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Motivational Tranquility: A Theory of Value and Welfare

Alexander R. Velichkov (student number: 10525475)

MA Philosophy Thesis

Supervisor: Dr. Beate Roessler

Second Reader: Dr. Thomas Nys

17 August, 2018

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Table of Contents

Introduction 4 Chapter 1: Valuing 7 1.1 Intrinsic and extrinsic values 7 1.2 Values as preferences 8

1.3 Valued and valuable objects 10

1.4 The mind dependency of values 12

Chapter 2: The TTT and TTTV 15

2.1 The Tranquility and Turmoil Theory (TTT) 15

2.2 The meaning of motivational tranquility 18 2.3 How tranquility determines choice 21

2.4 Tranquilitism and hedonism 22

2.5 The Tranquility and Turmoil Theory of Value (TTTV) 25

Chapter 3: The TTTW 28 3.1 Welfare as quality of subjective experience 28

3.2 The Tranquility and Turmoil Theory of Welfare (TTTW) 30 3.2 Against desire satisfactionism 32

3.3 Welfare and the good life 34 Chapter 4: Objections 36

4.1 The static life 36

4.2 False pleasures 38

4.3 Worthless and offensive pleasures 40 4.4 The experience machine 41

4.5 Artificial tranquility 43 Velichkov 3

Conclusion 45

Appendix A: The Paradox of Hedonism 46

References 47

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Motivational Tranquility: A Theory of Value and Welfare

Introduction

When a person looks back at the good moments in her life, what would she see? Perhaps she would recall moments of calm appreciation, such as when she marveled at the world from a mountaintop or when she saw her newborn baby for the first time. Or she would think of all the moments when she was performing at her best, such as when she scored the winning goal in that football match during her years in college. Maybe among her memories would pop up all the times when she celebrated her birthday with her family and friends, or when she had her first kiss, or when she fulfilled her dream of visiting the Carnival in Rio de Janeiro. These perfect moments are different in many ways; they include physical exertion and serenity, and encompass a wide range of emotions, such as love, meaningfulness, achievement, awe, and inspiration. Yet, despite their differences, the good moments in one’s life somehow seem to share something that makes them good. But what could this feature (or features) be?

Philosophy has seen various attempts at answering this question, with two of the most well- known ethical theories about the good life from a subjective point of view being desire satisfactionism and hedonism. The former claims that a life is good to the extent that one’s desires are satisfied (Carson, 2000; Heathwood, 2017), while the latter claims that a life is good to the extent that it contains a positive balance of pleasure over pain (Bentham, 1789; Feldman, 2004; Mill, 1863/2001; Sidgwick, 1907/1982). Neither theory is decisive. Both contain truth, but both have their problems, too.

In this thesis, I will try to further the study of the good life by departing from the metrics of desire satisfaction and pleasure. I will ask the question “How can the quality of subjective experience be measured?” and will propose that, for a given subject, the goodness of a moment is inversely proportional to the subject’s need to escape it. Thus, the quality of a conscious experience can be graded on what I shall call the tranquility scale: the more one feels a need to escape the present moment, the more one is in motivational turmoil; the more one is content with it, the more one is in motivational tranquility. This scale allows to group together all the various phenomenological feelings of human life based on whether they increase or decrease one’s need to change the present moment.

Having a metric of good experience can also be applied on a topic that is related to, yet distinct from welfare: the study of values. Value ethics can be approached in different ways. One is to ask “Which objects have value?” Besides being theories of welfare, desire satisfactionism and hedonism can be used to answer this question, too. While hedonism is a monist theory, arguing that there is only one thing of value – pleasure – desire satisfactionism argues that there are many things of value, but they are such in virtue of their ability to satisfy one’s desires. Besides Velichkov 5 desire satisfactionism, there are also other pluralist theories of value that try to list various objective or subjective values, such as knowledge, justice, or human flourishing (Kraut, 2009; Parfit, 1984; Ross, 1930).

A different question one could ask has to do with the ontological status of values: “Can judgments about value be true, or are they simple expressions of emotion?” This has sparked the cognitivist/non-cognitivist debate in philosophy. Cognitivists argue that the claim “A is good” can be a true fact (Moore, 1903, Shafer-Landau, 2003; Smith, 1991), while non- cognitivists deny it, for example by trying to show that this statement is just an expression of emotion or attitude (Ayer, 1952; Blackburn, 1993; Harman, 1977), or that such a statement can never be true (Mackie, 1977).

I will apply the tranquility scale to explicate the nature of values by asking a somewhat different question: “What does it mean for a subject to value an object?” This line of enquiry is not unconnected to the previous two ones, but its focus is on the subjective experience of valuing, rather than on the objects of value or on statements about value. Using the tranquility scale and a couple of useful distinctions, I will show what happens in mental life when a subject values an object. I will argue that the currency of one’s set of values is tranquility.

In sum, the products of this thesis are: 1) a conceptual tool, the tranquility scale, which I will use for 2) an inquiry into the nature of valuing, and 3) an inquiry into the nature of welfare. I will thus be treating welfare and value as separate topics, but will also try to show how they relate to each other.

In chapter 1, I will prepare the ground by outlining a framework for discussing the values. Here I will argue that valuing an object necessarily expresses a commitment to choose this object.

Next, in chapter 2, I will introduce the tranquility scale through the Tranquility and Turmoil Theory (TTT) and will show how it relates to hedonism. I will then apply the TTT on the question of values by constructing the Tranquility and Turmoil Theory of Value (TTTV), which describes what happens in mental life when preferring an object. If the idea of an object brings with it more tranquil feelings than its absence, then this object is preferable, and can therefore qualify for a valued object.

In chapter 3, I go into the other area in which the TTT can be of explanatory value, namely the ethics of welfare. Here I develop the Tranquility and Turmoil Theory of Welfare (TTTW), which states that a good conscious experience is one of tranquility, i.e. one that the subject does not want to escape. Because the TTT allows to grade conscious experiences in detail, as it looks at them moment per moment, I will show how the TTT has an advantage over desire satisfactionist theories of welfare. Velichkov 6

In chapter 4, I test the TTT, TTTV, and TTTW with a few well-known thought experiments from the literature on mental state theories of value and welfare. This has a triple purpose: first, to check the plausibility of the theories proposed in this thesis; second, to show how value and welfare interrelate; and third, to provide new points of view on mental state theories of value and welfare as a whole.

Finally, in Appendix A, I make a suggestion for how the TTT can be used to approach the paradox of hedonism, a well-known problem in the study of pleasure.

Because this is a work in philosophy, I utilize many of the methods contained in The Philosopher’s Toolkit (Baggini & Fosi, 2010). I primarily rely on conceptual analysis in order to identify necessary conditions for certain key concepts. The tranquility scale is constructed as a result of such conceptual analysis, as it recognizes that phenomenological feels contain in them varying degrees of the motivation to escape them. The conceptual analyses are based in turn on the intuitive meaning of words in ordinary language.

One of my main tasks in this work is to reach more detailed accounts of value and welfare. An important method for this purpose is to resolve ambiguities through drawing conceptual distinctions. Throughout the course of this work, I distinguish between motivational tranquility and other types of tranquility; the strength of motives and their success in resulting in action; valued and valuable objects; actual and total welfare; the life of welfare and the valued life. Among other things, I use these distinctions to offer ways for reconciling subjectivist and objectivist theories of value and welfare. I cannot avoid facing the objective/subjective divide in ethics, and I do my best to be as precise as possible by doing justice to both sides.

Finally, I put my findings to the test by analyzing a couple of thought experiments. I offer different interpretations of these thought experiments in order to cover as much ground as possible and leave no important possibilities unchecked.

This thesis is intended as a study in metaethics, as its purpose is to clarify the meaning of ethical concepts, rather than using them to argue for what ought to be done. The tranquilitist theories I offer are thus primarily a descriptive endeavor: I conceptually categorize conscious experiences based on motivation, which I then use to describe the act of valuing and to suggest a measure of welfare. My main focus is not on normativity – I do not go into detail on moral rightness and moral responsibility, for example – but normative considerations cannot be completely avoided. The theory of good conscious experience I offer is at least implicitly normative, as it suggests what kind of life ought to be promoted if we are concerned about people’s welfare.

Furthermore, the theories I will develop in this work are not intended to serve as the exclusive way of approaching the topics of value and welfare, but as a conceptual lens that provides new points of view and avenues of interpretation. For example, I believe one of the main Velichkov 7 contributions of this work is its opening up of new possibilities for deepening the study of hedonism and helping to face its challenges, such as the hedonic tone problem or what is known as the paradox of hedonism. Most importantly, the tranquility scale aims at clarifying one of the oldest and biggest questions in philosophy: “What is a good life?” by breaking it up into smaller questions, the main one of which is “What is a good conscious moment?”

Chapter 1: Valuing

Before going into the main theories of this work, I must set the foundations for talking about the complex issue of values. I will first present the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic values, and will then suggest that valuing an object necessarily expresses a commitment to a preference. Finally, I will clarify the metaphysical assumptions behind my discussion on values.

1.1 Intrinsic and extrinsic values

In axiology, a usual line of division is between intrinsic and extrinsic values (Shafer-Landau, 2014). Extrinsic values derive their worth from being a means to some further end, while intrinsic values contain their worth in themselves. Consider this example: for Sarah, the library is valuable because it allows her to read books, and she values books because they allow her to learn. Why does she want to learn? Well, there is no further reason in sight; she likes learning just because it engages her. On this line of thought, libraries and books are means to some further end. If all books were uploaded on the Internet and made freely available, the library Sarah goes to would lose a lot of its value. Similarly, if Sarah came to prefer instructional videos to books because the former do a better job at conveying information, then books would lose a lot of their appeal as well. Sarah values libraries and books extrinsically, as links in the chain that leads to learning. If she found a better alternative method of learning, she would have chosen it instead.

It appears, then, that there is a property that all extrinsically valuable things share. If something can be replaced, its value lies outside it. If textbooks can be replaced with e-books, videos, or lectures, then they are a means to an end. In the words of Immanuel Kant (1785/2002), extrinsic values have a price:

In the realm of ends everything has either a price or a dignity. What has a price is such that something else can also be put in its place as its equivalent; by contrast, that which is elevated above all price, and admits of no equivalent, has a dignity. (p. 52, emphasis in original)

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While it seems fairly obvious that means to some end indeed have a price and can be substituted by other means if they still bring about that end, matters get more intricate when it comes to intrinsic values. Do they have this inability to be traded off, this dignity which Kant mentions, or can they also be substituted? Can Sarah find another activity that can take the place of learning – say, creating art? The answer depends on the answers of still further questions. Is learning the thing that she values intrinsically or is it the enjoyment that learning brings her? Are there even such things as intrinsically valuable things, and if so, are there different types or dimensions of value? This and the following chapter will be devoted to addressing these questions.

1.2 Values as preferences

A good place to begin is to analyze what is meant when somebody says that they value an object. In this section I will suggest that a necessary condition for something to be a valued object is that it entails a commitment to a certain preference. This is most obviously the case when I state that I value A more than B. From this follows that given a choice between A and B, I would choose A. If I say that I value reading books more than watching films, then given the option to do either, I would go with reading a book. Of course, if I am tired, or if I am with friends who insist on watching films together, that would weigh in favor of B. These scenarios, however, introduce various other values – spending time with friends, getting enough rest – that distort the scales. This is why it would be appropriate to say that if the only conflict of values is between A and B (and not between A and B and D and C), and I value A more than B, I would choose A. Furthermore, the moment of choosing must happen in normal circumstances: if I am, for example, drugged, confused, or in a panic, that would also weigh in on the scales. Put in another way, valuing A more than B entails a commitment to choose A over B if the moment of choosing happens in normal circumstances1.

What about a claim such as “I value A"? Saying that Stephie values spending time playing the guitar does not at first glance seem to express a relation between different values. However, a person saying that A is valuable for her is expressing, though implicitly, some kind of relation of preference between objects. To make this explicit, one can ask Stephie “How much do you value spending time playing the guitar? Do you value it more than spending time cooking? Or more than spending time with your brother?” Questions like these show that Stephie is logically committed to making explicit some kind of hierarchy of preferences. She may value playing the guitar more than cooking, but not more than spending time with her brother. There is, then, no

1 For simplicity’s sake, I will not go into detail about what counts as normal circumstances. I will just assume that when a person says that they value A over B, they mean that they would choose A under some set of reasonable conditions. Another way of looking at the issue is to say that valuing expresses second-order desires (Frankfurt, 1971): that is, if I value A over B, I want to be able to choose A over B, even if, for example, my desire for a certain drug C overrides my ability to choose A. Velichkov 9 such thing as valuing simpliciter. Valuing A always presupposes some kind of relation between objects. At the very least, valuing A implies valuing A more than not-A, because It would be a contradiction to say that I value both A and the absence of A. I cannot value both freedom and the absence of freedom any more than I can value the existence of Bach music and the nonexistence of Bach music.

