Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association
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In Defense of Happiness: a Response to the Experience Machine
In Defense of Happiness: A Response to the Experience Machine Introduction Hedonism has seen better days. As a philosophical doctrine, it flourished in the utilitarian climate maintained by the great nineteenth-century British empiricists Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Henry Sidgwick. And even though utilitarianism continues to hold sway among many contempo rary ethical theorists, its hedonistic foundations have been all but abandoned. Nowadays, most philosophers entertain the idea of hedonism just long enough to dismiss it. Traditionally, hedonism has come in many guises. The term itself is derived from the Greek word hoovi] (hedone), meaning pleasure, and theo ries are hedonistic in virtue of the central role they assign to the notion of pleasure. Psychological hedonism is a view about human motivation. It holds that pleasure is the only possible object of a desire or pursuit. Moral hedon ism contends that pleasure is the only thing one ought to desire or pursue. A third version, rational hedonism, maintains that pleasure is the only thing one has reason to desire and pursue. 1 The most familiar formulation of hedonism, though, and the one with which I am primarily concerned here, is a doctrine about well-being and prudential value. Well-being is itself an elusive concept in need of explanation. An ex haustive and reductive definition is, however, beyond the scope of this essay; I offer instead some synonymous expressions. Although these expressions may not dispel all confusion, they will, I hope, help us recognize what is ascribed to a person when we say that he or she has well-being. -
The Methods of Ethics
The Methods of Ethics Henry Sidgwick Copyright © Jonathan Bennett 2017. All rights reserved [Brackets] enclose editorial explanations. Small ·dots· enclose material that has been added, but can be read as though it were part of the original text. Occasional •bullets, and also indenting of passages that are not quotations, are meant as aids to grasping the structure of a sentence or a thought. Every four-point ellipsis . indicates the omission of a brief passage that seems to present more difficulty than it is worth. Longer omissions are reported between brackets in normal-sized type.—The division of the work into Books, chapters, and numbered sections is Sidgwick’s. —Cross-references follow this system: ‘chapter 3’ means ‘chapter 3 of this Book’. ‘chapter 4.2’ means ‘chapter 4, section 2, of this Book’. ‘II/3’ means ‘Book II, chapter 3’. ‘IV/3.4’ means ‘Book IV, chapter 3, section 4’. An accompanying page-number refers to the page where the passage in question starts.—This version omits most of the 2,000+ cautions that Sidgwick includes, such as ‘I think. ’, ‘I conceive. ’, ‘it seems. ’ and so on. Even with these out of the way, the work doesn’t come across as bullyingly dogmatic.—In this version, most notably on pages 166 and 196, the author addresses the reader (‘you’), but in the original it is always ‘the reader’ and ‘he’.—This version is based on the sixth edition of the work (1901), the last non-posthumous one. The first edition appeared in 1874, the year after Mill died. First launched: October 2011 The Methods of Ethics Henry Sidgwick Contents BOOK I 1 Chapter 1: Introduction........................................................1 Chapter 2: The relation of ethics to politics.............................................7 Chapter 3: Ethical judgments................................................... -
6. Railton's “Alienation, Consequentialism, and the Demands of Morality”
