The Hedonic Question, Value vs Happiness
I've been mulling over the following question which I feel I've found an answer to but it still needs work I believe. I'm throwing out it there for criticism or approval.
The Hedonic Question: Do things have value because they make us happy or do they make us happy because they have value?
If things have value because they make us happy, hedonism is vindicated - happiness is the be all and end all in a manner of speaking and we should be, as hedonists recommend, doing everything possible to achieve happiness, nothing else matters. Life is essentially a saga of happiness. If such is true, things that have no happiness associated with them are valueless and not worth anything at all.
However, give some thought to the fact that, whatever else happiness and suffering are, physically speaking, that which is pro-life (e.g. sex) causes happiness and that which is anti-life (e.g. physical injury) causes suffering. I say this with some reservation of course as I suspect there are exceptions to these generalizations. That said, there can be little doubt that sex, one of happiest activities for many, is pro-life and bodily harm (cuts, bruises, fractures, etc.), a painful experience, is anti-life.
Given this is the case, there's enough wiggle room to make the claim that things make us happy because they have value: the value of sex (pro-life) lies in its purpose as mode of procreation and that's why it makes us happy & the value of injuries (anti-life) is in the threat it poses to life and so, the pain it causes. I should've said this earlier but I'll have to do it here; bear in mind that the value of sex as pro-life and the value of injury as anti-life is non-hedonic i.e. their value is rooted in their respective roles in survival and the continuation of the species. Happiness/suffering associated with sex/injury is only to ensure survival/procreation.
In conclusion, things make us happy because they have value (that isn't hedonic in nature). What this means for hedonism and therefore for utilitarianism is that they have it backwards - happiness isn't some kind of ultimate goal we should all be striving for but is simply a reward evolution has put in place so that we engage in activities (e.g. sex) whose real value is non-hedonic. Same goes for suffering which is simply there so that we avoid anti-life states (injuries).
A penny for your thoughts...
The Hedonic Question: Do things have value because they make us happy or do they make us happy because they have value?
If things have value because they make us happy, hedonism is vindicated - happiness is the be all and end all in a manner of speaking and we should be, as hedonists recommend, doing everything possible to achieve happiness, nothing else matters. Life is essentially a saga of happiness. If such is true, things that have no happiness associated with them are valueless and not worth anything at all.
However, give some thought to the fact that, whatever else happiness and suffering are, physically speaking, that which is pro-life (e.g. sex) causes happiness and that which is anti-life (e.g. physical injury) causes suffering. I say this with some reservation of course as I suspect there are exceptions to these generalizations. That said, there can be little doubt that sex, one of happiest activities for many, is pro-life and bodily harm (cuts, bruises, fractures, etc.), a painful experience, is anti-life.
Given this is the case, there's enough wiggle room to make the claim that things make us happy because they have value: the value of sex (pro-life) lies in its purpose as mode of procreation and that's why it makes us happy & the value of injuries (anti-life) is in the threat it poses to life and so, the pain it causes. I should've said this earlier but I'll have to do it here; bear in mind that the value of sex as pro-life and the value of injury as anti-life is non-hedonic i.e. their value is rooted in their respective roles in survival and the continuation of the species. Happiness/suffering associated with sex/injury is only to ensure survival/procreation.
In conclusion, things make us happy because they have value (that isn't hedonic in nature). What this means for hedonism and therefore for utilitarianism is that they have it backwards - happiness isn't some kind of ultimate goal we should all be striving for but is simply a reward evolution has put in place so that we engage in activities (e.g. sex) whose real value is non-hedonic. Same goes for suffering which is simply there so that we avoid anti-life states (injuries).
A penny for your thoughts...
Comments (38)
Everything we experience has value. We are sense-making creatures so what we experience matters to us in some way, whether it is boring or interesting, pleasant or unpleasant. I think the hedonic aspect of our valuations are a function of the relative assimilative coherence of what we experience in relation to our ongoing aims and goals. Hedonism isn’t some arbitrary mechanism shaped by evolution to tell us what we should like or not like, as if we would have no motivation without this ‘mechanism’. The ways in which we make sense of our world are inherently affective and hedonic
If you say so.
I think it’s a mistake to attribute agency to evolution, and also to try and orient philosophical questions with respect to purported evolutionary advantage.
Noted with thanks. I'm not, in any way, trying to suggest that evolution is an agency unto itself but it's telling that you assumed that I was. Have a look at The Mind - No Mind Equivalency Paradox
Please focus on the OP only (it's short) and tell me what you think.