A possible objection to this view on values is that some objects are so valuable that they are beyond preference. Going back to the Kantian terminology from the previous section, certain things, such as humanity, have dignity (Kant, 1785/2002, p. 53). For example, one could believe that if A and B are human beings, it would be impossible to choose saving the life of one over the life of another based on considerations of value. Yet, the existence of dignified objects does not weaken the idea that values entail commitments to preferences, because it is not a problem to say that if I value A and B as dignified objects, i.e., they are not susceptible to substitution, then when I am faced with a choice, I would not be able to make a decision. Many problems in value ethics arise when objects are of more or less equal value, or of incommensurable value, or beyond any value. In such cases, this simply translates into not being able to choose one object over the other in any reasonable way. The main proposition still stands. if I value A more than B, then I am committed to choosing A over B, with this special case added: If I cannot compare A and B in terms of value, then I cannot commit to preferring one way or the other.

It is important to emphasize that I propose that expressing commitments to preferences is a necessary – and not sufficient – component of what it is to be a valued object. Maybe not all objects of preference are being valued, and if that is the case, there also need to be other features of objects of value which make them such. Alternatively, maybe the difference between valued objects and preferred objects is simply a matter of degree. If I always choose salad over soup, does that mean I value salad? Maybe yes, I value salad in the same way I value world piece, but to a substantially lesser degree; or maybe not, because there is some respect, or care, or emotional import, or some long-term commitment that is lacking. Either way, the point of this section is not to explicate the essential nature of values, but to find a method for identifying objects of value. Adding the link between preferences and values to the toolbox, it is now possible to look at values as part of a hierarchy.

There are two features of commitments to preferences that need to be mentioned in order to explain more extraordinary cases. First, a commitment to a preference can have as its object something which the subject will never encounter directly or influence in any way. I could value media transparency in Central Asia, even though I would never have the chance to do anything about it. Still, in saying this, I express a certain readiness to choose in favor of media transparency in Central Asia. If the opportunity arises, however unlikely, to help or support the cause in any way, I would choose to do so. Put in more general terms, preferring to choose A over B does not necessarily have to mean that an opportunity to choose will ever arise. Velichkov 10

Second, it is possible to be mistaken about how much some objects are preferable. Imagine that Walter has been to the opera once years ago. He says he values it more than, say, watching football, and he is committed to choosing it over football as a means of recreation. One day he decides to go to the opera and by the end of the show, he has reevaluated it. Walter realizes that on closer inspection, opera is not what he thought it was, and that he actually wouldn’t choose opera over football next time he is wondering what to do Saturday night. Indeed, the rethinking or discovery of what is of value is a driving force behind many (if not most) contemporary narrative arcs which follow the growth of a character – a popular example is the film Titanic (Cameron, 1997), in which the highborn Rose discovers that she values genuine love more than her socially accepted engagement to a wealthy aristocrat. It is this possibility of mistake, the potential discrepancy between what a person values and what is actually valuable, that sparks many debates over the metaphysical status of values – is value a property of the objects of the world, or is it something that people construct subjectively?

1.3 Valued and valuable objects

Before moving on, I should make explicit the metaethical foundation of the present study. There are various positions one can take in respect to the reality of values, and traditionally, the debates have revolved around the question of whether values exist independently of the human mind or not. Being mind-dependent is a vague and ambiguous property, and so are labels such as “realist” and “cognitivist”, and for this reason, instead of naming the position I will adopt, I will describe in some detail the sense in which I understand values to be mind- dependent. I will defend the view that values always refer to a relationship between a subject and an object. An object of value V always presupposes the mind of some subject S who values it and in reference to whom V is valuable.

Let us first discuss the subject S. S is a being capable of valuing. I will not take up a position on which the beings capable of valuing are, since it partly depends on how one chooses to interpret the concept of value. If one says that valuing is a commitment to certain preferences, as I did in the previous section, and adds that this is a sufficient condition for valuing, then every being that has the capacity to commit to some choice in the future would qualify for having values. On this interpretation, it would be justified to say that dogs value their freedom. However, if one insists that valuing necessarily involves not only choosing, but also a capacity for self-reflection and rationality in order to put one’s values to scrutiny, then only rational beings would have values, and dogs’ values would be nothing but a metaphor. I believe that it is at least partly a matter of linguistic preference to go one way or the other, so I will not defend either side. What seems obvious is that at the very least, possessing a mind is a necessary condition for being able to value. Velichkov 11

The other component of valuing, the object V, is being valued because it possesses properties that have a certain positive impact on S. What these properties are and how exactly they affect the subject will be discussed in chapter 2. For now, it is enough to define a valued object as one that possesses properties that are valued by some S. Some objects are valued by single individuals – think of sentimental souvenirs – and some are valued by whole societies, such as liberal democracy.

However, in order to bring some structure to the discussion, a distinction should be made between an object’s being valued and an object’s being valuable. If some object V is being valued, it means that there is at least one subject S that values it at this point in time. In contrast, if V is valuable, it means that it gives real2 reasons for its being valued by at least one S, while in actuality, there may be no S that values it3. This distinction can best be understood through the following examples. Consider a painting by Jackson Pollock. The painting possesses some properties – having certain forms and colors – that make it valuable, i.e. make it possible for it to be valued by lovers of abstract expressionism. As it turns out, it is indeed being valued, since it is on display in a museum and many people see and marvel at it every day. It would be correct to say that this painting, call it painting A, is both valuable and being valued.

Now think of a painting B which is also painted by Pollock and possesses properties similar to those of painting A. Right after painting it, however, Pollock hid it somewhere. It was not only never discovered, but imagine that it remains hidden and unseen forever. Painting B, therefore, could never be valued by anyone, since there would never be anyone who could know about it. Could we say, nevertheless, that the painting is valuable? It seems so. Painting B has properties which make it a beautiful work of art despite the fact that there is no one around to witness it, thereby giving reasons for fans of Pollock to value it. We can conclude that painting B, in contrast to painting A, is valuable, but will never be valued.

2 What are “real reasons”? This is one of the million-dollar questions in ethics. Counterfactuals are notorious for their limited epistemological access: if I do not value V, how do we know that V has value? I will not try to provide a method for resolving this conflict, but will rely on the fact that, at least sometimes, it is intuitively clear that an object is valuable even if it is not being valued – see the Jackson Pollock example below. It is generally accepted by philosophers that people can be mistaken about the empirical facts behind objects they value (Ayer, 1952; Smith, 1991). 3 Thomas M. Scanlon (1998) also makes a distinction between valuable and valued objects, but treats it slightly differently: To claim that something is valuable (or that it is ‘of value’) is to claim that others also have reason to value it, as you do. . . So, for example, it is natural to say, and would be odd to deny, that I value my children; but it would be odd for me to put this by saying that they are valuable (except in the sense that everyone is). (p. 95, emphasis in original) I want to emphasize a different contrast between valued and valuable objects, namely that valued objects imply that their value is recognized by some subject, while valuable objects do not necessarily do so. To escape the oddity of saying that my children are valuable, I specify the subject: my children are valuable for me; the Algerian national flag is valuable for Algerians, etc. Velichkov 12

Notice that in both cases, the paintings are not valuable for absolutely everyone. It seems perfectly alright to say that I am not a lover of Jackson Pollock paintings, and although I can see why other people value it, I do not do so personally. Both painting A and B are valuable primarily for fans of expressionism (even though painting B would never have the chance to be valued). This relativity of values is most clear in cases where an object V is valuable for only one particular subject S. For instance, I have a certain seashell which I have kept from my wedding day and hold dear for sentimental reasons. It would be true to say that at this point in time, the seashell is valued, even if it is valued by just one person. It is also true that it is valuable for me, since it has the property of being a seashell from my wedding day. However, if I leave it on the beach, it would be just as valuable for passers-by as any other seashell, i.e. more or less worthless.

Being social creatures, human beings are naturally disposed to recognizing that some objects are valued by other people. My friends and family would know that the seashell from my wedding day is important for me even if it has no particular value for them. Moreover, in virtue of its being valuable for me, the seashell also becomes valuable for my close ones; if they are good close ones, they would find the shell more important than other shells and rank it higher in their hierarchy of values. Similarly, I can value a Pollock painting in virtue of the fact that it is valued by so many other people even if I don’t personally find it aesthetically pleasing. Our ability to reflect on what is valuable for us and for others makes it possible to inhabit what Kant (1785/2002) calls a “realm of ends” (p. 51): a society where people recognize each other’s ends as valuable.

1.4 The mind dependency of values

Hopefully, these examples capture the ordinary meaning of something’s being valued and/or valuable. If the analysis is correct, then it can safely be concluded that valuing involves two components: a subject S and an object V which is valued by S. If V is valuable for S, this means that V has properties which make it possible to be valued by S, even if only potentially. The mind dependency of values, then, refers to the fact that the value of objects is set by a subject S. In other words, if there is no S for whom an object is valuable, then this object has no value. A valuable object is always valuable for someone.

This claim needs further defense. A big source of confusion about the mind dependency of values comes from the fact that many times, the subjects for whom a particular V is valuable remain unspecified. If a time-traveller going back to ancient Greece tells the average citizen slave owner that universal human rights are valuable, the ancient Greek would probably disagree. To this the time-traveller might reply: “Human rights are valuable regardless of what anyone thinks about it!” Since this statement holds some intuitive appeal, one might conclude that there are values which are independent of any subjects whatsoever. Even if there was no Velichkov 13 one on earth at the time of ancient Greece who found value in universal human rights, they would still be valuable (Moore, 1903; Ross, 1930; Shafer-Landau, 2003; Smith, 1991). Notice that this mirrors the example of Pollock’s painting B. An object V is valuable even though it is not being valued. Surely, it is an empirical fact that the ancient Greek does not value human rights, and yet to say that they are valuable means that they have properties, perhaps certain types of nobility, universality, and sublimity, which make it possible for at least someone to value them.

Then who is this someone who can value universal human rights if it is not the citizens of ancient Greece? It needs to be some specific type of S, perhaps a human being who can feel respect for humanity or at least is not brought up to consider slavery natural. It is an S who is well informed about the world and knows enough about human rights to be able to respect and value them (Smith, 1991) – presumably, the time-traveller is such a person. What he seems to be saying is that if the ancient Greeks were like him and had the correct internal disposition, if they were the right kind of S, they would have been able to see the wrongness of slavery. There is something inhibiting the slave owners, some kind of internal lack, analogous to the expressionism enthusiasts who cannot value Pollock’s painting B because they are inhibited by the fact that they do not know it exists. This line of reasoning might well be true, but it is not an argument against the idea that values are fixed by subjects. Whether there is anyone that actually values human rights or not is beside the point; what is at stake is whether its properties are made valuable in reference to some subject S. The properties of human rights – for example, expressing universal respect – can only be valued by someone who can care about them. Believing otherwise would imply that human rights are also valuable for cats, rocks, and spiders, and the burden of proof would then lie on the one holding this uncommon belief. This is, then, the specific sense in which I understand values to be mind-dependent: though objects exist independently in the world, their properties are made valuable only in respect to some subject S (even if there are objects which are valuable for all S). Valuable objects are always valuable for somebody.

Nonetheless, the time-traveller is probably making another implicit assertion. It is not only that the right sort of subject S can see the value of human rights and that the ancient Greeks themselves have the potential to be this right kind of S, but also that the idea of human rights – unlike sentimental seashells – has the potential to be valued widely, maybe even by every human being across space and time (Strawson, 1961). It is claimed to be universally valuable, something that can be valued by absolutely everyone, given the right external circumstances and internal disposition. Is it true that there are such universal values (Harman, 1975; Gensler, 1998)? Maybe yes, but I think that the answer to this question lies more in evolutionary biology and psychology than in philosophy. Similarly, it is an open question whether there are objects Velichkov 14 that are not only universally valuable, but also universally valued, such as personal autonomy or absence of pain.

These considerations still do not exhaust the full force behind the time-traveller’s assertion, as another layer of implicit meaning that his claim could have is an imperative one. It is not only the case that everyone has the potential to value human rights, but also that everyone ought to value them (Shafer-Landau, 2003; Stevenson, 1937). This direction in normativity, however, is beyond the scope of this thesis, and I will stay mostly on the descriptive side of things by not discussing the complexities that arise from “ought” statements. Normative considerations nevertheless point to another important distinction that should be made clear at this point: valuable things do not necessarily mean good things, and the question of what is good is not always the same as what is valuable. This is because there is a teleological sense of the word “good”, according to which something’s being good means something’s being good at fulfilling some kind of function (Thomson, 2008, p. 19-ff). Consider the object X which is extremely good at being absolutely worthless for everyone. X can be a speck of dust or a mosquito, and although the existence of X is a bit sad, it must be concluded that there could be objects that are good in some way, though not valuable for anyone.

