“Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life, preprogramming your life’s desires? … Of course, while in the tank you won’t know that you’re there; you’ll think it’s all actually happening … Would you plug in? What else can matter to us, other than how our lives feel from the inside?”
The creator of this thought experiment from 1974, the US philosopher Robert Nozick, thinks that the answers to his closing questions are, respectively, “No” and “A lot.” Superficially, the experience machine looks a lot like Putnam’s vat (see The brain in a vat). Both describe virtual realities in which a world is simulated in such a way that it is completely indistinguishable, from the inside at least, from real life. But while Putnam’s interest is in the situation of the brain within the vat and what that tells us about the limits of skepticism, Nozick’s main concern is with the situation of a person before they are attached to his machine: would they choose a life plugged into the machine and, if they did, what can we learn from their choice?
“Between grief and nothing I will take grief.”
William Faulkner, 1939
The choice is between a simulated life of unalloyed pleasure in which every ambition and desire is achieved; and a real life marked by all the expected frustrations and disappointments, the usual mixture of partial successes and unfulfilled dreams. In spite of the obvious attractions of life attached to the experience machine, most people, Nozick thinks, would choose not to be plugged into it. The reality of life is important: we want to do certain things, not only experience the pleasure of doing them. Yet, if pleasure were the only thing affecting our well-being, if it were the sole constituent of the good life, surely we would not make this choice, since far more pleasure would be had by being plugged into the experience machine. From this, Nozick infers that there are other things apart from pleasure that we consider intrinsically valuable.
Classical utilitarianism This conclusion is damaging to any hedonistic (pleasure-based) theory of ethics, and in particular to utilitarianism, at least in the classic formulation given by its founder Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. Utilitarianism is the view that actions should be judged right or wrong to the extent that they increase or decrease human well-being or “utility.” Several interpretations of utility have been proposed since Bentham’s time, but for him it consisted in human pleasure or happiness, and his theory of right action is sometimes summarized as the promotion of “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.”
“Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do.”
Jeremy Bentham, 1785
Utilitarianism doesn’t shy away from moral conclusions that run counter to our normal intuitions. Indeed, one of its chief recommendations for Bentham was that it would provide a rational and scientific basis for moral and social decision-making, in contrast to the chaotic and incoherent intuitions on which so-called natural rights and natural law were based. In order to establish such a rational basis, Bentham proposed a “felicific calculus,” according to which the different amounts of pleasure and pain produced by different actions could be measured and compared; the right action on a given occasion could then be determined by a simple process of addition and subtraction. Thus for Bentham different pleasures differ only in respect of duration and intensity, not in quality; a rather monolithic conception of pleasure that looks vulnerable to the implications of Nozick’s experience machine. Given his uncompromising nature, we may guess that Bentham would have happily trampled on the intuition that Nozick’s thought experiment draws out. J.S. Mill, however, another of utilitarianism’s founding fathers, was more concerned to knock off some of the theory’s rougher edges.
Utilitarianism is, historically, the most significant version of consequentialism, the view that actions should be judged right or wrong in the light of their consequences (see Ends and means). In the case of utilitarianism, the value of actions is determined by their contribution to well-being or “utility.” In the classical (hedonic) utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill, utility is understood as human pleasure, but this has since been modified and broadened in various ways. These different approaches typically recognize that human happiness depends not only on pleasure but also on the satisfaction of a wide range of desires and preferences. Some theorists have also proposed extending the scope of utilitarianism beyond human well-being to other forms of sentient life.
There are also different views on how utilitarianism is to be applied to actions. According to direct or act utilitarianism, each action is assessed directly in terms of its own contribution to utility. In contrast, according to rule utilitarianism, an appropriate course of action is determined by reference to various sets of rules which will, if generally followed, promote utility. For instance, killing an innocent person might in certain circumstances lead to the saving of many lives and hence increase general utility, so for the act utilitarian this would be the right course of action. However, as a rule killing innocent people decreases utility, so the rule utilitarian might hold that the same action was wrong, even though it might have beneficial consequences on a particular occasion. Rule utilitarianism may thus accord more closely with our common intuitions on moral matters, though this has not necessarily commended it to most recent utilitarian thinkers, who for various reasons regard it as incoherent or otherwise objectionable.
Higher and lower pleasures Contemporary critics were quick to point out just how narrow a conception of morality Bentham had given. By supposing that life had no higher end than pleasure, he had apparently left out of the reckoning all sorts of things that we would normally count as inherently valuable, such as knowledge, honor and achievement; he had proposed (as Mill reports the charge) “a doctrine worthy only of swine.” Bentham himself, in splendidly egalitarian fashion, confronted the accusation head-on: “Prejudice apart,” he declared, “the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry.” In other words, if a greater overall quantity of pleasure was produced by playing a popular game, that game was indeed more valuable than the more refined pursuits of the intellect.
“Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.”
J.S. Mill, 1859
Mill was uncomfortable with Bentham’s forthright conclusion and sought to modify utilitarianism to deflect the critics’ charge. In addition to Bentham’s two variables in measuring pleasure—duration and intensity—Mill allowed a third—quality—thereby introducing a hierarchy of higher and lower pleasures. According to this distinction, some pleasures, such as those of the intellect and the arts, are by their nature more valuable than base physical ones, and by giving them greater weight in the calculus of pleasure, Mill was able to conclude that “the life of Socrates dissatisfied is better than that of a fool satisfied.” This accommodation is made at some cost, however. At the very least, one of the apparent attractions of Bentham’s scheme—its simplicity—is diminished, although the operation of the felicific calculus is in fact fraught with difficulty in any case. More seriously, Mill’s notion of different kinds of pleasure seems to require some criterion other than pleasure to tell them apart. If something other than pleasure is a constituent of Mill’s idea of utility, it may help him in resisting the kind of problem raised by Nozick, but it then becomes questionable whether his theory remains strictly utilitarian at all.
the condensed idea
Is happiness enough?
| Timeline | |
|---|---|
| c.AD1260 | Acts and omissions |
| 1739 | Hume’s guillotine |
| 1785 | Ends and means |
| 1974 | The experience machine |
| 1981 | The brain in a vat |