for like a few hours just to like ignore schoolwork.
[01:00:43.520]I mean, you were talking about hedonism and desire-based.
[01:00:45.130]Well, the hedonist
[01:00:47.040]isn't gonna probably have any trouble with that,
[01:00:49.780]the desire-based theorists
[01:00:51.040]is gonna say it's gonna depend on your desires, right?
[01:00:54.610]The objectivist is gonna have,
[01:00:57.570]there's various things they could say,
[01:00:59.180]you can well imagine them saying,
[01:01:02.170]that's not an appropriate thing to do.
[01:01:06.440]Even if you wanna do it,
[01:01:07.580]that somehow you're wasting your life in that situation
[01:01:11.848]where you're engaged in the fantasy that's not a reality.
[01:01:16.490]They don't usually think that it's bad
[01:01:20.100]to sleep and dream however,
[01:01:22.820]and that's a lot like sleeping and dreaming,
[01:01:25.710]though it's sort of under more under voluntary control.
[01:01:30.170]So, though Aristotle says that you're not,
[01:01:34.050]you wouldn't be flourishing if you sleep all your life,
[01:01:37.120]he doesn't say,
[01:01:39.115]while you're sleeping, you're not flourishing.
[01:01:41.360]But maybe that's a view, maybe that's a plausible view.
[01:01:45.320]Think about this question,
[01:01:47.690]does the quality of your life
[01:01:49.360]depends on what you experience while you dream?
[01:01:53.000]Imagine two lives that are the same waking bys.
[01:01:58.210]But somebody has really bad nightmares
[01:02:02.140]they don't remember, right, they don't remember at all.
[01:02:06.840]And the other person just has kind of mildly pleasant dreams
[01:02:10.320]all the time but they don't remember.
[01:02:12.520]Do we think that the person with the nightmares
[01:02:14.540]has the worst life?
[01:02:16.960]Anybody think the person with the nightmares
[01:02:18.760]that they don't remember has a worse life?
[01:02:22.260]They don't remember 'em.
[01:02:23.130]Yeah, I mean, maybe it matters
[01:02:25.580]what happens to you when you're asleep to your wellbeing,
[01:02:28.810]or maybe it doesn't matter at all.
[01:02:30.910]Maybe because it's dreaming, it just doesn't count,
[01:02:34.080]only what you do when you're awake matters.
[01:02:40.640]I dunno, that's something to think about.
[01:02:44.540]Can I ask another question real quick.
[01:02:46.273]Sure.
[01:02:49.080]So would a, I think I have this right,
[01:02:52.780]so if your entire life you spent at just chasing pleasure,
[01:02:56.320]whatever you thought is pleasure, you chase after it.
[01:02:59.980]Objectivist would say that's not a good life
[01:03:01.940]because there's no like goals you're fulfilling.
[01:03:05.060]Usually the objectivist, almost always, maybe every time,
[01:03:08.810]the objectivist thinks there's other things
[01:03:10.530]that matter to you.
[01:03:11.749]Right.
[01:03:13.070]Okay, so like in terms of like addiction, for example,
[01:03:17.290]the hedonist would say,
[01:03:18.260]the hedonist would have no problem with that
[01:03:19.940]because you're filling a pleasure
[01:03:21.300]that is innate biologically,
[01:03:25.090]whereas like the objectivist would say like,
[01:03:29.571]like your health matters so an addiction is bad for you
[01:03:31.330]therefore that's bad.
[01:03:32.970]So how did the desire-base fit in that
[01:03:35.320]because it's not objectively a good life
[01:03:36.940]to be constantly addicted to something,
[01:03:38.630]but at the same time you desire it.
[01:03:40.810]Yeah, we'd have to talk about the detail.
[01:03:43.640]So one thing about hedonism,
[01:03:44.960]the fact is that the hedonist often say,
[01:03:47.380]the opposition misrepresents their view.
[01:03:50.624]'Cause the actual hedonist in history,
[01:03:52.750]these people, the epicureans, and then the ancient world,
[01:03:55.520]and Bentham and so forth,
[01:03:57.870]they often said that really their view
[01:04:01.730]recommends that you pursue mild pleasures
[01:04:04.530]because they're not risky.
[01:04:07.892]It doesn't recommend you take whatever drug
[01:04:11.830]and lead a wild life,
[01:04:13.838]'cause those kinds of pleasures
[01:04:15.380]have a good chance of leaving in pain.
[01:04:17.630]So they would probably often say,
[01:04:21.090]try to avoid addictions
[01:04:22.570]because addictions involve considerable pain, right?
[01:04:25.540]Can involve, have the risk of involving considerable pain.
[01:04:28.807]But the addiction case is also interesting as you suggested
[01:04:31.960]when thinking about the desire-based view
[01:04:34.730]because an addict may really desire the fix
[01:04:40.060]more than anything else, right?
[01:04:42.500]And at least on the surface,
[01:04:44.080]it looks like a desire-based view will have to say,
[01:04:47.630]that's good for him.
[01:04:49.080]And if you think it isn't, right?
[01:04:51.380]I mean, take another kind of case
[01:04:52.930]that's a trouble for the desire-base view, suicide case.
[01:04:56.980]somebody wants to kill themselves,
[01:04:59.210]it's what they really want.
[01:05:01.728]On the surface, it looks like the desire-base views
[01:05:04.530]says that's good for them if you think they're wrong, right?
[01:05:08.660]Because you think,
[01:05:09.493]well, there's something wrong with their desire there.
[01:05:12.090]And maybe the same thing
[01:05:13.890]is similar thing is true of the addict case.
[01:05:16.360]Now, you can use those cases to argue for objectivism,
[01:05:19.960]but if you're a desire-based theorists,
[01:05:23.010]you can say things like,
[01:05:23.930]well, it's not just the desires at this time that matter
[01:05:28.190]but desires over life and maybe the suicide will.
[01:05:32.540]And so there's various complicated things
[01:05:34.780]to think about there.
[01:05:35.613]But yeah, the addict cases are hard
[01:05:37.470]for the desire-based views.
[01:05:41.730]And they're pretty good for the objectivist.
[01:05:44.530]That's the motivation for objectivism that some people have.
[01:05:48.270]Thank you.
[01:05:53.130]Okay.
[01:05:55.270]If there are no other questions,
[01:05:56.480]thank you so much, Dr. Mendola.
[01:06:00.040]Another round of applause.
[01:06:00.904](audience applauding)
[01:06:01.737]Okay, thank you.
[01:06:03.410]Thank you for coming on this beautiful day.
[01:06:05.920]And I hope we can see you all
[01:06:07.920]for our next installment of the series,
[01:06:10.150]that's Tuesday, October 5th,
[01:06:12.380]where we'll be exploring pain in more detail
[01:06:15.530]with the talk white pain by Dr. Casey Kelly
[01:06:19.600]in communication study.
[01:06:20.900]So I hope to see you then, have a good evening, thank you.

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"Pain and Pleasure in Philosophy" by Joseph Mendola | CAS Inquire

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