6. Railton’s “Alienation, Consequentialism, and the Demands of Morality” Martín Abreu Zavaleta July 14, 2015 Railton is addressing one kind of problem that we raised. In class, we discussed the case of a parent who is offered a choice between saving the life of her own child or saving the life of another child. Saving the life of the other child would produce overall more utility than saving the life of her own, so utilitarian consequentialism claims that she should save the life of the other child. To many people, this seems to be the wrong result: surely, they think, whatever duty she has to save the life of the other child is overridden by her duties and obligations to save the life of her own child. Samuel Scheffler presents us with a less tragic, but related problem for consequentialism. Schef- fler observes that consequentialism demands that we don’t buy new shoes if we can spend that money in ways that will help other people more, or that we don’t watch TV if instead we could be doing more utility maximizing things. These two cases point to one important problem for consequentialism (here, under the guise of utilitarianism). Consequentialism seems to alienate us from the people we love and from things that make our lives richer. By focusing solely on the maximization of utility, it seems to ignore the value that other things bring into our lives: things like friendship, the love for one’s family, entertainment, art appreciation, etc. A life lived in line with consequentialist demands seems to be a very impoverished life, enslaved to the maximization of utility. -
Paradoxes Situations That Seems to Defy Intuition
Paradoxes Situations that seems to defy intuition PDF generated using the open source mwlib toolkit. See http://code.pediapress.com/ for more information. PDF generated at: Tue, 08 Jul 2014 07:26:17 UTC Contents Articles Introduction 1 Paradox 1 List of paradoxes 4 Paradoxical laughter 16 Decision theory 17 Abilene paradox 17 Chainstore paradox 19 Exchange paradox 22 Kavka's toxin puzzle 34 Necktie paradox 36 Economy 38 Allais paradox 38 Arrow's impossibility theorem 41 Bertrand paradox 52 Demographic-economic paradox 53 Dollar auction 56 Downs–Thomson paradox 57 Easterlin paradox 58 Ellsberg paradox 59 Green paradox 62 Icarus paradox 65 Jevons paradox 65 Leontief paradox 70 Lucas paradox 71 Metzler paradox 72 Paradox of thrift 73 Paradox of value 77 Productivity paradox 80 St. Petersburg paradox 85 Logic 92 All horses are the same color 92 Barbershop paradox 93 Carroll's paradox 96 Crocodile Dilemma 97 Drinker paradox 98 Infinite regress 101 Lottery paradox 102 Paradoxes of material implication 104 Raven paradox 107 Unexpected hanging paradox 119 What the Tortoise Said to Achilles 123 Mathematics 127 Accuracy paradox 127 Apportionment paradox 129 Banach–Tarski paradox 131 Berkson's paradox 139 Bertrand's box paradox 141 Bertrand paradox 146 Birthday problem 149 Borel–Kolmogorov paradox 163 Boy or Girl paradox 166 Burali-Forti paradox 172 Cantor's paradox 173 Coastline paradox 174 Cramer's paradox 178 Elevator paradox 179 False positive paradox 181 Gabriel's Horn 184 Galileo's paradox 187 Gambler's fallacy 188 Gödel's incompleteness theorems -
Obdrzalek, Moral Transformation and the Love of Beauty In
[Penultimate draft; Journal of the History of Philosophy, 2010 (Vol. 48), 415-44] Moral Transformation and the Love of Beauty in Plato's Symposium Suzanne Obdrzalek 1. Introduction On the day Eros was conceived, the gods were having a party to celebrate the birth of Aphrodite. His father-to-be, Poros (resource), was having a grand old time, and in fact got so carried away with the nectar that he passed out cold in Zeus’ garden. His mother-to-be, Penia (poverty), had not made the guest list, and was skulking around the gates. She was poor but cunning, and on seeing Poros sprawled on the ground, hatched a plot to relieve her poverty. She would sleep with him—after all, Poros was too drunk to know what was going on—and conceive a child who would enable her to escape her penury. The name of this child was Eros. This is the story of the origins of erōs which Diotima offers in her speech in the Symposium, and on the face of it, Plato couldn’t have come up with a stranger, more startling myth (203b1–204c6). Love, we learn, is born when a scheming, desperate woman who takes advantage of a drunk man who lies passed-out in the dirt. There is no mention of marriage, the wedding-bed, affection, beauty, even lust—no mention of any of the things which one would ordinarily associate with a myth about the origins of love. Plato is focusing on the seamier side of erōs; his myth describes just the sort of sexual encounter which might make a man mistrust erōs, in which a man is seduced by a cunning woman for the sake of profit. -
