Analysis Of Hedonism

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Hedonism is a theory of well-being which prioritizes pleasure when determining the value of a life. It does so by expressing that “all and only positive experiences are good for you, and that all and only negative experiences are bad for you” (Gregory, 2015, p. 1). This perspective on well-being aims to describe what is good for us by solely giving importance to conscious experiences. By doing so, it is subject to objections such as Nozick’s experience machine objection (1974, p. 42-45). The objection asks the reader to imagine being plugged into a machine which will give the subject all sorts of pleasures. This is what occurs in the case given for this essay: two people live identical experiences with the difference that one of them is plugged
Supported by authors such as Mill (1863) and Bentham (1789) among others, it provides a perspective on the evaluation of a life. One of the main arguments for hedonism is its plausibility. Pain, suffering, and displeasure are all things that people reject, which can be explained by the fact that they all create bad experiences. It makes hedonism seem plausible since it is applicable to everyday things that cause people pain or pleasure. This point can be doubted since it applies to some cases in particular, but there may be cases where bad experiences could end up being good in a future sense. For example, Nick could be going to university and studying Economics because he believes it will give him more pleasure in the future. If he were to not like Economics, would it imply that his hedonic levels are low and that his life doesn’t have as much value as someone else’s? If it were true, it would be stating that it is not a life’s value that is judged, but only a particular moment in that life. By doing so, it implies that pleasure that’s occurred in the past or will occur in the future is irrelevant to the value of a life. If the previous statement were to be false, then it would suggest that someone’s experience could have more pleasure but not have as much hedonic
They could do this how Gregory explained it, by claiming that a life inside the machine is as valuable as a life outside of it, and that humans are deluded in thinking otherwise because of their moral obligations to other people (p. 119). The issue with this refutation to the objection is that it seems intuitively unconvincing. In spite of that, when the experience machine is compared with Kagan’s businessman (1994, p. 311), this response seems more plausible. Kagan gave the example of a businessman who seemed to have a perfectly enjoyable life but that most of it was fake. The people around him were lying to him about how they felt, making him feel false pleasures. The businessman and the experience machine are two cases which reflect the same idea, so when we utilize the hedonistic objection to the experience machine in the businessman’s context, we are able to analyse it in a different way. In the case of the businessman, his life is as pleasurable as any other, but it’s because of our own moral obligations to others that we’d believe his life is at fault. He is feeling pleasure, and the ones who are not living a pleasurable life would be the people lying to him, since those people aren’t taking pleasure out of living with the businessman, so his life would have the same hedonic level as that of normal

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