The knife cuts ways both ways I'm afraid. If one believes evolution is mindless and we're not, and one takes into the account that how evolution operates is the best strategy for life to ensure its own survival given the circumstances, it follows that having no mind (evolution) = having a mind (us). In effect this means there's no difference between having a mind and not having one i.e. we wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a world created by a god and world that a creator-deity had no hand in its formation.
Despite the fact that you are, actually. The OP is entirely based on evolutionary ethics.
Please go back to my previous post. I edited it for clarity.
I'll give your link a look. :up:
From a buddhist perspective, something you're the forum expert on, life is suffering but I won't go so far as to endorse that, preferring to swap "suffering" with "unsatisfactory" or "uncomfortable" which seems closer to the meaning of dukkha.
What's interesting to say the least about this is how the brain/mind seems to be unhappy, so to speak, about the arrangement between it and the world. My take on this tension between "harsh reality" and our minds/brains is that it indicates some kind of discrepancy in the sense of the mind/brain imagining or coming up with what is essentially a "better" deal - more/all happiness and less/no dukhha. Isn't this odd in some sense? Why would evolution "create" a creature that would eventually find fault with evolution itself? There's no other animal that does that - yes animals suffer, sometimes extremely and unimaginably, but they lack the brains to analyze the raw deal with nature they're part of.
Humans are different in this respect - we know a bad situation when we see one and life is, in a buddhist sense, the mother of all bad situations. It just won't meet our expectations - disappointment after disappointment later it finally dawns on us that, as the Buddha was so very keen on doing, we need an exit strategy and fast. Nirvana then is simply the way out of this evolutionary mess we're in. What nirvana is then a scathing criticism of evolution - it's in desperate need of a thorough overhaul. Are we the ones evolution has chosen to carry out this daunting task? Maybe/maybe not but in our own small way we've at least made the first move in the right direction - recognizing there's a problem in the first place.
At the heart of this issue lies a paradox: the very purpose of evolution is the generation and perpetuation of life but life, through us, humans, found out the rather painful truth that life, in its current form, just ain't worth perpetuating or generating (samsara is not the Buddha's idea of a good time).
I hope we can discuss evolutionary ethics later and mea culpa, you were right about the following:
Quoting Wayfarer
Lots to unpack here. First a couple of points - although I think Buddhism would be less challenged by the modern theory of evolution than some interpretations of Christianity, I also don't think that it had any inkling of evolution in a scientific sense, so, couldn't have been critical of it.
Another thing to consider is the cultural context of the discovery of evolution by natural selection in the mid-nineteenth century. This became very much part of the intellectual movement we know as 'the Enlightenment'. (Actually an interesting fact is that the reason Thomas Rhys-Davids used the word 'enlightenment' to translate the Buddhist term 'bodhi', is that it suggested a compatibility between Buddhism and Enlightenment values, which was very much in vogue in the late 19th c.) But anyway, the perceived conflict between the traditional, religious attitude, and the modern scientific attitude, is clearly a major tension in modern culture - more so in some places than others.
I always notice how naturally it is assumed that 'we evolved to have x' or 'evolved to do x' - as if evolutionary theory now situatues us or prepares us, in a similar way to that which earlier generations would attribute to their religion. It's as if evolution now occupies the place left by the abandonment of religion. The problem is that religions provide a value system - they're not a scientific theory at all. There's a lot of unclarity on both sides of the conflict about all that. The better commentators on that are neither religious nor scientific - Mary Midgley, Raymond Tallis and Thomas Nagel come to mind.
So - with respect to the Buddha's declaration that 'life is dukkha' - in one way or another all the higher religions and most classical philosophy affirms that. Human life is a predicament, beset by sorrows, doomed to end in death of all we hold dear. And as you point out, only humans can really reflect on that - which is the sense in which it is a predicament. Animals go on blithely unaware, they're not burdened by self-hood.
And that's where I think naturalistic ethics fall short. You will notice the best that evolutionary theory seems to offer is hedonic utilitarianism - more pleasure, or the dimishment of suffering. Which is certainly good as far as it goes - nobody wants to live a deprived and painful existence - but somehow humans sense something beyond even that.
My considered view is that in reaching self-awareness and rational intelligence, h. sapiens transcends the biological - we become more than, or other than, something which can be comprehended solely through the biological perspective. And that view, I've discovered, was actually shared by the co-discovered of evolution by natural selection, namely Alfred Russel Wallace.
Quoting TheMadFool
I think most scientists would object to the assertion that evolution has any purpose whatever. Hence Dawkin's 'Blind Watchmaker' - it's like an algorithm that blindly blunders on reproducing, for no reason other than to continue. Of course I don't believe that, but it's nearer the mainstream view than any idea of there being a purpose to it all.
