What’s the best philosophy to live your life by that would guarantee you the highest
state of well-being and satisfaction possible? What philosophy or idea comes the closest
to helping one, as philosophers say, live the good life? Well, one idea is called Preference
Hedonism, a theory of well-being by philosopher Derek Parfit. This philosophy isn’t like
the hedonism you’re accustomed to, where one strives for pleasure and avoids pain,
but a contemporary idea that expands upon this initial concept that’s very intriguing.
In this video, I’ll go over what Preference Hedonism is, then analyze if this is really
the best philosophy to live by that makes one’s life go best.
To explain what Preference Hedonism is, we first have to distinguish it from regular
hedonism or also referred to as Prudential Hedonism.
The Prudential-Hedonist’s view is that life goes better if it is more pleasurable and
less painful.
Pleasure meaning when we feel good. Pleasure can have quantitative aspects to it like duration,
intensity, certainty, and more, as philosopher Jeremy Bentham wrote. Or, pleasure can have
qualitative aspects meaning the type we’re experiencing or want to experience, as John
Stuart Mill wrote.
Although you’ve probably encountered pure hedonists in your life, Prudential Hedonism
as a whole is sort of a dead-end in philosophy for living a good life.
One of the most famous hedonism killers was Harvard philosopher Robert Nozik and his ‘Experience
Machine’ thought experiment.
Nozick asks us if there was a machine called ‘the experience machine,’ something you
can plug your brain into that would simulate the happiest reality possible for you, and
you wouldn’t remember you plugged into it would you plug into it? Think like the Matrix
where you’re a living like a blob hooked up to a computer simulator.
According to Prudential Hedonism, you would want to since you’re experiencing more happy
chemicals like dopamine, oxytocin, and happy feelings during your life. But Nozick says
none of us would really hook up if given a chance, which shows there’s more to life
than just pleasure.
We want to do and achieve certain things, he writes, instead of just experience them.
We want to live our real lives and be a certain kind of person, instead of a blob of matter
connected to a device.
When he outlined theories of well-being in his book Reason’s and Persons, Derek Parfit
was also thinking along this line and suggested that what we’ve been defining as pleasure
and satisfaction hasn’t been clear from the start.
After all, we often pick things to experience in life that don’t give us pleasure over
those that do, like choosing to watch a sad drama over a comedy or attending a funeral
for a loved one. We’re fulfilling our desire here, but yet it’s not hedonistic and pleasure
seeking. He writes,
‘Compare the pleasures of satisfying an intense thirst or lust, listening to music,
solving an intellectual problem, reading a tragedy, and knowing that one’s child is
happy. These various experiences do not contain any distinctive common quality.’
In the place of Prudential Hedonism, he suggests Preference Hedonism. On this view, one’s
life goes better if it contains more experiences of the kind that one desires.
Prudential or Narrow Hedonism focuses just on pleasure sensations, but Preference Hedonism
contains anything we desire at the moment to experience. The greatness of pleasure,
on this view, is proportional to the strength of one’s desire to have that experience.
Now, just to be clear, Preference Hedonism is not the same thing as Desire Satisfaction
Theory or Success Theory that I covered in a previous video.
While Desire Satisfaction Theory appeals to all of our preferences about our own lives,
Preference Hedonism appeals only to preferences about those features of our lives that we
know about or are discernible.
He gives this example:
“Suppose that I strongly want not to be deceived by other people. On Preference Hedonism,
it will be better for me if I believe that I am not being deceived. It will be irrelevant
if my belief is false, since this makes no difference to my state of mind. On the Success
Theory, it will be worse for me if my belief is false.”
With Preference Hedonism, if we really want to feel sad, cry, or suffer, that’s OK,
and choosing the experience that gives us the desired mental state will help us live
the best life we can
The first objection to Preference Hedonism that comes to mind is doing whatever you want
leads us down the same route as regular hedonism. You’ll be living a self-centered, unfulfilling
life since you only care about yourself and what you want.
But consider the following example.
Say you’ve been giving a choice between a decadent cruise to the Bahamas or volunteering
to clean an animal shelter. A traditional hedonist would choose the cruise. But now,
with Preference Hedonism, if volunteering and helping others gives you the most desired
mental state over what a cruise could give you, you should do that. According to the
this philosophy, you should skip the cruise for the highest state of well-being if you
want to feel like a good person even though there will be grueling, pain-producing work
involved in volunteering.
But what about Nozick's experience machine? Does the experience machine thought experience
kill off this type of hedonism, too?
Some philosophers would say yes because while it’s true you can have any experience you
want, that doesn’t mean you’ll live a life that’s good.
We would still want to stay out of the experience machine even if we have a strong desire to
go in it because again, it’s not real life, just fake fantasy.
But, hold on a second.
Who exactly is determining what a good life is? It certainly seems like an outside ‘expert,’
or Nozick himself is determining for someone else that entering the experience machine
means they will be living a bad life.
He’s not referencing that person's mental state, and only that person gets to decide
if a life lived in the experience machine was worth it or not.
Perhaps some people have a strong desire not to enter the experience machine and instead
form meaning for themselves in the real world, according to Preference Hedonism.
But for others, they are suffering so much in real life that hooking up the machine may
produce a much better, fulfilling life in the end, even if it were pure fantasy, so
why not fulfill that desire?
Who is Nozick to say that their life wasn’t made much better because of his machine? Can
he read their mind and experience what they experience? Of course not.
However, let’s say in an attempt to prove Preference Hedonism wrong, Nozick constructs
and executes a scheme that gets us addicting to drugs.
Each day we wake up with a desire for the drug he got us addicted to and give us until
we die. Does that make for a good life even though we fulfilled our preferences each day.
This was a preference in which we had no say in.
But, it’s possible one day, we may wake up with a second desire to get off drugs and
do something more meaningful with our lives that may be greater than our 1st desire for
our regular fix. According to Preference-Hedonism, this second desire outweighs the first. We
can eventually seek rehab and get off drugs despite still desiring to do the addicting
pleasure-inducing drug.
So, that thought experiment doesn’t work either.
Is Preference Hedonism as of today the best philosophy for a good life? Is there anyone
out there who has a good counter? Well, there is one guy, and his name was Derek Parfit.
Toward the end of this essay on well-being, Parfit briefly suggested another type of theory
of well-being that could trump Preference Hedonism, he didn’t say it necessarily did,
which I’ll get into in the next video.
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