1 Introduction

(Crosspost of this).

A warning: This is going to get very complicated. The various different models of well-being end up producing weird and counterintuitive conclusions. This is probably the topic that I have spent the most time thinking about of any topic in my life. Very few people have spent much time thinking about lopsided lives, so the terrain is largely unexplored. There are maybe two people on the planet who have spent lots of time thinking about this argument, and I’m one of them. So hopefully this is interesting, but it will only be interesting if you’re a giant nerd.

It’s a shame that very often the best arguments for things are totally ignored by almost all people. The number of people who have read various papers which provide quite decisive cases against deontology is quite small—no one has heard of the suitcase cases or Chappell’s paradox of deontology or the paralysis argument. The best arguments are often churned out in the dusty halls of academia, relegated to some obscure journal, footnoted occasionally—never seriously explored. There are, as far as I can tell, upwards of 8 arguments against deontology that have been made at various points, that no one has ever published a response to. These arguments appeal to deeply intuitive, widely shared premises, showing that if you accept, for example, the principle that you should want others to act rightly, you should give up your deontological beliefs.

But my target here is not deontology. Instead, I am arguing for hedonism about well-being, roughly the idea that the only thing that makes a person’s life go well is happiness and the only thing that makes a person’s life go poorly is suffering. In other words, the only things that determine how well your life goes are your mental states—the ones that feel good are good for you, ones that feel bad are bad for you. How much you know, how many friends you have, and so on matter instrumentally, as friendship and knowledge tend to make a life happier than it would be otherwise. Still though, if two lives are equal in pleasure and pain, it is utterly irrelevant how much of the other things they each contain. Friendship, knowledge, and achievements are valuable as means towards an end—as ways to get pleasure for yourself and others—but are not ends in and of themselves.

This argument comes from one of my favorite philosophers—Theron Pum...

Hedonism Sequence