The Oberlin Colloquium in Philosophy: Program History
The Oberlin Colloquium in Philosophy: Program History 1960 FIRST COLLOQUIUM Wilfrid Sellars, "On Looking at Something and Seeing it" Ronald Hepburn, "God and Ambiguity" Comments: Dennis O'Brien Kurt Baier, "Itching and Scratching" Comments: David Falk/Bruce Aune Annette Baier, "Motives" Comments: Jerome Schneewind 1961 SECOND COLLOQUIUM W.D. Falk, "Hegel, Hare and the Existential Malady" Richard Cartwright, "Propositions" Comments: Ruth Barcan Marcus D.A.T. Casking, "Avowals" Comments: Martin Lean Zeno Vendler, "Consequences, Effects and Results" Comments: William Dray/Sylvan Bromberger PUBLISHED: Analytical Philosophy, First Series, R.J. Butler (ed.), Oxford, Blackwell's, 1962. 1962 THIRD COLLOQUIUM C.J. Warnock, "Truth" Arthur Prior, "Some Exercises in Epistemic Logic" Newton Garver, "Criteria" Comments: Carl Ginet/Paul Ziff Hector-Neri Castenada, "The Private Language Argument" Comments: Vere Chappell/James Thomson John Searle, "Meaning and Speech Acts" Comments: Paul Benacerraf/Zeno Vendler PUBLISHED: Knowledge and Experience, C.D. Rollins (ed.), University of Pittsburgh Press, 1964. 1963 FOURTH COLLOQUIUM Michael Scriven, "Insanity" Frederick Will, "The Preferability of Probable Beliefs" Norman Malcolm, "Criteria" Comments: Peter Geach/George Pitcher Terrence Penelhum, "Pleasure and Falsity" Comments: William Kennick/Arnold Isenberg 1964 FIFTH COLLOQUIUM Stephen Korner, "Some Remarks on Deductivism" J.J.C. Smart, "Nonsense" Joel Feinberg, "Causing Voluntary Actions" Comments: Keith Donnellan/Keith Lehrer Nicholas Rescher, "Evaluative Metaphysics" Comments: Lewis W. Beck/Thomas E. Patton Herbert Hochberg, "Qualities" Comments: Richard Severens/J.M. Shorter PUBLISHED: Metaphysics and Explanation, W.H. Capitan and D.D. Merrill (eds.), University of Pittsburgh Press, 1966. 1965 SIXTH COLLOQUIUM Patrick Nowell-Smith, "Acts and Locutions" George Nakhnikian, "St. Anselm's Four Ontological Arguments" Hilary Putnam, "Psychological Predicates" Comments: Bruce Aune/U.T. -
List of Paradoxes 1 List of Paradoxes
List of paradoxes 1 List of paradoxes This is a list of paradoxes, grouped thematically. The grouping is approximate: Paradoxes may fit into more than one category. Because of varying definitions of the term paradox, some of the following are not considered to be paradoxes by everyone. This list collects only those instances that have been termed paradox by at least one source and which have their own article. Although considered paradoxes, some of these are based on fallacious reasoning, or incomplete/faulty analysis. Logic • Barbershop paradox: The supposition that if one of two simultaneous assumptions leads to a contradiction, the other assumption is also disproved leads to paradoxical consequences. • What the Tortoise Said to Achilles "Whatever Logic is good enough to tell me is worth writing down...," also known as Carroll's paradox, not to be confused with the physical paradox of the same name. • Crocodile Dilemma: If a crocodile steals a child and promises its return if the father can correctly guess what the crocodile will do, how should the crocodile respond in the case that the father guesses that the child will not be returned? • Catch-22 (logic): In need of something which can only be had by not being in need of it. • Drinker paradox: In any pub there is a customer such that, if he or she drinks, everybody in the pub drinks. • Paradox of entailment: Inconsistent premises always make an argument valid. • Horse paradox: All horses are the same color. • Lottery paradox: There is one winning ticket in a large lottery. It is reasonable to believe of a particular lottery ticket that it is not the winning ticket, since the probability that it is the winner is so very small, but it is not reasonable to believe that no lottery ticket will win. -
The Melbourne Spectrum