On a side note, it is also worth mentioning exactly what kinds of facts judgments about value express according to the present view. The fact that I want to express when I say that V is valuable for S is that V has properties which give S a reason to value it4. Both the subject and the object are real entities, and valuing is a type of mental process that is as real as any other, such as desire or fear. There is nothing mysterious about this, and there is no reason to believe that it is incompatible with the scientific method. Maybe science is not advanced enough to be able to predict which objects would elicit a certain response in a certain brain, but this does not mean that valuing is not a real process that happens in the real, physical world or that judgments about it cannot be true or false.

Hopefully, in this section I was able to clarify my metaethical stance. Values have an objective and a subjective side. They are objective insofar as an object can be valuable without being valued, i.e., an object can exist and possess properties that make it valuable without anyone at present actually valuing it; and values are subjective in the sense that they are mind dependent, as what makes the properties of objects valuable is the internal disposition of some subject. Probably not everyone will agree with this view and most certainly there are more objections that need addressing, but this is the most general description of the foundation on which I will be philosophizing in the following chapters. Fortunately, accepting the entirety of this view on values is not necessary for accepting many of the arguments that will come in the following chapters.

4 The existence of such facts is accepted by cognitivists (Shafer-Landau, 2003), and not denied by at least some non- cognitivists (Ayer, 1952; Harman, 1977; Mackie, 1977). Velichkov 15

There still remain the big questions about values, and in the next chapter, I will try to address them by looking at the currency of value, the standard according to which something is deemed more worthy and preferable than another.

Chapter 2: The TTT and TTTV

In this chapter, I will develop a theory about the currency of value. I will start out by defining and refining the concept of tranquility: a conative aspect of conscious experience which determines choice. Using tranquility, I will end up with two theories: The Tranquility and Turmoil Theory (TTT), which is a stepping stone towards the Tranquility and Turmoil Theory of Value (TTTV).

2.1 The Tranquility and Turmoil Theory (TTT)

I concluded the last chapter by stating that it is a necessary condition for a value to express a commitment to a certain preference. Now I am turning to the question: What makes one object more preferable than another?

To answer this, I need to define a few new concepts, as to my knowledge there is nothing specifically like them. The link between values and motivation is at least as old as David Hume (1737/2003), who maintained that moral judgments are intrinsically motivating. There have been many attempts at explaining exactly what the right connection between value and motivation is, but it is generally agreed that moral values are supposed to be intrinsically motivating (Ayer, 1952; Harman, 1977; Mackie, 1977; Nagel, 1985; Shafer-Landau, 2003; Stevenson, 1937).

Here is my own line of thought regarding the relationship between value and motivation. Any conscious human experience can be evaluated based on how strongly the subject feels a motive to change her circumstances. When I suffer a skiing accident and break my leg, I feel an intense need to change my circumstances so as to remove the pain and fear. I wish that the present moment changes. I unrealistically wish to bring about a world in which I have not broken my leg. Or, more realistically, I want to call someone who would help me get to a hospital.

When I am anxious about the big test tomorrow, I want to change my circumstances in a way that removes the anxiety. I review the study material, I try to convince myself that I am well prepared, and I am glad when my close ones comfort me.

When I am sitting at home on a Sunday afternoon feeling bored, I want to change my circumstances in a way that alleviates my boredom. I go out for a walk or invite a friend over. Velichkov 16

When I am sunbathing at the beach, however, I feel no noticeable need to change my circumstances. In the present moment, I feel perfectly fine right where I am. I am not anxious, bored, or in pain. Similarly, I feel no noticeable need to change my circumstances when I watch an exciting film, write poetry, go jogging at the end of the day, or work in the garden. For sure, there are small tingles of motivation which make me put one foot in front of the other when running and search my mind for rhymes when writing poetry, but these are a lot weaker than, for instance, the intensity of pain. The difference between horrible and pleasant moments can be viewed as a matter of degree in respect to the motivation to change my circumstances.

These examples aim to show that moments in our lives with very different phenomenological feels can be grouped based on how much we are motivated to escape them. In the words of Christine Korsgaard (1996), pain is a sensation “which we are inclined to fight” (p. 147). However, there is a myriad of feelings besides pain that also contain a reason to escape them, such as fear, anxiety, boredom, regret, guilt, craving, jealousy, itches, and vertigo. I shall call the motivation to escape a given moment that these feelings give rise to the need for change. The concept of the need for change, however, is so broad that it is not useful until it is refined. In what follows, I will list the features of the need for change and show how it differs from other mental phenomena.

The most important feature of the need for change is that it admits to degrees. The intense pain of a broken leg involves a lot more need for change than putting one foot in front of the other when jogging for fun. The intensity of the need for change could be measured on a scale, and I shall stipulatively call the lower pole of this scale, the one where need for change is minimum, the pole of motivational tranquility; the opposite pole I shall stipulatively call the pole of motivational turmoil; for the purposes of conciseness, I will use simply tranquility and turmoil. Relaxing the need for change brings tranquility and increasing it brings turmoil. Henceforth, I shall refer to the scale of the need for change as the tranquility scale:

Tranquility and Turmoil Theory (TTT): Any conscious human experience can be graded on the tranquility scale. The tranquility scale shows how much a subject feels the need for change.

The tranquility scale provides a way of talking about states of relative tranquility and states of relative turmoil. A state of turmoil is one in which there is a very intense need for change, such as bodily pain. A tranquil state is one in which there is only a weak need for change, such as listening to one’s favorite band5.

5 “Tranquility” and “turmoil” are terms which I have chosen in order to emphasize the motivational aspect of states in which the need for change is respectively weak or strong. However, if we assume that one would always intrinsically desire mental states which involve less need for change, then the reader can also think of “tranquility” and “turmoil” as respectively “desirable” and “undesirable” mental states. Velichkov 17

At this point, there could be an objection about my terminology. Why not just use “desire” instead of “need for change” and “desire intensity” instead of “tranquility scale”? Although these terms are indeed similar, desire and desire intensity can be interpreted in more than one way, and some interpretations do not capture what I have in mind. First, it is not always natural to say that one has a desire when one feels a need for change. I can imagine circumstances I want to escape but in which I do not have a concrete desire, for example when being in a bad mood for an unknown reason (Schroeder, 2004). Waking up one morning, I feel I do not want to be in my present conscious state, but I do not know why. That is, there is no particular object in my mind that I seem to desire; I just want to be somewhere else or feel in a different way. If there is such objectless motivation, instead of saying that I desire to change but have no particular object of desire in mind, it is more straightforward to say that I experience a need for change.

Second, desire intensity can have many dimensions, only one of which corresponds to the tranquility scale. Wanting to see one’s beloved can be a desire that is intense in emotion, intense in bodily sensation, intense in the force of attraction, etc. Yet, on the tranquility scale, experiencing such a desire is a comparatively tranquil experience. Desiring to see one’s beloved seems like a state that involves less need to escape it than a state of desiring to alleviate one’s hunger. One can daydream about one’s beloved for hours, precisely because it is intense in ways not measured by the tranquility scale. These examples show that there are ambiguities in the concept of desire that can be circumvented if I use “need for change” instead. Plus, the “need for change” emphasizes the specific motivational feel which I think is relevant for this study on values and welfare.

Going back to the tranquility scale, another of its essential properties is that it measures the overall feeling of the need for change at any given moment. That is, at a given point in time, the tranquility and turmoil from various sources balance each other out and get combined into a tranquility bundle. This tranquility bundle represents the overall score of a conscious experience on the tranquility scale. Imagine a mountain trekker who feels a bit tired, which makes him want to change his circumstances in a way that he can rest. An even stronger desire he has is to satisfy his intense thirst, which combines with his slight tiredness to make him want to change his circumstances even more. The trekker’s tranquility bundle includes two items: thirst and tiredness, both of which increase his turmoil. He feels higher turmoil when he is both thirsty and tired than he would have felt if he were simply thirsty or simply tired.

This, however, is not the whole story, as turmoil can be counterbalanced. One way to relax the need for change is to satisfy one’s desires. Drinking water would decrease the need for change of the trekker and his level of tranquility would thereby become higher. Similarly, sitting down would satisfy his desire for rest and increase his tranquility even more. But satisfying the desires that are the source of one’s turmoil is not the only source of tranquility. Imagine that the trekker Velichkov 18 unexpectedly stumbles upon a majestic vista. He breathes in the pristine mountain air and suddenly realizes that he is less inclined to change his present circumstances, even though he is still as thirsty and as tired as before. Or, after ten hours of walking, the trekker becomes inured to the difficulties of climbing; he starts caring less and less about his aching limbs and dry throat, even though they are as aching and as dry as before. The trekker’s tranquility increases, despite his not drinking water or sitting down, thereby satisfying the desires that are the source of his turmoil. His tranquility bundle now is the sum of his tiredness, thirst, aesthetic impressions, and adaptation to turmoil. This is yet another reason that the need for change is to be distinguished from desire – the intensity of one’s need for change can fluctuate without satisfying a particular desire.

2.2 The meaning of motivational tranquility

Although the tranquility scale is quite a broad concept, it is important to draw its limits. From the exposition so far, it should become apparent that motivational6 tranquility in the present context is to be distinguished from other types of tranquility. The distinction can be made clearer by looking at cases where a person is tranquil exclusively in the sense of motivational intensity. Think of a person dancing at her favorite festival. She has been waiting for it the whole year and is in ecstatic bliss. Her body is allowed, not forced, to move with vigor and her senses are overwhelmed by the music, costumes, and movements of other people. Her body is not in stasis; neither are her emotions. Her mind is also not devoid of content, as ideas and impressions storm around her mind in rapid succession. At the same time, though, she feels no noticeable need to change anything. She is right where she wants to be and nothing motivates her strongly to escape her present state. How one achieves motivational tranquility changes based on the desires and needs one has, and it does not presuppose a complete halt of bodily, emotional, or mental life. Sitting on top of a mountain would not alleviate many people’s boredom, loneliness, and need for movement.

Furthermore, the tranquility scale measures only a certain aspect of motivation. First, it does not measure whether one has motives in general. Conscious life would be impossible without any volition, because then there would not be any movement of body or mind at all. The

6 I use motivation in the present study rather loosely. The need for change is supposed to encompasses all the feelings that give one a reason to change her circumstances. This might or might not include all of human motivation, but I leave the verdict to the philosophers of mind. Perhaps some theorists would not agree that the need for change is a type of motivation at all. Consider this case discussed by Timothy Schroeder (2004): Think, for example, of an ancient Greek mathematician who is uncertain about the value of π but who desires that it not be expressible as a fraction of two natural numbers. What motivational complex could possibly correspond to this desire? There is nothing our mathematician can do, and nothing he believes he can do, to affect the value of π. (p. 16) According to Schroeder, the Greek mathematician desires – i.e. feels a need to change something in the world, namely the value of π – without feeling motivation. I suppose that this is a matter of definitions. Schroeder seems to think that a mental state that does not lead to a bodily act is not motivation. To me this seems an overly strict definition of motivation, because many times one appears to be motivated not to act bodily, but to act mentally. The Greek mathematician’s desire is a motivation to think in certain ways, such as visualizing how great mathematics would be if π was a fraction of two natural numbers. Velichkov 19 tranquility scale assumes that there is (almost) always a naturally created need for change in everyone during conscious life.

The tranquility scale also does not measure whether one succeeds in acting on one’s motives. Let us take as an example the same act – say, running twenty kilometers – motivated by two different motives. When my child needs medical attention while on a mountain hike, the fear for her safety would motivate me to get help even if it means running twenty kilometers. Another motive for running the same distance could be a simple desire to be healthy. It might be a habit of mine that every Saturday, I go out running half a marathon as part of my fitness routine. The two motives can succeed or fail in resulting in action, but this is not what the tranquility scale measures.

Instead, the tranquility scale measures only the strength of one’s motivation to change one’s circumstances. Fear for a close one’s safety motivates with great force; I must, necessarily, at all costs, change the world until the source of the fear is gone. In contrast, a desire to be fit is weaker. It does not matter too much if I skip my training this Saturday, and yet I still succeed in doing it every Saturday. Thus, given the right circumstances, relative motivational tranquility is sufficient to motivate lively acts in all their diversity. There are always motives in one’s consciousness, and they do not need to involve great turmoil in order to give rise to action. Tranquil feelings, such as love, are sufficient for performing all sorts of great and difficult acts. When I play football, a game that I love, the strong need to change my circumstances is not necessary for running at top speed till exhaustion. Physical movement happens naturally and easily, without any noticeable turmoil. I can similarly act on my motives to dance, play, write, compose, work, and act in various other ways without greatly wanting to change my circumstances. The strong motivation given by pain does not seem necessary for performing the acts of a happy human life.