I think that to pursue an answer to this question will necessarily lead to an unsatisfactory result, because both happiness and value need to come with a sense of being apriori or else they lose their lustre.
Right! Remember the last discussion we had on how "fashionable" it was to treat buddhism as "scientific"; add to that the buddha's unwillingness to get sucked into metaphysics and kept that to a minimum in his teachings. I suppose the buddha was doing all he could to keep speculative thought, another name for bullshit, at arms length.
Quoting Wayfarer
Good to know! Thanks!
Quoting Wayfarer
This squares with the is/ought problem and the naturalistic fallacy as pertains to evolutionary ethics. I'd like to discuss those if you don't mind.
1. The is/ought problem, the way I understand it, is the non sequitur of making the leap from statements of fact (is) to moral injunctions (ought). Frankly, I don't see what all the fuss is about unless the objection is an ought follows from an is in that they're both equivalent. So, if I say we ought to kill because killing is part of nature, that would be an is/ought fallacy. The whole point of morality, its roots, lies in what I like to refer to as dissatisfaction with how things are. Think of it, if we were happy the way nature is, morality would have no purpose, it would be redundant.
Factoring that - the dissatisfaction with the way nature is/works - in, we come to realize that there must exist some kind of values that engenders this state of discontentment. These values are, together, what ethics/morality is.
So, since morality/ethics, whatever shape or form it takes, effects our concern for how nature is, quite naturally, it becomes the impetus for how nature ought to be.
In short, the is/ought problem is only one if we lack a moral theory that bridges the is/ought gap but we do have moral theories, quite a number of them, and though this reflects badly on us in that we seem quite far from the truth, it at least, in a sense; defangs the the is/ought viper.
2. About the naturalistic fallacy I have nothing to say except that I couldn't wrap my head around it. Maybe you could help me out.
Quoting Wayfarer
Excellent! Hopefully that sense, at some point, bears exquisite fruit. That said, there are circles who believe that the gut-feeling we have that there's more to reality than meets the eye reveals more about how our minds/brains work than reality itself. Sure, it's interesting to know what's under the hood vis-à-vis minds/brains but if reality is a WYSIWYG kinda deal, it would take all the fun out living.
Quoting Wayfarer
That maybe so and I'm fine with. What bothers me is the "illusion" of purpose as demonstrated in how evolution works - sexual reproduction & random mutation are both "good strategies" in an unpredictable environment. We can almost see a great "strategist" working behind faer messy desk, thinking hard to formulate a plan (evolution) for life that's capable of handling any and all contingencies. This Richard Dawkins and other evolutionary biologists claim is an illusion but my point is that there is an illusion of a "good strategy" (evolution) suggesting a master "stratrgist" is in itself something interesting to ponder upon.
Kindly expand and elaborate.
No, that would be the naturalistic fallacy - that because something is natural, it's therefore good. A lot of what goes under 'evolutionary ethics' would fall under that.
Quoting TheMadFool
'How things are' is, however, a very vague and sweeping description. I think, from the viewpoint of many forms of classical philosophy and religion, there is intrinsic suffering in existence, because existence itself is inherently imperfect. 'COMPARED TO WHAT?' I hear you ask. And there's the big question.
In the Christian mythos, for example, all mankind suffer from the original sin inherited from Adam and Eve. My interpretation of that is symbolic - I don't believe it is a literal re-telling but a metaphorical or mythical allegory about the human condition. The crucial point in my interpretation is that Adam eats of the fruit of the 'tree of knowledge', that being the knowledge of good and evil. That signifies self-consciousness, passing into a state of being in which one is a judge of what is good and what is evil. Animals make no such judgement, they're like 'water in water', they have no sense of themselves as separate individuals. Whereas humans have, not only a sense of self, but also a sense of possessions, of 'me and mine', my family, tribe, and so on - realistically something which evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. From a comment by Zen Roshi Norman Fischer on Georges Battaille:
[quote=Norman Fischer]The animal world is a world of pure being, a world of immediacy and immanence. The animal soul is like “water in water,” seamlessly connected to all that surrounds it, so that there is no sense of self or other, of time, of space, of being or not being. This utopian (to human sensibility, which has such alienating notions) Shangri-La or Eden actually isn’t that because it is characterized at all points by what we’d call violence. Animals, that is, eat and are eaten. For them killing and being killed is the norm; and there isn’t any meaning to such a thing, or anything that we would call fear; there’s no concept of killing or being killed. There’s only being, immediacy, “isness.” Animals don’t have any need for religion; they already are that, already transcend life and death, being and nonbeing, self and other, in their very living, which is utterly pure.