Chapter 7 The Melbourne Spectrum T IS an old saying that philosophy begins with a sense of wonder. That is a source of philosophy, but there is another one, the sense Ithat ‘that’s all bullshit (and I can explain why)’. Different philoso- phers draw on these sources in differing proportions. An uncritical sense of wonder leads one out of philosophy altogether, into the land of the fairies, to start angels from under stones, find morals at every turn and hug the rainforest. A philosopher near the other extreme — or one, like David Stove, actually occupying the extreme — will at least still be doing philosophy, but it will consist entirely of criticism of others. In the Australian intellectual tradition, the wonder/criticism mix varies not only according to individuals but according to cities. At least, it has since 1927, when John Anderson arrived in Australia and Sydney and Melbourne set off on different paths. Various writers, mainly from Melbourne, have discoursed at some length on the con- trasts between the two cities in their styles of thought, and with all due allowance made for the hot air factor, there is undoubtedly some distinct difference to be identified. Where Sydney intellectuals, fol- lowing Anderson, tend to be critical, pessimistic, classical and opposed to ‘meliorist’ schemes to improve society, Melbourne’s unctuous bien pensants are eager to ‘serve society’, meaning, to instruct the great and powerful how they ought to go about achieving Progress and the perfection of mankind.1 Manning Clark — and it is characteristic of 1 J. Docker, Australian Cultural Elites: Intellectual Traditions in Sydney and Melbourne (Sydney, 1974); V. -
Hedonism Reconsidered
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Vol. LXXII1, No. 3, November 2006 Hedonism Reconsidered ROGER CRISP St Anne’s College, Oxford Tlus paper is a plea for hedonism to be taken more seriously. It begins by charting hedonism’s decline, and suggests that this is a result of two major objections: the claim that hedonism is the ‘philosophy of swine’, reducing all value to a single common denominator, and Nozick’s ‘experience machine’ objection. There follows some eluci- dation of the nature of hedonism, and of enjoyment in particular. Two types of theory of enjoyment are outlined-internalism, according to which enjoyment has some special ’feeling tone’, and externalism, according to which enjoyment is any kind of experience to which we take some special attitude, such as that of desire. Internalism-the tradi- tional view-is defended against current externalist orthodoxy. The paper ends with responses to the philosophy of swine and the experience machine objections. 1. Hedonism’s Decline Hedonism has a distinguished philosophical history. It was central in ancient philosophy. One interpretation of Plato’s Protugorus has Socrates defending the view, and it is taken seriously in many other dialogues, including the Philebus and the Republic. Aristotle analyses it closely in his Ethics. It was defended vigorously by the Epicureans and Cyrenaics, and attacked equally vigorously by the Stoics. More recently, hedonism was the standard view of the British empiricists from Hobbes to J.S. Mill.’ In the twentieth century, however, hedonism became significantly less popular. There are at least three reasons for this. First, Mill’s attempt to deal with the objection that hedonism was the ‘philosophy of swine’, using his distinction between higher and lower pleasures, was thought to be either an ’ See esp. -
Hedonism and Indian Philosophy of Peace: an Examination
IDEA – Studia nad strukturą i rozwojem pojęć filozoficznych XXIX/1 Białystok 2017 Aditya Kumar Gupta, Kanika Saraf (Delhi, Indie) HEDONISM AND INDIAN PHILOSOPHY OF PEACE: AN EXAMINATION Human being,like other animals,is a creature who desires pleasure and avoids pain.It is natural for a man to avail or allow only those moments which give pleasure to him and to go away from moments of pain. But despite being pleasure-loving, what do we get in the end?, Do we remain happy after we get pleasure?.Why is it so that a pleasure creates a type of boredom after some time which, later on, develops the desire for another or higher pleasures?What is the mystery of human life -we seek pleasure but remain unsatisfied even