Since this is primarily a study on ethics, I will not go further into the philosophy of mind behind the TTT. The need for change is a complex mental process, and it is true that an investigation into it from the point of view of the philosophy of action can help describe it in even further detail. For example, the need for change can be broken down into its constituent stages, and it could be shown how exactly it relates to concepts such as intention, desire, and action. However, such a detailed description is not necessary for the main task of this thesis, which is to suggest a particular way of using motivation – in the broadest sense – to approach metaethical questions. It is possible to group together experiences based on the need to escape them without having a complete picture of how motivation works.

Thus, for the purposes of studying values and welfare, it suffices to find a method for discovering a subject’s level of motivational tranquility and distinguishing it from other mental Velichkov 20 processes. The best method I can think of is the subject’s asking himself honestly “Do I feel a need to change anything in the present moment?”

There are three possible responses to this question. The first one is “yes”. This is probably the response that will be given almost all the time by most people. In any moment of conscious life there is almost always at least a little turmoil brought about by various sources, from trivial everyday desires to the need to bring about the political system of one’s choice. A person can even feel a need for change because of unrealizable desires. During episodes of guilt and regret, for example, a person wishes for the impossible opportunity to go back in time and act differently.

The important thing in this category of experiences is the severity of turmoil: “How much do I feel the need to change in the present moment?” The difference between good and bad lives lies in this, as happiness does not require a complete lack of turmoil, but simply sufficiently high levels of tranquility. If while sunbathing at the beach the only unsatisfied desire is the thirst for lemonade, then this is an enviably high level of tranquility. Being bored brings one further down the tranquility scale and cases of bodily pain are already cases of violent turmoil.

A second possible response is “no”. This is absolute tranquility7. One’s needs are so minor that there is nothing noticeable to be changed in the present perfect moment; there is nothing left to achieve and no urgent desires to be satisfied. Absolute tranquility seems to be captured by phrases such as “I am so happy I could die”. It is found in fictions of complete bliss, for example heaven, nirvana, or the idea of utopia. The real life achievement of absolute tranquility can be found in ecstatic experiences of all kinds: aesthetic perception of the beautiful and sublime, religious ecstasy, near-death experiences, instances of collective joy, and perhaps even in the brief moments of heartfelt laughter. Such states are possible, but apparently relatively rare.

There could, nonetheless, also be a third response: “I don’t know”. This can come about in two ways. The first is when at a given moment the individual is on the verge between “yes” and “no”. Experiencing in rapid succession both the desire for lemonade and the beauty of the sun, the waves, and the sky, there is confusion about whether the moment really is perfect or just not entirely so. Since tranquility is a matter of degree, it is entirely conceivable that there are many such cases. These would still be ranked relatively high by the subject in terms of happiness and value, because being on the verge of a perfect moment is already a lot better than most of ordinary everyday experience. There is, though, another possibility that I will leave open, and that is that there could be a complete lack of awareness of one’s motivation. I can imagine that in deep concentration – for example during meditation – the subject could lose touch with how much he wants to change, just like during dreamless sleep. If there indeed are such states of

7 It is more correct to say “close to absolute tranquility”, because it is probably impossible to utterly halt the need to change one’s circumstances during conscious life. In what follows, by “absolute tranquility” I will mean a state in which the subject feels only very minor, though still existent, bursts of motivation. Velichkov 21 mind, they would be exceptions to the TTT, and in contrast to the indecisiveness case, they would be considered entirely beyond the scope of the tranquility scale.

There is one important drawback to the method I have just outlined. Asking oneself “Do I feel a need to change anything in the present moment?” already changes the present moment. Since most people perceive that there is always something that could be improved in the universe, thinking about what could be changed can bring about thoughts of environmental crises, famine and war. These are thoughts that are latent somewhere in the back of one’s mind and are only sometimes brought to awareness. So, the assessment of one’s tranquility is supposed to be targeted at the moment that is prior to asking the question. It should be about one’s feeling of a need for change in the present moment, and not about whether one in general thinks that there is something in the world that needs to be changed. Most of us believe that the world in its present state is in need of change, but moments of happiness would never be possible if that was the only thing we were thinking about.

2.3 How tranquility determines choice

Let us recap. At any given moment in time, various aspects of experience influence a subject’s need for change. Some feelings relax this need and some increase it. The sum total of these influences at a given point in time yields a tranquility bundle: an overall score on the tranquility scale.

Now we can look at the process of making a conscious choice8 in more detail. Different courses of action are assessed based on how much the idea of them brings the subject tranquility or turmoil. Should I order cake or ice-cream for dessert? I hate cake. It is too sweet, and the idea of it makes me nauseous. I want to escape the thought of cake. In contrast, the idea of ice-cream relaxes my need to change the present moment, as I love ice-cream. Since I want to escape the course of action that would result in cake a lot more than the one that would result in ice- cream, I cannot fail to choose ice-cream.

When assessing choices, it is of crucial importance to recall that tranquility and turmoil get combined into an overall score on the tranquility scale, because this explains why it is rational for people to commit to such acts as childbearing or fighting in wars. Demanding and difficult acts do induce turmoil, but this can be overridden by tranquilizing aspects of these acts. Feelings of pride, honor, love, beauty, or meaningfulness9 can more than counterbalance the need for change generated by physical and mental pain, fatigue, stress, or fear.

8 I say conscious choice to contrast it with species of choice and motivation that seem to bypass conscious mental life, such as acting out of habit or reflex. In what follows, I will take “choice” to mean “conscious choice”. 9 For a recent study on the value of meaningfulness, see Wolf (2010). Velichkov 22

Here is a sketch of how a more complex choice is made. I have signed up for a marathon and am now having second thoughts. I have two choices. Choice number one is to participate: the idea of running forty kilometers makes me want to escape it and give up, but, simultaneously, considering the pride I would feel at the end of the marathon relaxes me; it makes running seem more bearable. So, in total, this course of action makes me feel only a mediocre need to escape it. Choice number two is to give up. This promises a bit of tranquility, because I will not have to exert myself; but it also makes me feel the turmoil of intense shame, which I cannot bear. In total, I feel a very intense need to escape from giving up on the marathon. By definition, I cannot consciously fail to choose to participate in the marathon. Because I have defined the tranquility scale to reflect how much one is motivated to escape a situation, it is a tautology to say that one will always choose more tranquility over less.

It is worth noting that there is nothing in the TTT which entails that people necessarily make an egoistic choice. Voluntary self-sacrifice provides an illuminating example to prove this. Think of a soldier during wartime who has the opportunity to sacrifice herself in order to save the lives of a few of her comrades. She has the following options: 1) let her comrades die and continue living with a reasonable chance that she would return home and lead a satisfactory life for decades; or 2) save her comrades and die herself, eliminating any opportunity for leading a good life in the future. In this particular instance, she chooses 2), because the fear and sorrow that come with the idea that her comrades would die is a source of great turmoil. It is so great that it overrides her instinct for self-preservation. Her choice shows that the most preferable tranquility bundle is not necessarily the one that will maximize one’s own future welfare.

Notice that the need for change is a concept that is broad enough to weigh in the tranquility and turmoil of feelings regardless of whether these feelings are moral, egoistic, aesthetic, etc. All feelings of conscious life can be assessed based on how much one wants to escape them. A person who feverishly wants to fulfill her duty is in turmoil, just as a person who experiences a dire lack of food, entertainment, or social contact. All types of consciously made choices can be described using the concepts outlined so far. Masochists would choose tranquility bundles involving more physical pain, dutiful vendors would choose bundles involving being honest to customers, and good parents would choose bundles involving sacrifices for their children.

2.4 Tranquilitism and hedonism

The attentive reader would have noticed that in the previous sections, I talk of happy or pleasant states as tranquil states. This is because I believe that it is quite possible that pleasant states are if not coextensive with, then at least a subspecies of tranquil ones. Similarly, pain seems straightforwardly a case of turmoil. Indulging in one’s favorite hobby is hardly an experience one wants to escape, while burning one’s finger on the stove is. Because of this overlap, in this section I will briefly digress from the main train of thought to show how the TTT Velichkov 23 relates to the concepts of hedonism and how the former can be useful for furthering the discussion on the latter.

In ordinary language, pleasure and pain appear to have a narrower connotation than what I define tranquility and turmoil to mean. Unpleasant experiences such as itches and nausea are not often referred to as painful (Sumner, 2003, p. 103), although they are instances of turmoil. Similarly, fulfilling one’s duty is usually contrasted with pleasure, while under my definition fulfilling one’s duty is a prime example of a tranquil state. Tranquility and turmoil, therefore, include a wider variety of experiences than, respectively, pleasure and pain.

However, philosophers who have held a hedonistic theory of value and the good life seem to depart from ordinary language when defining pleasure and pain, and might have intended to describe something close to the tranquilitism of this thesis. Consider one of the founding fathers of hedonism, Epicurus, who says:

When we say, then, that pleasure is the end and aim, we do not mean the pleasures of the prodigal or the pleasures of sensuality, as we are understood to do by some through ignorance, prejudice, or willful misrepresentation. By pleasure we mean the absence of pain in the body and trouble in the soul. (Epicurus, 2015, p. 14)

Absence of pain and trouble in the soul seem remarkably close to the definition of tranquility in the TTT. Or take James Mill’s (1839) definitions of pleasure and pain:

I have one sensation, and then another, and then another. The first is of such a kind, that I care not whether it is long or short; the second is of such a kind, that I would put an end to it instantly if I could; the third is of such a kind, that I like it prolonged. To distinguish those feelings, I give them names. I call the first Indifferent; the second, Painful; the third, Pleasurable; very often, for shortness, I call the second, Pain, the third, Pleasure. (p. 144)

For James Mill, pain might have meant something quite close to turmoil, and “I like it prolonged”, though a bit vague, is a phrase suggesting that pleasure is seen as something similar to tranquility. I include these passages not because I am convinced that hedonists of the past were necessarily tranquilitists, but because I believe a benefit of the TTT is that it can open up new avenues for studying and interpreting the hedonistic theorists of the past. It is conceivable that they were trying to define the good in terms of motivation, what I call tranquility, but that their ideas were clouded by the ordinary language use of pleasure and pain.

The tranquilitist route also explains why hedonists have relied on such a simple dichotomy between pleasure and pain for their theories of value. For John Stuart Mill (1863/2001), “pleasure and freedom from pain are the only things that are desirable as ends” (p. 10), while Jeremy Bentham (1789) famously begins his book An Introduction to the Principles of Morals Velichkov 24 and Legislation with the sentence “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain, and pleasure” (p. 1, emphasis in original). The tranquility scale can make sense of why it feels natural to suppose that feelings can be categorized into just two types: they either increase or decrease our need to change our circumstances.

Hedonism has often been charged with being unable to justify this categorization, as pleasure and pain have been found to illegitimately group together experiences so different in kind that they could hardly be called comparable. What phenomenological feel does the pleasure of reading a good book late in the evening have in common with the pleasure of skydiving? In other words, what is the phenomenological “hedonic tone” that all pleasures are supposed to share (Alston, 1967)? Recently, an attempt to answer this problem of hedonism has been to suggest that pleasures share not one, but many hedonic tones (Labukt, 2012), but this still leaves the question open: what is it that all pleasures, or all hedonic tones, have in common?

One well-known attempt to unify all experiences of pleasure and enjoyment has been offered and rejected by J. C. B. Gosling (1969): “a person who is enjoying something thereby wants, i.e. wants to continue the experience he is enjoying” (p. 64). But this definition of pleasure cannot work, as Gosling himself points out:

I may enjoy breaking a certain piece of good news to someone; but it is hard to believe that because I enjoy it I must want to go on breaking it. After all, I know as well as anyone else that I cannot go on breaking the same piece of news to the same person. (p. 65).

I believe that the mistake in the definition offered by Gosling is that it does not get the relationship between motivation and pleasure right: pleasure does not involve wanting to prolong an experience, but instead not wanting to change the experience. There is an important difference, as wanting to prolong an experience only contingently accompanies enjoyment and might equally well be a case of fear and unpleasantness. Imagine indulging in a delicious ice- cream cake. With each bite, one feels less need to change anything, as one can just let go and cherish the moment. But once the cake starts running out, there is a sudden feeling of wanting to prolong, to hold on to the fleeting experience; one wants to find more cake or somehow make the last bites last longer. One wants to prolong the taste of ice-cream cake as much as possible, and the more intense this desire is, the more it becomes a feeling of fearful craving.