Bataille sees human consciousness beginning with the making of the first tool, the first “thing” that isn’t a pure being, intrinsic in its value and inseparable from all of being. A tool is a separable, useful, intentionally made thing; it can be possessed, and it serves a purpose. It can be altered to suit that purpose. It is instrumental, defined by its use. The tool is the first instance of the “not-I,” and with its advent there is now the beginning of a world of objects, a “thing” world. Little by little out of this comes a way of thinking and acting within thingness (language), and then once this plane of thingness is established, more and more gets placed upon it—other objects , plants, animals, other people, one’s self, a world. Now there is self and other—and then, paradoxically, self becomes other to itself, alienated not only from the rest of the projected world of things, but from itself, which it must perceive as a thing, a possession. This constellation of an alienated self is a double-edged sword: seeing the self as a thing, the self can for the first time know itself and so find a closeness to itself; prior to this, there isn’t any self so there is nothing to be known or not known. But the creation of my me, though it gives me for the first time myself as a friend, also rips me out of the world and puts me out on a limb on my own.
Interestingly, and quite logically, this development of human consciousness coincides with a deepening of the human relationship to the animal world, which opens up to the human mind now as a depth, a mystery. Humans are that depth, because humans are animals, know this and feel it to be so, and yet also not so; humans long for union with the animal world of immediacy, yet know they are separate from it. Also they are terrified of it, for to reenter that world would be a loss of the self; it would literally be the end of me as I know me.
In the midst of this essential human loneliness and perplexity, which is almost unbearable, religion appears. It intuits and imagines the ancient world of oneness, of which there is still a powerful primordial memory, and calls it 'the sacred'. This is the invisible world, world of spirit, world of the gods, or of God. It is inexorably opposed to, defined as the opposite of, the world of things, the profane world of the body, of instrumentality, a world of separation, the fallen world. Religion’s purpose then is to bring us back to the lost world of intimacy, and all its rites, rituals, and activities are created to this end. We want this, and need it, as sure as we need food and shelter; and yet it is also terrifying. All religions have known and been based squarely on this sense of terrible necessity. 1 [/quote]
There's a lot in that, but then the question is a deep question and ought not to be glossed over.
I read the link you were so kind to provide re: naturalistic fallacy and Moore's (I hope I got that right) concept of naturalistic fallacy doesn't seem to be what you're saying above. It's got something to do with notions of "simple ideas" and "complex ideas" which, to my reckoning, are ideas that can't be analyzed into simpler ideas and those that can respectively. You maybe right though and if you are it makes my life easier - I understand it, at least in the way you put it.
Quoting Wayfarer
:up: :clap:
In a sense then we're fully cognizant of our condition - that it's nothing to be proud of - and now the task on our hands is to explain it and thereby hangs a tale. I wonder if it wouldn't be better for us to stop searching for explanations in re our "sinful state" and get to work trying to make things better. Perhaps it's the doctor in all of us - the remedy/cure will work only if we know what the disease is (its cause, its nature) - and so we, with nothing at our disposal except our imagination, the world as it appears to us, our rationality, come up with hypotheses (original sin, karma, moral causation) which though appear fanciful are not completely outside the realm of possibility.
Quoting Wayfarer
William Lane Craig says, in a talk, that this self-awareness amplifies both joy and suffering in a response to question on the moral status of animal pain. Descartes seems to have shared this sentiment but does it hold water?
If memory serves Wikipedia has an entry on how the medical profession (US/UK?) was once of the view that infants don't feel pain - reports, true/false I'm uncertain, indicate that infants were put under the surgeon's knife sans anesthesia. This practice eventually lost credibility but I don't recall there being scientifically validated findings that conclusively proved that infants feel pain i.e. infants can suffer just like adults can.
As far as I can tell, the story of self-awareness and hedonism seems to be neither as simple and nor as obvious as I initially thought. Now, it's true that animals don't seem to give any indication that they're capable of self-awareness and this fact, if true of course, would weaken/destroy my argument which is as follows:
Self-awareness is simply awareness of being aware, the realization that there's something that's aware. It's kinda like, if ever possible, the earth becoming aware of it being the earth, life's only refuge in the solar system. That out of the way, if an organism is to achieve self-awareness, there are two special ingredients that are needed: 1. a brain capable of becoming self aware and 2. an experience in awareness that has a certain quality one of which should be/could be how strong/intense the experience is in terms of how urgently it demands the attention of the brain and, if all goes well, forces the brain to realize that something is happening to it and when this happens, self-awareness is, let's just say, born.