after we get it? The Proposed article is the critical study of hedonism in the light of Indian philosophy of Renunciation and Peace. The term ‘Hedonism’ comes from Latin term ‘ Hedone ’, which means pleas- ure. This is the philosophy which believes in pleasure as the aim of life and of any particular human action. Why do we do any particular task which is volun- tary in nature?; What do we want to get in the end? Hedonists answer these questions in one word- pleasure. Here by ‘pleasure’ they mean sensual pleasures which include even mental pleasure 1. There are six commonly accepted sense organs-Eyes, Ears, Nose, Skin, Tongue and Mind. Pleasure is always associated with these six sense organs. Hedonism is based on two assumptions,-a metaphysical and a psychologi- cal. According to Metaphysical assumption, self or mind is purely sensuous in nature, a series of sensations, feelings, appetites, and instincts. -
An Exclusive Interview with Sir Peter Ustinov
Is There a Need for An Exclusive FM'M? Interview with Sir Peter Ustinov Are daydreams, by Warren Allen Smith illusions, and religious beliefs an escape from Remembering reality, or bene- ficial tools for World War II dealing with life? Racial Superiority and `Ethnic Cleansing' The Wandering Jew by Martin Gardner Editor: Paul Kurtz SUMMER 1995, VOL. 15, NO. 3 ISSN 0272-0701 r- PreS1.re I Contents C Senior Editors: Vern Bullough, Thomas W. Flynn, Gerald Larue, Gordon Stein 3 LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Executive Editor: Timothy J. Madigan Managing Editor: Andrea Szalanski 5 An Exclusive Interview with Contributing Editors: Robert S. Alley, Joe E. Barnhart, David Berman, Peter Ustinov Warren Allen Smith H. James Birx, Jo Ann Boydston, Bonnie Bullough, Paul Edwards, Albert Ellis, Roy P. Fairfield, Charles 8 EDITORIALS W. Faulkner, Antony Flew, Levi Fragell, Adolf Grünbaum, Marvin Kohl, Jean Kotkin, Thelma Agenda for the Humanist Movement in the Twenty-First Century, Paul Lavine, Tibor Machan, Ronald A. Lindsay, Michael Martin, Delos B. McKown, Lee Nisbet, John Novak, Kurtz / True Believers and Utter Madness, James A. Naught I Right to Skipp Porteous, Howard Radest, Robert Rimmer, Die: The Battle Is Joined, Ronald A. Lindsay Michael Rockier, Svetozar Stojanovic, Thomas Szasz, V. M. Tarkunde, Richard Taylor, Rob Tielman 15 Humanist Potpourri Warren Allen Smith Associate Editors: Molleen Matsumura, Lois Porter 19 Editorial Associates: REMEMBERING WORLD WAR II Doris Doyle, Thomas Franczyk, Roger Greeley, 19 Racial Superiority and `Ethnic Cleansing' Revisited Paul Kurtz James Martin-Diaz, Steven L. Mitchell, Warren Allen Smith 20 Why I Am Immune to Mysticism Paul A. -
Plato the Hedonist?
Plato, The Hedonist? by Brooks A. Sommerville A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Philosophy University of Toronto © Copyright by Brooks A. Sommerville 2014 Plato, The Hedonist? Brooks A. Sommerville Doctor of Philosophy Department of Philosophy University of Toronto 2014 Abstract Most moral philosophers agree that a happy life involves pleasure in some way. Some go so far as to claim that pleasure alone is what makes a life happy or worthwhile. In either case, it seems that any complete account of a desirable life owes us an explanation as to what pleasure is. So, what is pleasure? As the history of moral philosophy attests, answering this question turns out to be surprisingly difficult. Although we all experience pleasures of various kinds, it is by no means clear that a unified account can cover all the things we take to be pleasant. This conceptual question about pleasure has clear implications for the distinct ethical question of pleasure’s value. In short, if we don’t know what pleasure is, then it isn’t at all clear why we should value it. Plato appreciates this. Pleasure’s place in the good life is one of Plato’s enduring ethical concerns, and so it should come as no surprise that he also undertakes to develop a unified account of pleasure. My aim in this dissertation is to argue that Plato arrives at a definitive answer as to what pleasure is, and that this helps us to understand his considered view as to pleasure’s role in the happy life.