Instead, tranquilitism classifies a feeling as pleasurable if one does not want to escape it. While breaking the piece of good news, I do not want to escape the moment. After I am done, the moment is gone and if I want to go on breaking the news, that would be a wish to change my circumstances and hence already depart from being a pleasant experience. The tranquility scale thus provides a starting point for grouping experiences in a way that resolves the hedonic tone problem. Velichkov 25

It is a matter of interpretation to see whether hedonists such as Epicurus or James Mill meant something like tranquility when they were talking of pleasure, but whatever their views were, I will treat pleasure and pain as respectively cases of tranquility and turmoil. The motivational aspect of pleasure and pain is generally agreed upon by theorists10, and at least in most general terms, one does not want to escape pleasures, but wants to escape pains.

2.5 The Tranquility and Turmoil Theory of Value (TTTV)

The TTT provides a conceptual tool for ranking human experiences based on the subjective feeling of the need for change, but it is not yet clear how this is relevant for the question of the currency of values. Here I will bring together the arguments provided so far in order to construct the Tranquility and Turmoil Theory of Value (TTTV).

First, which objects are valued as opposed to valuable? I showed in Chapter 1 that when a subject values an object, this necessarily expresses a commitment to a certain preference. Valuing A more than B means that, external influences disregarded, S would choose A over B, given the opportunity. In section 2.3, I defined the motivation that leads to making a choice as the need for change, and proposed that a subject chooses between an object A and an object B based on the tranquility that the idea of each object brings him. The idea of living in a world in which philosophy is part of the academic programmes of universities brings me feelings of happiness and contentment. The idea of a world in which philosophy is not a respected part of university curricula brings me revulsion and sadness. I want to escape the latter feelings a lot more than the former ones, and this in turn means that I would choose to live in the former world rather than in the latter. Because I am committed to this choice, it could be said that I value the study of philosophy in universities.

If my line of thinking so far is accepted as sound, then we can conclude that the currency of subjectively valuing something is tranquility. This by itself is hardly a spectacular philosophical point: it simply means that we value objects if we want to escape their absence more than their presence.

What about the more complex issue of which objects are valuable for a given subject? Recall that in section 1.3 I defined a valuable object as one that provides real reasons for being valued by a subject S, although she might fail to do so. In the language of the TTT, this means that an object V is valuable for a subject S if it can provide reasons to be chosen by the subject based on the currency of tranquility.

There are, therefore, four possible types of relationship between a subject and an object in terms of valuing: 1) valuing something that is valuable; 2) not valuing something that is not

10 For an overview of the philosophical literature connecting pleasure and pain with motivation, see Helm (2002) Velichkov 26 valuable; 3) valuing something that is not valuable; and 4) not valuing something that is valuable.

The first two possibilities are quite straightforward. I value the study of philosophy in universities because it gives me a real reason to value it, namely the feelings of contentment that come with it. Conversely, I do not value the existence of famine, as revulsion and fear would make me not choose to live in a world of famine. In both cases, I am well informed about the topics and know their real consequences.

However, it is possible that there is a mismatch between what I find valuable and what is valuable for me. For example, we can imagine an ancient people who value the cult to their goddess because they believe that she would guarantee a good harvest. Although the cult to this goddess may fulfill all sorts of societal functions, it would not guarantee a good harvest. The cult does not offer a real reason for being valued in the way that it is. It is being valued, but is not valuable – or at least not valuable in the way that is imagined by the worshippers. They might not choose to continue their worship once they find out that this would not help their crops grow.

Finally, one could fail to value something that is valuable. For hundreds of thousands of years people all over the planet did not know the role the Amazon forest plays in supplying oxygen for all living things on Earth. People did not value the existence of the rainforest, even though it was immensely valuable for them. It is only recently that we have discovered the crucially important function of the Amazon and are beginning to value it.

Thus it is a completely truth-evaluable claim to say that V is valuable for S. For this statement to be true, V needs to possess reasons for it to be chosen by S. Conversely, saying that V is valuable for S even though S does not have any reason to choose it is false. Claiming that going through public education is valuable for S cannot be true if S does not care one bit about public education and it would only scar him mentally and emotionally, without offering much benefit in return. S’s going through education might be valuable for society, that is, for other people who would need S to acquire certain social and practical skills, but not for him.

Having established the currency of valuing, it is possible to approach the question of intrinsic value again. If the test for knowing whether something of intrinsic value is to check whether it is possible to be replaced – as I outlined in section 1.1 – then it is quite plausible to suppose that in the real world there are objects which are essential for a person’s tranquility and cannot be replaced by anything else. Freedom of movement might be something without which I would not feel tranquil, no matter what. There could be individual intrinsic values – my heirloom of sentimental value, for example, is indispensable – and there might be universal ones, such as freedom of movement or autonomy. Velichkov 27

Bringing all of this together yields the Tranquility and Turmoil Theory of Value:

Tranquility and Turmoil Theory of Value (TTTV): The currency of valuing is tranquility. An object V is valued by a subject S if the idea of V brings S more tranquility than its absence. An object V is valuable for a subject S if it offers S real reasons to value it.

The TTTV might seem like a platitude. It could be seen as a result of play with definitions and a series of tautologies. Still, I think it is of use in the study of values because it ties value to a specific conative aspect of experience and draws useful distinctions. A merit of the TTTV is that it describes the act of valuing in some detail. This would come to use in Chapter 4, where I will address a few complex thought experiments having to do with welfare. Moreover, a helpful aspect of the TTTV is the distinction between valuable and valued objects, because it explains why both subjectivist and objectivist theories of value have intuitive appeal. Objective list theories try to find objects which are valuable for individuals regardless of their opinions (Parfit, 1984). An example is Jean Kazez’ (2007) theory of basic necessities, which can explain why it is justified to increase, say, the level of autonomy in a given society even if its members do not see the point of such endeavors. However, despite their merits, objective lists can only come after a thorough understanding of the subjective side of valuing. If V does not provide S with any reasons for its being valued – which depends on the subjective life of S – this shows that V cannot be called valuable for S.

It should be stressed that while the TTTV views all values through the same lens, it does not deny the existence of different dimensions of value. A person values an object if she is committed to choosing this object, but sometimes, as Bernard Williams (1973; 1981) has remarked, there are no clear ways of making the choice between values of different kinds. When moral and prudential values clash, for example, it is not always possible to make a sensible choice. The TTTV proposes that tranquility is the currency of valuing, but this currency is a rough indicator of value and does not abolish the ambivalence of choices. For instance, it appears natural to say that for a lover of classical music, a Bach concerto is more valuable than a supermarket jingle. She would choose to have the former over the latter anytime. However, should I turn my son over to the police if he has committed a crime (Wolf, 2014)? Furthermore, ambivalence might occur even within the same dimension of value. As I remarked in section 1.2, it is conceivable that there are situations entirely within the moral sphere in which no preference can be made one way or the other. When you can save only one of two drowning strangers, how do you make the choice? The TTTV does not offer a straightforward method for resolving the ambivalence of values, nor does it suggest that there could be one.

This then is the TTTV. The need for change motivates one to make choices. Conscious experiences can be ranked on the tranquility scale based on how much there is a need for change, with tranquil experiences being more preferable than ones involving turmoil. The more Velichkov 28 the idea of an object makes a subject feel tranquil, the more it is valued by her. If an object offers real reasons to be valued by an S, then it is valuable for S. The currency of valuing is tranquility. All the objects that cannot be replaced in terms of tranquility in a person’s life are of intrinsic value.

I feel more than a few objections looming over both the TTT and the TTTV. However, because many of the criticisms will also hold for what I have to say about welfare, I will postpone addressing objections for after I have made clear how the TTT translates into TTTW: the Tranquility and Turmoil Theory of Welfare.

Chapter 3: The TTTW

It may seem like a theory of value is interchangeable with a theory of welfare and a theory of the good life, but this is not always the case. Тhere is more than one way in which a theory of value can be interpreted as welfare, and in this chapter, I will make clear how the tranquility scale can be used to construct the Tranquility and Turmoil Theory of Welfare (TTTW) and how that in turn can lead to two distinct conceptions of the prudentially good life.

3.1 Welfare as quality of subjective experience

First, a few words of caution. In this chapter, I will view welfare specifically as the quality of subjective experience. There are various ways in which one can talk about welfare. In medicine, for example, welfare can mean the healthy functioning of one’s mind and body, which may not reflect a good conscious life. I will not attempt to prove that quality of conscious experience is the only way one should look at welfare. I simply want to employ the concept of tranquility as a useful conceptual tool for measuring the quality of a person’s life from her own point of view. This can serve normative and political theories which rely on a notion of welfare as subjective experience.

In this thesis, I am also not advocating welfarism, the view that “the justificatory force of any moral reason rests on well-being” (Crisp, 2017, “5. Well-being and Morality”, para. 1). Here I will investigate welfare as only one among many dimensions of value. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, values can clash, and welfare may not always come out victorious. In the next chapter, I will look at cases where people might sacrifice their own welfare because of morality, dignity, or authenticity.

So, in this chapter, I am interested in what is standardly called the “prudentially good life” (Griffin, 1986; Sumner, 2003; Feldman, 2004): the life that is good for the one living it, in contrast to being, for example, good for others or good as a prime example of the human Velichkov 29 species. Fred Feldman (2004) suggests a thought experiment for clarifying what is meant by the prudentially good life:

Imagine that you are filled with love as you look into the crib, checking on your newly arrived firstborn child. The infant is sleeping peacefully. You might think of various ways in which the baby's life could turn out. What schools will he attend? What career will he choose? What sort of personality and intellect will he have? Will he someday have children of his own? Your concern for the baby might express itself in the hope that, whatever he does, things will turn out well for him. You might hope that this baby gets a good life—a life good in itself for him. (pp. 9-10)

This thought experiment is a bit problematic11, but it serves the purpose of fixating the topic for now. Henceforth, unless stated otherwise, by “good life” I will mean “prudentially good life”.

A theory of the good life must start out with an account of personal welfare in the sense of what is good for oneself or what is in one’s self-interest: “my self-interest is what is in the interest of myself, and not others.” (Crisp, 2017, “1. The Concept”, para. 1). As I mentioned above, here I will treat welfare as the quality of one’s subjective experience. This is one of the most intuitively plausible definitions of welfare. It would be strange to say that something adds to my welfare if it would never, in any way, affect my conscious life. A political revolution on the other side of the planet may be good for the world or for the progress of the human race, but if I never learn about it or its effects never reach me, then it does not really add to my welfare. Welfare in the sense used here is to be distinguished from other senses of something’s being good for me, such as something’s being good for others’ opinions of me.

A typical case from the philosophy of desire can illustrate the distinction between what is good for my conscious life and what is good for others’ idea of me. Consider the case of posthumously satisfied desires (Sumner, 2003, p. 125-127): imagine that Ivan wants his children to prosper after his death, and as it turns out, after Ivan passes away, his children indeed lead successful lives, the types of lives their father wanted them to have. Is the satisfaction of this desire good for Ivan? Assuming there is no afterlife, one cannot say that the success of his sons is good for his conscious life and thereby adds to his welfare. But in a different sense, for some it may seem natural to say that it is good for Ivan that his wish came true. Whatever this latter thought expresses, it probably has to do with others’ idea of Ivan as it does not concern the quality of his subjective experience.

Next, let us be clear about the meaning of what it means to be a good subjective experience. It is well known that “good” is one of the broadest and most ambiguous properties, but I think that just like it can be granted that a valuable object is preferable to a less valuable one, so it

11 In chapter 4, I will point out that a person can have a good life for herself while others, even her closest ones, might not want her to have it. Velichkov 30 can be granted that an intrinsically good experience is preferable to an intrinsically bad one. Experiences can be morally bad, bad for one’s future, bad in the eyes of others, but if something is an intrinsically bad subjective experience, disregarding external influences, it is less preferable than an intrinsically good one (Ayer, 1952; Smith, 1991; Sumner, 2003). If an experience is intrinsically good qua subjective experience, and not good morally, good for its consequences, or good at meriting respect, then it seems contradictory to say “I prefer to have this intrinsically bad experience over this intrinsically good one”. Whether we call them good experiences or not, the discussion that follows is about preferable experiences – the ones that the subject herself, and not anyone else, wants to have.

3.2 The Tranquility and Turmoil Theory of Welfare (TTTW)

Unsurprisingly then, the quality of subjective experiences can be measured by the tranquility scale. One has higher welfare when one has a more intrinsically preferable experience, and an experience is by definition intrinsically preferable to the extent that it does not involve the need to escape it.