Condition 1, sadly, seems to be present only in humans. Condition 2, however, is interesting to say the least because the only experience that I feel is powerful enough to compel/coerce as it were the brain to think, in the simplest of terms, "something is happening to me (the brain)" is (immense) suffering and even (extreme) joy although I would bet on the former as a better tool to use if our objective is to cause an organism with the adequate mental ability to become self-aware. To get right to the point, what I'm trying to convey here is that suffering may have been the reason why we're self-aware. I wonder what this means for buddhist annata or non-self?
Right - the point being, ‘good’ is a simple idea - it can’t be explained in other terms, for instance, in terms of adaptive fitness. Being a ‘simple idea’ means not being reducible or explainable in other terms. You will note the constantly recurring theme that what society and culture considers to be good, is likely a result of natural selection. This calls that into question.
Quoting TheMadFool
If that is the solution, then why bother with asking the question?
Quoting TheMadFool
Brains are never self-aware. Beings are self-aware.
So here we’re considering in the abstract one of the deepest problems, or the deepest problem, of philosophy.
:ok: Thanks a megaton. My question is why did Moore think good is a simple idea? Does he provide some reasons? What grounded his insight that good can't be expressed in terms of other concepts/ideas? If this were true, it would render the good undefinable in a sense - that's just swapping a problem for another, even bigger, problem.
Quoting Wayfarer
I suppose there's an interpretation within which that makes sense. I wonder what it is.
Anyway, what do you make of my contention that suffering, punctuated by periods of respite, maybe the ultimate reason/cause for self-awareness?
As far as I know, consciousness (awareness) is subdivided into two: 1. Other-awareness an example of which is you being aware of the words on the screen of your computer/phone and 2. Self-awareness which, in my humble opinion, hinges on other-awareness. To illustrate and clarify, first you're aware of the words on the screen of your computer/phone and then you become aware that you're aware of the words on the screen of your computer/phone - that's self-awareness and it depends on other-awareness.
As you might've already figured out, the seed of self-awareness is present in other-awareness for both are essentially awareness. Yet, given from the fact that almost all animals save a few seem to be other-aware but not self-aware, there seems to be a giant chasm between the two subtypes of awareness. This I'll refer to as the other-self gap.
It's my suspicion that when experience (all sensory) is removed, distant, from that which experiences, there really is no reason, no compulsion rather,'to be self-aware. So, for instance, a dog looking at table a few yards away has no reason to be self-aware; the table is, all said and done, not about the dog that sees it and so the dog lacks a good reason to be aware of itself.
Consider now a different situation. The same dog above is being beaten with a stick by a cruel person, there are quite a few walking the streets I believe. The pain and anguish is about the dog itself. The pain and anguish of being beaten then becomes some kind of a bridge, temporary and of questionable worthiness as it maybe, to cross the other-self gap I talked about earlier. Hey presto! and we have self-awareness!
Joy too can perform a similar function, at least in principle but there's something about suffering that makes it a better tool in this respect. Suffering is something you don't want, something you want to put as many miles as possible between you and it and that is, to me, the beginnings of the distinction between self and not-self. Joy tends to erode that distinction; after all, we tend to, as some say, become one with that which makes us happy and so seems inappropriate for the occasion.
More can be said but as of now that's all she wrote.
Because it's simple. Whatever is simple can't be explained in other terms. Like, why does 2 and 2 equal 4? There is no answer to why that is, there's no further explanation. If some kindy child says 'but why, teacher?' answer is, 'just is, kid'.
If you think about that, it also has bearing on the is/ought problem. The is/ought problem is basically about the tension between what can be measured, and what we ought to do.
In classical philosophy, the ability to know 'what is', was itself a virtue - the virtue of sagacity. The sage sees 'what truly is'. In Buddhism, that is yath?bh?ta? ('in reality, in truth, really, definitely, absolutely; as ought to be, truthfully, in its real essence'.) Whereas Hume is at the onset of the Enlightenment, 'what truly is' is 'what can be measured' - only what can be quantified is to be considered, the remainder is private or subjective. There's the problem in a nutshell. All comes down to taking Galilean method as a metaphysic of value, which it isn't.
Your dog examples and 'being beaten' examples are irrelevant to the question.
You blew my mind! How could I ask someone to explain that which that someone asserts is inexplicable? The question is nonsense. It's like asking what's the color of a colorless object? I'll need to carry out my own investigation into the naturalistic fallacy but later, not now. Until then I'm going to run with your take on it. Thanks.