Thus, at a given moment, the less a person wants to escape her present situation, the higher her welfare is. This seems to reflect everyday experience quite well. When I am hungry, anxious, in pain, or melancholic, I want to escape my situation. Even when I am depressed, I feel a strong motive to escape my situation (though I may fail to act on it). When I am excited, happy, engaged, or content, the desire to change my circumstances is very weak, and hence I am in relative tranquility. That is to say, that above a certain vague threshold of indifferent conscious experiences, there are tranquil experiences, which can be called good for the one having them.

This line of reasoning can easily be criticized by pointing out its logical conclusion. If a person’s welfare is inversely proportional to her desire to change her circumstances, then she would have highest welfare if she reaches complete motivational stasis. If we want to have the best life possible, we should aim at the life of an oyster. This is a powerful criticism, and I will address it in more detail in section 4.5. The short answer is that welfare is not dependent on the existence of motives, but on their intensity. Conscious life is constituted by the need for change, and it is its functioning within certain limits – not its complete disappearance – that constitutes welfare.

Also, recall that in section 2.2, I argued that the tranquility scale only measures the intensity of motives, and not whether they result in action. I do not need great pain or fear in order to perform many, if not most, of the lively acts of a flourishing human life, such as moving or working till exhaustion. The tranquility scale does not put an unrealistic boundary on the set of acts that can constitute high welfare. It only studies the manner in which one is motivated to perform these acts. Velichkov 31

Matters, however, are not so simple. There is an important distinction that should be made within the concept of welfare, because conscious experiences can be good intrinsically and/or good extrinsically (Shafer-Landau, 2014). On the one hand, there is the level of personal tranquility one has at a specific time – broadly speaking, this is how happy a person is at any given moment. This concept I shall call actual welfare. On the other hand, there are cases in which a person is tranquil in the present moment, but there is a possibility of great turmoil in the future. Imagine a person who is perfectly satisfied with her life but in fact has a developing latent illness. She does not know about the illness yet, so her actual welfare is enviably high. However, a person knowing about the illness, perhaps her doctor, would not count her as having high welfare, or at least not as high as if she were fully healthy. This is because there is a high risk that the ill person’s conscious life will involve lots of turmoil in the future. To capture this sense of welfare, the combination of one’s actual level of tranquility and the potential of losing or gaining tranquility in the future is what I shall call total welfare. Thus, soldiers going to war or people developing illnesses can have high actual welfare but score very low on total welfare. Note that the source of one’s future turmoil may be in one’s resources, circumstances, or even within oneself – for instance, victims of trauma can be quite susceptible to future loss of tranquility.

Putting all of this together yields:

Tranquility and Turmoil Theory of Welfare (TTTW): At any moment in time, one’s actual welfare is equal to one’s level of tranquility. One’s total welfare is the sum of one’s actual tranquility and one’s potential for future tranquility.

Similar to the TTTV, the TTTW offers a distinction that is useful for reconciling subjectivist and objectivist theories of welfare. The distinction between actual and total welfare shows that objective list theories and subjectivist theories at least some of the time are not in conflict, but simply talk about different aspects of welfare. Specifically, an objective list theory of welfare which claims that knowledge is good (Ross, 1930) for me can be saying one of two things. Firstly, the theory can mean that knowledge increases my total welfare, because even if now I do not care about knowledge, it brings potential for better subjective experiences later on in my life. In fact, it has been a primary goal of philosophy since its earliest days to aid human flourishing by showing what really adds to human welfare. For example, the ethics of Aristotle (Trans. 1999) can be interpreted in this way, as the list of virtues that he gives can be seen as necessary constituents of the good life. This is consistent with the subjectivist project, because it corrects subjective mistakes and passes down advice on which objects truly tend to secure welfare. Alternatively, the objective list theory could claim that knowledge is better for me even if I would never get more preferable experiences out of it. This latter claim, however, is not a statement about welfare, but about something else – perhaps about what influences others’ Velichkov 32 idea of me, or what makes a life worthy of respect and admiration, or what sorts of lives society wants to promote. This line of thought is consistent with subjectivist theories of welfare, too.

To put this in more concrete terms, imagine what kind of person the TTTW claims has high welfare. A person has high actual welfare at a given moment if she feels no noticeable motivational pull to escape her situation. Because people have different needs, values, and preferences, this might happen in a large variety of circumstances: during moral elation, extreme physical exertion, masochistic reception of pain, or simply at a family dinner. Moreover, the person has high total welfare if she has potential to have many such experiences in her life to come and no experiences of the opposite kind, i.e. experiences of turmoil.

One should also not forget that human beings are not mental states floating in a vacuum. We are embodied, and our tranquility depends to a large degree on our bodies and their needs. Conscious experience is an experience of the body, and it seems hard to imagine a good life without a body whose needs – for movement, rest, nutrition, shelter – are not satisfied.

Notice that although to some the TTTW may seem like a truism when investigated in detail, it is nevertheless by no means the standard view of welfare. Traditionally, the contenders for a subjectivist theory of welfare have been hedonism and desire satisfactionism, neither of which includes the specific notion of the need for change.

3.2 Against desire satisfactionism

The relationship between desire and welfare is a complex one, and because the TTTV rests on the concept of tranquility, i.e. relaxing the need for change, one might conclude that the TTTV would translate into some kind of desire-satisfaction theory of welfare instead of the TTTW. Here I will show how the concept of tranquility provides the conceptual tools to reject desire satisfactionism as a theory of welfare (understood as the quality of subjective experience).

I will address one of the most recent formulations of desire satisfactionism, Chris Heathwood’s (2017) genuine desire theory, because it is supposed to solve some problems of earlier versions of desire-satisfaction theories of welfare. However, I believe the criticism against genuine desires that follows also holds for desires in general, regardless of whether they are informed, hypothetical, or of whatever other type. According to Heathwood, one has welfare to the extent that one satisfies one’s genuine desires. Unlike a behavioral desire – desire in its broadest sense – a genuine desire involves a certain attitude:

If a person has a genuine-attraction desire for some event to occur (or to have occurred or to be occurring), the person finds the occurrence of the event attractive or appealing, is enthusiastic about it (at least to some extent), and tends to view it with pleasure or gusto. (Heathwood, 2017, p. 11) Velichkov 33

To see why this or any other desire-satisfaction theory cannot fully reflect a person’s welfare, consider the following example. Two people, A and B, manage to satisfy the same genuine desires over their lifetimes. The desires are equal in number and have the same objects: both A and B graduate from their college of choice, start a loving family, find their dream job, etc. However, A and B differ in their habits when it comes to experiencing the act of desiring. A often visualizes the objects of her desire with love and calm anticipation, and feels optimistic about them even in hard times. When one of A’s genuine desires is satisfied, she cherishes and celebrates it for a long time. In contrast, B has a seemingly unhealthy way of waiting for the satisfaction of his desires. Although B finds the objects of his desires appealing and feels enthusiastic about them, he is impatiently craving satisfaction, constantly feeling anxious and unsure about whether he would succeed in realizing his wishes. At the moment a desire is satisfied, he feels happy for only a few brief moments before proceeding to yearn the next item on his list of desires.

Arthur Schopenhauer (1818/2010) views the human life controlled by desires as a “circular path of red-hot coals with a few cool places, where we are forced to keep going around and around. . .” (p. 406). For B, the red-hot coals are hotter and the cool places less cool and smaller than for A. If one accepts that there is an intuitive difference in the welfare of A and B, then there is more to welfare than the satisfaction of desires. Desires can vary in both shape and intensity: some desires, such as wanting to get one’s driving license, can involve a long period of frustrating build-up leading up to only a brief moment of mild satisfaction. Or, a desire to win the lottery can be very relaxed in the moments of anticipation because of a realistic view on the small chance of success, but with an intense and prolonged period of gratification if it becomes satisfied. Some genuine desires take decades to satisfy and some only a few moments. Also, there is interpersonal variation in the attitudes towards desires – some care deeply about the objects of their desires and some do not; some feel afraid of failing to achieve their goals, while others do not. In short, welfare seems to be affected not only by whether a desire is satisfied, but also by the manner in which it is experienced.

I see two replies available to the desire satisfactionist in the face of this challenge. First, she can say that the lives of A and B are not actually equal in terms of desires, because unlike A, B also has a number of unsatisfied genuine desires, for instance the desire to lead a calm, anxiety-free life and to have more control over the manner of his desiring. This seems a bit unrealistic. Could B really have a second-order desire all the time, saying to himself such things as “I really want this new car, but I also want to want it in a calm way”? He may have this thought sometimes, but is it necessary that he has it? Even if we assume that he does, this just affirms the TTTW – one always feels a need for change, and the less one does, the higher her welfare. Even if it turns out that it is somehow true that we all have second-order desires to experience desires in the most tranquil way possible, this needlessly complicates matters. Saying that desire- Velichkov 34 satisfaction is what matters, including the satisfaction of the desire to experience the act of desiring in more enjoyable ways seems like a very roundabout way of talking about tranquility.

A second possible reply is to make amendments to desire satisfactionism and not only take into account the number of satisfied desires, but also the intensity of desiring and the intensity of the period of satisfaction. However, this is no longer a desire-satisfaction theory, and, as with the first reply, it seems that it is a roundabout way of describing the tranquility scale. Both replies thus collapse into the TTTW.

Although desire satisfactionism provides rough indicators of welfare, its imprecision can lead to misleading results. From the point of view of the TTTW, it is sometimes better for one’s welfare to have an unsatisfied genuine desire than a satisfied one. Daydreaming about having a villa in the woods is a tranquilizing experience by itself and it does not necessarily need to come true to increase one’s welfare. Conversely, a genuine desire to get a promotion in one’s career may involve lots of stress and disappointingly little gratification when it is realized. Western societies should score extremely high on individual welfare according to desire satisfactionism – so many desires satisfied every minute, and so much potential to satisfy even more! Though, of course, the western world is comparatively privileged, this does not mean that in non-comparative terms individuals necessarily have high levels of welfare. Metrics of desire-satisfaction cannot factor feelings such as stress, insatiability, and meaninglessness that can easily accompany contemporary lives. There is a lot more nuance and diversity in the good life than a simple dichotomy between satisfied and unsatisfied desires.

3.3 Welfare and the good life

Just as a theory of value can be translated into more than one theory of welfare, so it is not a straightforward task to translate a theory of welfare into a theory of the prudentially good life. I see at least two conceptions of a life that is good for the one living it which are consistent with the TTTW.

The first is the life of welfare. This is the good life understood as the sum of all of one’s actual welfare throughout one’s lifetime. Notice that total welfare is not being calculated, because that would involve a lot of potential for tranquility levels that may or may not have been realized. Going back to the latent illness example from section 3.1, a person developing a serious illness has low total welfare, even if she does not know about it. If the body’s immune system somehow manages to overpower the illness, the person would gain in total welfare, but it is possible that all of these fluctuations in total welfare would go unnoticed and never affect her conscious life, i.e. her actual welfare. It seems, therefore, that it is more relevant for a view on the prudentially good life to take into account what the person experienced and not what Velichkov 35 the person could have experienced12. This is a usual hedonist route of defining the good life (Bentham, 1789; Feldman, 2004; Sidgwick, 1907/1982). Summing up the happiness levels from one’s childhood, adolescence, middle age and senior years yields an index of the prudentially good life, based on which individual lives can be compared. A person who suffered from depression in the first part of his life and very happy in the second has had a worse life than someone who felt happy all throughout.

The second conception of the good life is as an object of thought from the point of view of the person living it. We can call this the valued life. One does not necessarily need to think of one’s life as a sum of tranquility levels. In fact, this would be quite unnatural. Instead, various factors influence how one judges one’s life, for example one’s values, or even one’s mood at the time of judgment. There is such a thing as the shape of a life (Slote, 1982; Velleman, 1991): spending one’s 20s toiling in a sweatshop, but then gradually building a successful career seems a better life than one in which one starts out well but slowly declines into misery. Or, someone might judge one’s life as good despite lots of turmoil simply because she does not care too much about the suffering she has had; what has been has been, and suffering is a part of life anyways. Or, even though she may have thought she had a great life up till now, she may momentarily believe otherwise – for example, she has just suffered a betrayal from an old friend and feels like it has all been meaningless.

While the past stays the same over time in the life of welfare – as the tranquility levels of the past are set in stone – the valued life has fluidity. From a subjective point of view, one’s own life is an object of thought, and this means that the idea of a life can bring tranquility or turmoil in the same way as other objects of thought: I may feel regret or displeasure about World War I just as I can feel regret about my youth. So, on the second conception, a life is to be judged like any other object of value, i.e. based on how much tranquility or turmoil the idea of it brings. I can love, hate, or feel neutral about my own life, and that is something different from adding up all the happiness I have had up till now.

Which of the two conceptions of the good life should one pursue? On which one should we judge the life of our loved ones and of strangers? Which one should society try to promote – do we want people to be happy or do we want them to feel happiness at the thought of their lives? These questions cross deep into normativity, and it would take an independent study to give them an elaborate answer.

In this chapter, I showed how the TTT can be used to construct a theory of welfare which equates a person’s welfare with his level of tranquility. The TTTW distinguishes between actual and total welfare to allow for both real and potential fluctuations of tranquility levels. I also

12 Of course, if it can serve some purpose, one could sum up the total welfare of a life. That could be a third conception of the prudentially good life consistent with the TTTW, but I will not discuss it here. Velichkov 36 defined two conceptions of the good life which are consistent with the concept of welfare as tranquility. The life of welfare relies on summing up all tranquility levels over one’s lifetime, while the valued life measures how much tranquility one gets from the idea of one’s own life. With these distinctions at hand, I am finally ready to turn to addressing potential objections to the theories established so far.

Chapter 4: Objections

As I discussed in section 2.4, my tranquilitist view is quite similar to the concepts of hedonism, and hedonism has had strong criticisms directed at it for more than two millennia. In this chapter, I will test how well tranquilitism fares in the face of a few of the most common and forceful objections made to hedonism, as well as to some that are targeted directly at the concept of tranquility.

The thought experiments in this chapter were developed by different authors as parts of different arguments which aim at proving or questioning different things. Regardless of their original purpose, I will adapt these thought experiments and approach them from the point of view of the TTTV and the TTTW to see what can be learned from the exchange. Addressing objections will achieve several goals: first, it will show how useful and plausible tranquilitism is as a theory of value and welfare understood as quality of subjective experience; second, it will provide a good opportunity to develop tranquilitism in more depth and explore how welfare and value interrelate; finally, the distinctions and strategies I use to address objections might deepen the level of discussion on hedonism and mental state theories of welfare as a whole.

Keep in mind that I am proposing a theory of welfare, and am not advocating welfarism: I neither assume that welfare is the only thing of value, nor that it exclusively justifies moral rightness or wrongness. As the thought experiments of this chapter will show, people can be tempted to sacrifice welfare when values clash.

4.1 The static life

To some, the TTTW and the TTTV could be seen as leading to unacceptable conceptions of subjectively good experiences. Would the best sort of life really be one in which the subject is tranquil all the time? Can we imagine a static society where people do not want to change anything? Surely, life would be quite dull without at least a bit of change or even a bit of turmoil – in fact, most of the worthwhile and meaningful projects in the world involve toil, sacrifice, and pain.

This is a constellation of objections which seem to be a result of misinterpreting the definition of tranquility and turmoil. I will briefly discuss four conflations which could lead to criticisms Velichkov 37 directed against tranquilitism. First, one can conflate motivational tranquility with other types of stasis. Recall that in section 2.3 I distinguished between different types of tranquility, and argued that the only thing I am imagining as an experience of high actual welfare is one in which the person does not want to escape her present situation – and nothing more. By definition, this can happen in all sorts of circumstances, many of which will not involve a halt in one’s mental, emotional, or bodily life. Finishing a marathon, the athlete, though experiencing vigorous mental, emotional, and bodily activity is in tranquility, thinking to himself: “This is exactly the thing I want to be doing right now”.

Second, one can conflate the relative tranquility of the strength of motives with the amount of success with which motives lead to action. I use the former as the standard for welfare, and not the latter. For a happy life, there is no need to be motivated by a great desire to escape one’s situation. Pleasant forces, such as excitement or inspiration are sufficient to motivate a great variety of human acts. I do not claim that one needs to stop acting in order to achieve a high level of welfare; it is perfectly alright to experience healthily small amounts of the need for change as a necessary aspect of motivation.

Third, objections can conflate the need for change with a particular phenomenological feel – such as pain – and assume that just as a masochist can intrinsically desire the latter, he can also intrinsically desire the former. In fact, the way I have defined tranquility shows that masochists might well be in tranquility while in great pain. The definition of turmoil precludes the possibility that anyone would want turmoil for its own sake, because it is everything that the subject wants to escape. Despite this, it is a feature of the world that many of the projects that bring the most tranquility involve some degrees of turmoil, meaning that turmoil is sometimes a necessary component of what people intrinsically desire. For example, it appears impossible to learn and develop as a human being if one does not make mistakes, some of which could lead to pain and regret. As true as this is, it does not entail that people voluntarily pursue turmoil for its own sake. They pursue the tranquility that can only instrumentally come as a result of turmoil. Recall the discussion on tranquility bundles from section 2.3: a marathon runner who wants to experience the tranquility of winning a race must accept the turmoil of physical exertion that comes with it. And there might be some forms of tranquil states that can be reached exclusively through turmoil: maybe the only way for a student to prove to herself that she is strong and capable is to go through a number of hardships. For some people feelings such as achievement and pride might only be possible as a result of feeling some pain. This is consistent with the TTTW.

The TTTW further implies that if there was a way to fulfill all of a person’s needs – for meaningfulness, development, self-confidence – without going through any turmoil in the process, she would be better off if she did so. Imagine that one can save human lives, feel achieved, help scientific progress, participate in engaging hobbies, and create wonderful works Velichkov 38 of art without having to experience the turmoil of stress, boredom, fatigue, or pain. This would be a straightforward increase in welfare. It is just the way of the real world that some of the most fulfilling acts are accompanied by some amount of turmoil.

Finally, one can conflate tranquility with self-interest. One could be concerned that a life high in welfare according to the TTTW would somehow be devoid of moral reasons, because why would a person choose to help others if he is only after preferable states of mind? The first part of the answer is that, simply, people choose to perform genuine moral acts because not doing so would lead to less preferable states of mind. Exercising compassion and fulfilling our duty is something we choose to do, because otherwise we would feel pained, guilty, or constrained. To check our intuitions, think of a person who for some reason is prohibited from exercising her moral faculties. Her country is ravaged by war and famine, but she is not allowed to help. Wouldn’t such a person feel miserable? I believe that exercising our moral faculties is a part of our humanity that requires fulfillment, just as the needs for nutrition, entertainment, and learning (Kraut, 2009). Welfare would not be complete for many people without the moral life.

There are cases, though, where one has to choose between one’s own welfare and the demands of morality. This is when the TTTV can explain what goes on in our minds: we test the ideas of the two courses of action and we choose the one which brings us a more preferable state of mind in the present moment. Sometimes this conflict can be resolved easily, and sometimes it might be impossible to make a sensible choice. This clash of dimensions of value can be clearly seen in the objection against hedonism known as the argument from false pleasures, and I do not claim that welfare maximization should or will always win.

4.2 False pleasures

Here is one of the paradigm examples of the argument from false pleasures, Shelly Kagan’s (1998) deceived businessman:

Imagine a man who dies contented, thinking he has achieved everything he wanted in life: his wife and family love him, he is a respected member of the community, and he has founded a successful business. Or so he thinks. In reality, however, he has been completely deceived: his wife cheated on him, his daughter and son were only nice to him so that they would be able to borrow the car, the other members of the community only pretended to respect him for the sake of the charitable contributions he sometimes made, and his business partner has been embezzling funds from the company, which will soon go bankrupt. (pp. 34-35)

Kagan uses this example to show that mental state theories, of whatever kind, cannot by themselves account for the nature of well-being. Here I will investigate three interpretations and see what they entail for tranquilitism as a mental state theory of welfare. For the purposes Velichkov 39 of clarity, let us imagine that there are two businessmen: Kagan’s deceived one, and an undeceived businessman who has the same subjective life, but in fact has a loving wife and children, a successful business, etc.

First of all, our intuitions might tell us that the deceived businessman actually does suffer in his subjective life by being deceived (Feldman, 2004, p. 109). He does not have romantic dinners with his wife as often as his undeceived counterpart, he does not get to have meaningful conversations with his children, and he is not listened to in his community. He is not seeing sincere smiles and he only has shallow dialogues with his friends and family. In this respect, he suffers in tranquility, because he is getting qualitatively inferior simulacra of good experiences. Even though he may never realize it, the deceived businessman is not leading a life that is as good as the undeceived businessman. Hence, this cannot be an argument against tranquilitism and mental state theories of welfare in general. It simply shows that authentic relationships are experienced in a different way from inauthentic ones.

But Kagan (1998) states that the deceived businessman does not lead a good life even if his “mental states were exactly the same as the ones he would have had if he had actually been loved and respected” (p. 35, emphasis in original). So if his mental life does not suffer at all by being deceived, why is there an intuitive resistance against saying that the deceived businessman had high welfare? A second route of argumentation is to use the distinction between actual and total welfare I made in section 3.1. The deceived businessman, though having scored high in actual welfare, had an incredibly poor record of total welfare. This is because, at any given point in his life, he had a high risk of finding out about his deception and suffering great turmoil. It is actually quite incredible that he never found out about the inauthenticity reigning in every sphere of his life. Even though he was not aware of it, the deceived businessman had quite a risky existence, and that risk justifiably makes his life an undesirable one to lead. He was as if walking on a tightrope, and it was sheer luck that saved him from ruin. This insight does not entail an objection against using tranquility as the standard of a person’s welfare. It just shows that for the purposes of measuring welfare, one should be able to distinguish between real and potential mental states.

There is still a third way to interpret Kagan’s thought experiment: even if there was absolutely no risk of his ever finding out about the deceptions, the deceived businessman would still be worse off than the undeceived businessman. However, in what way would he be worse off? It is stipulated as guaranteed that he has an absolutely indistinguishable subjective life from that of a successful and happy businessman. Furthermore, to make Kagan’s point as strong as possible, we should assume that if the deceived businessman had not been deceived by his close ones, he would have had a subjectively bad life; he would have been lonely, miserable, and poor. But if one has a guaranteed life that is subjectively indistinguishable from that of a successful and loved member of society, what is it that makes it bad? Velichkov 40

The way the TTTV and TTTW make sense of Kagan’s experiment is to say that while the deceived businessman had quite high welfare (after all, the TTTW views welfare as the quality of subjective experience), his life is not one that would be chosen by many people. In other words, in the deceived businessman case, prudential values clash against values of authenticity and dignity. The distinction between the life of welfare and the valued life from section 3.3 suggests that a person could want to lead a beautiful, moral, or dignified life, even though she knows this would lead to misery. In other words, the life of welfare can be distinct from the valued life. The deceived businessman has had the highest welfare that was possible for him during his lifetime, but others would still think his life is not worth admiration, respect, or emulation. Perhaps even the deceived businessman himself would have chosen, if he could, not to lead such a life. This choice would not have been more mysterious than the choice of a soldier who decides to sacrifice her life for others. Both face a choice between a life high in welfare and some other value, and both decide in favor of the latter.

One powerful reason to judge the deceived businessman’s life as not good is that he did not have the beneficial impact on the world that he thought he had. Upon his death, he did not leave a stable family and a successful business. Consider another case of a person whose prudentially good life is bad for others and in the eyes of others: a queen believes she has ruled successfully for many years, and at her deathbed she happily leaves her kingdom in the hands of her descendants. She believes that they will respect her legacy and maintain the affluence she has created. After her death, however, it becomes obvious that the queen has been reigning in illusion. Her policies have depleted the treasury and her descendants spend no time to enter into civil war and divide the kingdom. In this case, is it counterintuitive to say that the queen had high welfare? I do not think so. She had a life good for herself. But at the same time, it is not a life that people would necessarily admire and desire. The deceived queen might have had a good life to live, but she would not enter history books as a role model.

4.3 Worthless and offensive pleasures

Another instance of conflating the prudentially good life with the admirable life appears in an argument against hedonism known as worthless (or offensive) pleasures. Think of a sadist who regularly gets pleasure by seeing people and animals being tortured. If a hedonistic theory of welfare is correct, then this sadist is leading a relatively good life – but, one could say, this seems an intuitively repulsive conclusion. Are we really expected to believe that the sadist’s life is a good one?

Our repulsion, however, cannot easily serve as an argument against a hedonistic theory of the prudentially good life, because it has nothing to say about the sadist’s experience from his point of view. Feldman (2004, p. 39) claims that it is a mistake to think that the sadist has a prudentially bad life if he tortures people. This seems correct. It might be hard to accept, but it Velichkov 41 is conceivable that the sadist is having great experiences from a subjective point of view if he regularly sees living things being tortured. Of course, others would feel horrified by this, and a sensible normative theory would not advise to maximize his welfare by satisfying his sadistic wishes13.