Quoting Wayfarer
Quoting Wayfarer
Ah! Looks like Hume was trying to ground "what is" in science, you know, all that measurement/quantification craze that swept Europe after Newton's principia and the result is science in a deep hypnotic trance - measurement, measurement, and more measurement, almost like being under a witch's spell or suffering from palilalia. I suppose, to be fair to Hume, this couldn't be avoided, it was inevitable but for reasons that I'm presently in the dark about.
Quoting Wayfarer
You maybe right about that but my aim was to explore my view as expressed on the nexus between suffering and the self. After all, it is the self that desires liberation from suffering but, from a certain angle that I attempted to describe with my dog example, it seems to liberate oneself, attain nirvana, is tantamount to surrendering one's self-awareness. The paradox then is, the self wishes to be free of suffering but when the self is free of suffering, the self no longer matters!
Might if I offer by way of an explanation my views on why, and I quote, "...'what truly is' is 'what can be measured'..."?
Firstly, people tend to make the distinction quality vs quantity but, having given this some thought, it seems this particular dichotomy is at its best, a result of our oversight and at its worst, a sign of great confusion.
What do I mean?
Let's look at the words that seem to be of key significance to the issue viz. "more", "same/equal", "less". If you haven't noticed already these are, at their core, quantifying words and what's both amazing about them and germane to the issue at hand is that they seem to be employed everywhere in that insofar as these words are concerned, the quality vs quantity duality is nonexistent. In other words, quantity is quantity, obviously, but, here's where it gets interesting, even quality is quantified.
Secondly, mathematics, the whole notion of measurement, is what gives precision to the words, "more", "same/equal", and "less". Imagine yourself trying to find out which of 2 objects is heavier and you're doing it by how each feels using your hands. If there's a big difference between the weights of these objects, it wouldn't be too much of a task to figure out which object is heavier/lighter. However, if the objects are of very similar even if not equal weight you'll not be able to tell which weighs more/less. Enter mathematics, measurement, and you can solve this problem without the slightest difficulty.
To sum it all up, quantifying seems to be an innate aspect of our nature, probably because reality itself is, either in part or wholly, quantity, and thus Hume's view that 'what is' is 'what can be measured' was inevitable, appropriate, and, most importantly, truthful.
Consider completing the following sentences:
"My happiness is based on ..."
"What I value is based on ..."
Can you complete the sentences in a way that doesn't feel like something is lacking or remiss?
It originates with the techniques used in Galileo's physics and Cartesian algebraic geometery. It's very effective at whatever can be objectivised and quantized. 'But', said Einstein, 'not everything can be counted, and not everything that can be counted, counts'.
That would've resonated with the me of 2 or 3 years ago but I believe Einstein, despite his formidable intellect, goofed up on that score. A thing, anything, is either already quantified or well on its way to being so. Language, the words I mentioned in my previous post, provides the biggest clue that reality is being perceived through the lens of numbers. It's either measurable or its nothing!
As far as it goes. But it doesn't extend to value, which is, after all, the name of the OP.
Good one! However, value is amenable to and is, in my humble opinion, more truthfully described numerically.
Google definition of "value": the numerical amount denoted by an algebraic term; a magnitude, quantity, or number. "the mean value of x"
I don't mean to devalue value by numericizing it but what I'm trying to get across is that value is inherently a measurement for, in my humble opinion, value ultimately boils down to some kind of comparison and that can only be done accurately if we mathematize whatever it is whose value is being considered.
If you don't believe what I'm saying, think of something we consider as possessing value and immediately you'll notice yourself asking, what is its value? which, in itself, is a plea of sorts to mathematize i.e. numerically quantify that value. Furthermore, the next question that naturally follows is, which is more valuable?, this thing that you have valuated or something else which too you have valuated, but that requires numbers to decide.
:grimace:
Quantify that!
I'll take a stab at it if you don't mind.
1. My happiness is based on the value of life. Everything that makes me happy and everything that makes me sad are, in the simplest sense, those which prolong my life and those which shorten it respectively.
2. What I value is based on happiness/suffering but not in the sense that it's happiness/suffering that confers the value to that which I value but that happiness/suffering are an evolutionary tools, fine-tuned over countless generations, that detect things that prolong my life and things that shorten my life, the information thus garnered helping me to survive.
:smile:
Sorry to tick you off but I genuinely believe that everything can be numericized. You've kindly offered some possible areas of reality that aren't amenable to numerical treatment and let's examine them if what you say is true or not.