Nevertheless, there might be another reason to judge the sadist’s life as bad besides our intuitive repulsion: perhaps we believe that he does not have subjective experiences that are that good after all. This might be true as well. A non-sadist might have higher tranquility levels than a sadist. There are at least three conceivable reasons why a sadist would have higher welfare if he manages to overcome his desire for torturing living beings for pleasure. Firstly, the joys of love and friendship might turn out to contain more tranquility than the pleasures of sadism. By itself, a feeling of genuine compassion for someone might involve less need to escape it than the pleasure of watching someone feel pain, and a sadist unable to feel the former might be missing out on some of the greatest human experiences possible. He would be similar to a person who completely lacks aesthetic perception and cannot experience the pleasures of art. Secondly, sadistic pleasures might be extrinsically bad for one’s welfare, because they could lead to periods of self-loathing, horror, and guilt. Thirdly, a sadist also misses out on good conscious experiences that come from forming healthy relationships to others. It might be very difficult for a sadist to participate in society and to form close personal ties with people in virtue of the fear and disgust he probably arouses in them. How many close friends could a person have if he likes to regularly set animals on fire?

To utilize another distinction from this thesis, although he does not value it, a non-sadistic life would be more valuable for a sadist. This strikes me as quite plausible. People can indeed often be mistaken about what is best for them. The joys of a moral, or at least decently moral life may turn out to be indispensable for a life high in welfare.

4.4 The experience machine

This brings me to the supposed nightmare of every hedonist, Robert Nozick’s (1974) experience machine thought experiment. Though similar to the deceived businessman case, it is worth investigating in its own right. Here it is:

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

13 Though in a very special case in which the sadist’s needs to see people being tortured can be fulfilled without hurting anyone in the process – for example by showing him sadistic videos – then I agree with J. J. C. Smart (1973, pp. 25-26) that it could be a good thing to do so. If the person could really never be cured from sadism, and he would, for some reason, suffer intensely without his sadist pleasures, then if we wished him well, we would have to let him watch sadistic videos. Velichkov 42

to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life, preprogramming your life’s experiences? (Nozick, 1974, p. 42)

So what is the experiment saying? Let us assume, first of all, that the experience machine is foolproof. It provides experiences indistinguishable from those of real life, it is not subject to failure, and it is not operated by a malign alien race.

I will investigate three possibilities which depend on how one construes the details of the experiment. First, if we assume that the machine simply gives its clients what they want, that is, what they value, then this is not a machine that necessarily boosts welfare. People can easily be mistaken about what leads to a tranquil life. Also, without the challenges and unexpectedness of the real world, life in the machine would be dull, monotonous, and not allow for the pleasures of personal development. The clients of the machine could fall victim to a vicious circle of instant gratifications, which would make them ever more blasé and would not involve the deep, fulfilling states of mind that come from facing the turbulent waves of life. All in all, the clients of such a machine would lead a poor copy of real life, which does not necessarily have to result in high welfare.

Alternatively, one could say that the machine is more complex. Maybe participants can tell it to give them the best subjective experience possible, or it would do so automatically. This complex experience machine would give each client a tailor-made experience that is most valuable for her. It would provide her with the joys of learning, development, and everything else that does not involve high levels of a need for change14. She would travel the world, see galaxies up close, swim with dolphins, etc. This makes the machine a lot more acceptable, but it would still fail to provide one important source of tranquility: real relationships. A person plugged in the machine would not be able to improve the world and care for her friends and family outside the machine. She would be letting rainforests be cut, and she would leave those close to her without support. A person in the experience machine would not enjoy her experiences, because she would be feeling guilty and morally unfulfilled. Because many moral values have intrinsic worth, and are hence indispensable, no amount of other pleasures would be able to compensate for such a lack. Thus an experience machine of this kind cannot provide as much tranquility as the real world – and cannot serve as an argument against the TTTW.

But, in fact, the problem of unfulfilled moral desires does not arise in Nozick’s (1974) original machine, because one’s memories are erased when one enters the machine: “Of course, while in the tank you won’t know that you’re there; you’ll think it’s all actually happening. Others can also plug in to have the experiences they want, so there’s no need to stay unplugged to serve them” (p. 43). Plugging in would then be equivalent to starting a completely new and perfectly

14 A similar type of reasoning is used by Crisp (2006) to counter the experience machine objection to a hedonistic theory of welfare. Velichkov 43 happy human life, a life of high welfare. This does not seem so appalling, but it is still something that people can resist. Whether the reason for not plugging in is fear from losing one’s real-life identity, a desire to help human progress in the real world, or simply a rejection of being babysat by a machine, it is quite conceivable that many people would not plug into the machine.

Again, the TTTW does not view these kinds of choices as a problem. Even though the clients of the machine would have high actual welfare, this does not necessarily mean that they would want to plug in. Just as a person can give up his future welfare by committing self-sacrifice for the sake of others, so he can choose to give up the great life of the experience machine in order to, for example, serve human progress in the real world. We do not have to assume the egoistic idea that we exclusively value our own future welfare. If that were so, we would never care for others except if that maximized our own future tranquility, and cases of self-sacrifice would be inexplicable.

4.5 Artificial tranquility

Still, there is one more thought experiment that cannot be easily countered by drawing the conceptual distinctions discussed so far. In his dialogue Philebus, Plato (Trans. 1997) suggests that if pleasure was the only thing that made a life good, then we would all be content with the life of an oyster. However, it seems absurd to suppose that a human being would be satisfied with the conscious life of an oyster, suggesting that pleasure by itself cannot account for welfare. Here is a more recent example of this kind of reasoning proposed by Richard Kraut (2007):

A high induced by a drug might be one of the most intense pleasures a human being can experience. Suppose it were possible to administer such a drug to a human being soon after her birth, and to keep that child alive but dysfunctional in every way for the normal span of a human life. She would lie in her hospital bed, fed by a tube through which drugs flow, and would remain in that state of truncated development for the remainder of her existence. The pleasure felt in such a life is, by hypothesis, intense, uninterrupted, certain, and long-lasting. Even so, this is not an option any sane parent would choose for a child if she could instead live a life in which her faculties grow and mature and the less intense satisfactions of a normal and happy life, albeit accompanied by some measure of disappointment, sorrow, and pain, are available to her. (p. 125)

Let us assume that instead of pleasure, the doctors administer the baby a tranquilizing drug which keeps his need for change at very low levels. By blocking the normal functioning of his motivational apparatus, such a person would never feel pain, fear, and boredom. Even if he has absolutely no diversity in experience and just stays in almost complete mental and physical stasis, he experiences great tranquility. Though conscious, the growing human does not want to Velichkov 44 learn new things or have new relationships; he is never bored and never feels the motivation to change his circumstances.

This straightforwardly ghastly example forces the defender of the TTTW to make a choice regarding the concept of tranquility. One possibility is to bite the bullet and admit that the person administered a tranquilizing drug has the greatest welfare possible, even though his life has about as much appeal to an outsider as that of an oyster. This would show the limitations of the TTTW and would render tranquility as useful only to a limited extent. The TTTW would be able to account for a great majority of cases, but it would lead to counterintuitive results in cases of artificially stimulated tranquility.

However, there is another route of argumentation, and it is the one which I shall favor. To keep the explanatory utility of equating welfare with tranquility, I must further elaborate on what is necessary for welfare. Consider the tranquil mental life of a lizard. In an Aristotelian spirit, it seems fairly obvious that the mental life of a lizard, even if tranquil, would not constitute high human welfare. A human being who has the conscious experiences of a lizard, even a blissful one, would not have high welfare for a human being. The TTTW is a theory about the welfare of human beings, and as such, it assumes that the tranquility experienced is that of a human body and brain. In order to salvage the usefulness of the concept of tranquility, its definition should be augmented to specifically reflect the relaxation of the need for change in a human organism.

In normal circumstances, people have various needs which motivate them to act. One cannot stay in the same place too long because of boredom, and one has all sorts of dreams, ambitions, and projects that one wants to pursue. This all happens naturally. Now, a human brain whose motivational apparatus is artificially made dysfunctional seems to lie outside the domain of the TTTW. A brain with an incapacitated motivational apparatus is similar to a brain without imagination – it seems to be too inhuman to be counted as having any welfare at all; it is even too inanimate, as even the least sophisticated of animals, such as insects and mollusks, have functioning motivation. The permanently tranquilized baby would be classified by the TTTW as similar to a flower – it would fall outside the sphere of beings that have welfare. This shows the boundaries of the TTTW. It is a theory that can only be used to grade the welfare of living beings that have motivation; it has nothing to say about whether entities such as plants and trees are in good or bad states. A high level of tranquility is by itself not sufficient for welfare. It is also necessary for a human being to have the natural motives that allow the diversities of conscious life.

Let us take stock. The TTTW states that a person has high actual welfare at any given moment in time if she does not feel an intense need for change. To make sense of the risk of losing welfare that disadvantaged and deceived people have, it is necessary to take into account both one’s Velichkov 45 actual welfare and one’s potential for future welfare, the combination of which I call total welfare.

Welfare is not the only criterion on which the value of a life is judged. Even if a person has high total welfare, this does not mean that others would emulate, admire or value her life. Furthermore, people do not always choose to maximize their own welfare. Sometimes they could be wrong about what will bring them welfare, but sometimes they could choose to forego their welfare even if fully informed, for example because of moral self-sacrifice or out of a desire to preserve other values, such as authenticity, beauty, or dignity. Finally, the sphere of the TTTW could in principle only include beings which can experience the need for change. A human being would count as having high welfare only if she has high levels of tranquility for a human mind.

Conclusion

I have told a story about the constituents of a good life – good conscious moments – by proposing a new way of saying that good moments are good and that bad ones are bad. The tranquility scale measures the quality of experiences based on the motivation to escape them. I have argued that a life is good qua subjective experience if it does not need to be moved by the strength of fear and pain, but by feelings such as awe, love, ambition, and inspiration. For a more complete picture of welfare, it is necessary to distinguish between actual welfare and total welfare, because even the greatest intrinsically good moments can be instrumentally bad for one’s future.

I have also sketched out how we perform the act of valuing. An object is valued if a subject, guided by tranquility, prefers its presence more than its absence. There are also many valuable objects which offer us reasons to value them, but we might never actually include them in our system of preferences.

Furthermore, thought experiments such as the experience machine or the deceived businessman show that a person’s welfare may clash against his other values. One’s life can be good in two ways: as a sum of one’s welfare, and as an idea, an object of thought. The two can become separate, and it is up to the individual to choose which one is more valuable for him.

What can these findings be used for? The product of this thesis is a conceptual welfare metric, which can be of use in various fields in ethics where welfare is an essential concept. As I have said in the Introduction, the TTT helps develop hedonism by connecting it to conation in a specific way, which in turn could offer resolutions to the hedonic tone problem and the paradox of hedonism. The relative precision of the tranquility scale might shed light even in fields such as Velichkov 46 political philosophy, where, for example, liberal egalitarians have been struggling with the relationship between resources and welfare (Arneson 1989; Cohen, 1989; Dworkin, 1981).

Another direction for further research is to see whether tranquilitism can serve the ethical debate about the limits of morality – how much should a person be morally required to sacrifice her welfare (Scheffler, 1986; Singer, 1972; Wolf, 1982; 2014)? Finally, motivational tranquility can help the study of conscious experience in more general terms, such as in the religious study of the mystical experience or the aesthetic study of the beautiful and the sublime.

And, of course, the TTT was designed with the primary ethical goal of offering a guideline for how one ought to live one’s life. In practice, perhaps the TTT can reveal more of the value of acceptance. If a moment’s goodness is judged based on the motivation to escape it, then it is important to know when it is appropriate to fight one’s situation and when it is not. Sometimes, change must be forced; but sometimes, one can simply enjoy the change that happens by itself.

Appendix A: The Paradox of Hedonism

In this appendix, I will briefly show how tranquilitism can approach what has come to be known as the paradox of hedonism in a unique way.

This is how Roger Crisp presents the paradox: “one will gain more enjoyment by trying to do something other than to enjoy oneself. The tennis player who forgets about enjoyment and focuses on winning will enjoy the game more than were she to aim explicitly at enjoyment” (Crisp, 2006, p. 120). It is paradoxical that unlike all other things that one could desire, in order to get happiness, it is better to not seek happiness. A person who wants to lead a happy life should somehow hide this fact from herself, because thinking about it will detract from her happiness.

What the TTTW can say about this paradox is that it arises when one has a distorted view of happiness or enjoyment, perhaps a view akin to desire satisfactionism. People who are stuck in the paradox of hedonism seem to think of enjoyment as a particular phenomenological sensation instead of as a type of motivation. Maybe the tennis player wants to force sensations of enjoyment that usually accompany a relaxation of the need for change but he cannot succeed because enjoyment is the lack of forcing itself. If one knows that good subjective experiences are those that have a lack of the drive to escape, one will not try to bring about a good experience by trying to escape one’s current experience. There cannot be a paradox of tranquilitism, because a person believing in the TTTW would find techniques to learn to accept and to let go, thereby not unnecessarily intensifying her desires.

Velichkov 47

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