1. Importance, worth, or usefulness of something. Importance only makes sense if you have some kind of list ordered from most important to least important and that requires numbers: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. Worth is how much is something of value? Notice the "how much" which betrays its true function viz. quantification. Usefulness suggests a range; consider the expressions, "of little use", "very useful" and what'll jump out at you are the words "little" and "very" both quantifiers in their own right.
2. Principles or standards of behavior. This in itself might appear to you as unquantifiable but that's just because we haven't gotten around to doing that. Once we become alert to the fact that different "principles or standards of behavior" are compared to each other with the express intent to discover which among them is the most reasonable, we immediately realize that we need to mathematize them.
What I'm trying to say essentially boils down to a simple truth - any and all values are essentially calls to numericize/mathematize.
It could very well be that I've got the wrong end of the stick but I can't help it, it becomes harder to believe I'm wrong, if language itself is such that quantification is a major aspect of it: Comparative
:ok: See you around!
You've completed the sentences. Are you fully satisifed with the way you did it?
In a way yes but get to the point, what about it bothers you?
Remember, my point that started this was that happiness and value "need to come with a sense of being apriori or else they lose their lustre", ie. a person must have a sense that happiness and value must have something inexplicable about them, must be perceived as axiomatic, otherwise, there's a sense of unsatisfactoriness about them.
Perhaps this doesn't apply to you. But it seems to me that for most people, "peeking behind the courtain" has a demoralizing effect on them.
If I catch your drift, you mean to say that the the question, "why is x of value?", paradoxically, diminshes the value of x; after all, if it has an answer, x is only a means of acquiring the value attributed to it and x isn't an end unto itself. If that's what you mean, you forget or overlook the fact that the "luster" x possesses is given to it by the very thing that makes it "lose luster". A paradox in its own right. It's like Caesar and Brutus: Caesar loved Brutus as a dear friend and drew strength from the friendship between him and Brutus but his last words, according to Shakespeare, were "et tu Brute!"
[i]And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
[b]With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action[/b].[/i]
Whichever way you look at it, it seems to me like you’re trying to justify a value system because it’s a value system. I’m not sure that’s very effective. You’ve already assumed that this hedonic value system exists. It’s like asking: does ‘God’ exist because we look for him, or do we look for ‘God’ because he exists?
I think @Joshs was spot on when he said that “The ways in which we make sense of our world are inherently affective and hedonic”, and @baker was onto something when he said that both sides of the question (happiness and value) rely on a sense of a priori.
Quoting TheMadFool
Your reservation is well-founded. There are so many exceptions to these sweeping generalisations that they lack any sense of accuracy. The experience of sex being “one of the happiest activities for many” is an example of this. Yes, sex can be a momentarily happy experience, but no more so than life in general. It can also be, has been and is, a painful and/or harmful experience for many - and may even be both happy and harmful.
These are not outliers - your rubric is inadequate. Your proposed structure of pro-life or anti-life is qualified by the limited perception of your life. I think I can safely assume that sex is necessarily a happy experience for you, otherwise it doesn’t qualify as ‘sex’. I don’t mean to get personal here - I just wanted to point out that there can be more than a little doubt.
The idea that either things have value because they make us happy, OR things make us happy because they have value, is an oversimplification that attempts to isolate an attribution of value from our limited understanding of reality. Even the simplest explanations of value that may be considered ‘objectively’ accurate have a triadic relational structure at minimum: they are inclusive of an unquantifiable system qualification (‘us’) whose perceived capacity arbitrarily defines or qualifies the upper and lower limits.
So, while we commonly describe value structure as either a plane or a linear range, we need to also account for the qualitative limitations of the system. Pain or harm that threatens the consolidation of life is a qualitative limitation of our organic system, and everyone’s pain threshold varies. Pleasure, too, has an arbitrary upper limit, beyond which any perception of ‘self’ dissolves. But this dissolution of self is not in the same linear range as our pain threshold, qualitatively speaking - and any attempt to reduce it to a single value range (ie. happiness) is fraught with subjective uncertainty.
Not so. I clearly didn't assume the existence of any hedonic or nonhedonic value system, hence the question, do things have value because they make us happy or do things make us happy because they have value?
If things have value because they make us happy then all value, even purportedly nonhedonic ones, ultimately end up being about happiness/suffering - hedonism then pervades everything we think/say/do, hedonism subsumes all there is.
On the other hand, if things make us happy because they have value, hedonism is either an erroneous idea or an incomplete one for there must exist a nonhedonic system of values which supersedes the value of happiness/suffering.
Quoting Possibility
That we do something from habit - one that seems to have been widely prevalent and passed down from parent to offspring not to mention horizontally in worldwide communities - doesn't make it right. Wouldn't that be the fallacy of appeal to tradition? In addition, such a stance begs the question; after all, the question is whether hedonism is a standalone value system that, in a sense, is not a proxy for a value system that's the real McCoy so to speak but one which is concealed for reasons I, as of the moment, can't fathom. Speculative, yes, but not, in my humble opinion, beyond the realm of possibility.
Quoting Possibility
Let's not split hairs on this issue. John Stuart Mill, one of the founders of utilitarianism (hedonic through and through) did all he could do to distance his ethics from pleasures of the flesh - he created, by way of a solution, the distinction higher pleasures (mind) and lower pleasures(body). That Mill had to divorce bodily and mental pleasures like this is a clear indication that sex can, has, and will gum up the works for any philosophy founded on hedonic values that wants to avoid becoming just an excuse to have wild drunken orgies.
Returning to the main issue which is, allow me to reiterate, whether things have value because they make us happy or do things make us happy because they have value?, I'd like to narrate a short story below.
[i]There once was a man, his name was Hedo. Hedo was an average bloke closer to fool than wise but he more than made up for it with his immense wealth. Hedo, despite lacking in the brain department loved art and wanted to create his own private collection in one of his mansions. Unfortunately, he didn't know the difference between good and bad art.
Hedo did what anyone with that much money would do - he hired a local middle-aged art critic called Nism whose task it was to separate the wheat from the chaff in the numerous galleries in the city. A happy partnership most would agree between a man who had the moolah to buy good art but couldn't recognize it and a man who knew good art when he saw one but wasn't rich enough to buy them.
Over the years, the duo - Hedo & Nism - managed to purchase the best the city's artists had to offer. Hedo's art collection became the talk of the town and that filled him and also Nism with great pride and joy.
15 years passed by and then it happened. Unbeknownst to either, Nism's abilities began to decline, age had taken its toll. Nism could no longer assess the quality of an artist's skill as well as when he was younger. Unfortunately, Hedo was still as bad at discerning an artist's talent and execution as he had been but he wasn't in any way bothered by that - Hedo had full faith in Nism's now nonexistent skills.
One hot day in July, Hedo and Nism were on their way to a gallery in which an exhibition was being held. As they were walking down the streets they saw a group of men, women, and children exclaiming loudly and clapping hard. The two decided to investigate. They weaved their way through until they came up to what all the commotion was about - a chimpanzee with half a pencil in its left leg scrawling haphazardly on a blank page torn out of a child's notebook. "Oh! Magnificent! This is art at its finest!" exclaimed Nism euphorically. "You must have this in your collection Hedo," he urged. Hedo didn't hesitate for even a second, looking at the man who looked like the chimp's handler, he asked, "how much for this masterpiece?" The man, realizing an opportunity when he saw one replied, "well, er, $10,000" and threw in "take it or leave" for good measure. Hedo filled out the check and thrust it into the handler's outstretched hand and with utmost care, gently folded the chimp's doodle and deposited it into his velvet-lined breast pocket. Hedo & Nism were never this happy in the so many years they had worked with each other.[/i]
But you can’t deny that the system exists, so it’s only the relational structure between happiness and value that is in question here. You can’t answer this question solely through introspection, though, because there is no introspective position in which what makes us happy does not have value for us. Whereas a position does exist in which what we value does not make us happy, even if we can recall that it did, once.
It isn’t that hedonism is an erroneous or incomplete idea, then, but a limited one. And it isn’t that a nonhedonic system of values supersedes the value of happiness/suffering, but that hedonism is one aspect of a more complex value system - one that extends beyond ‘us’.
Quoting TheMadFool
I’m not talking about habit here, and I’m not talking about what’s right. I’m talking about the basic informative process of an organism. Regardless of what we think, we act based on how we feel and on what benefits the system. It’s the process of informing how we feel - constructing our value systems in such a way that what makes us happy is intertwined with the apparent happiness of ourselves, our parents/offspring, as well as the wider communities with whom we interact - that complicates this hedonic value system.
A child learns the value structures of language initially from their parents, for instance, in differentiating pleasurable interactions by associated sound and movement patterns. All of our value structures are built on this basic ‘hedonic’ system, and all of our intentionality reduces to the ongoing affective state of the organism - to an allocation of attention and effort based on pleasure/displeasure and arousal. That’s not to say that we are ruled by affect or emotion, but rather that affect (an interaction of pleasure/displeasure and arousal) is the base language of consciousness.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that the existence of an hedonic value system does not preclude the existence of a nonhedonic value system - or vice versa.