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/// What follows is a piece which presents a series of examinations of utilitarianism from Harwood’s seminal essay, “Eleven Objections to Utilitarianism”, along with my demonstrations of how these objections are unsound. Previous installments address such topics as integrity, justice, promise-keeping, supererogation, average and total utilitarianisms, and rule utilitarianism. As the objections get more and more serious, my replies have grown in length. My apologies. ///

7. Utilitarianism requires us to enter the experience machine.

Most readers are by now familiar with the film “The Matrix” (just as most philosophers are tired of references to it in introductory philosophy classes). A central feature of the film was the concept that people could, without their knowledge, live in a world that was entirely virtual. Robert Nozick, in “Anarchy, State, and Utopia”, famously asks us to imagine a device called the “experience machine”. The experience machine is, in almost all respects, akin to the apparatus featured in The Matrix, with the sole exceptions being that for Nozick, a) people would have a choice as to whether or not they could enter the machine, and b) the machine would be programmed to provide nonstop pleasure to the participant(s). It would simulate happy experiences in virtual reality, allow the participant to achieve their greatest dreams, and so on. Let’s also suppose that everyone else on the planet has already entered such a machine. Suddenly, Joe awakes, as part of a normal procedure of setting up the details of the virtual life to come.

Nozick argues that utilitarianism requires Joe to enter the machine, for it would ultimately create happiness in him. However, Nozick contends that this is wrongheaded; people are in some sense alienated from their goals if those goals are not satisfied in reality. Thus utilitarianism is false.

This is a serious objection, and not just a charicature of hedonism. What is impressive is that the qualitative aspect of experience is kept the same in the example. If the example had involved lobotomy, or morphine injections, it would misfire, because they would diminish our capacity to experience which is necessary for the enjoyment of things. It would, for example, destroy the ability to commit to enjoyment, among other things which the utilitarian ought to concern herself with. Moreover, it doesn’t (as an accusation) say anything about what Joe would, in fact, choose. Rather, it relies upon our intuitions concerning what he ought to choose.

1. The first reply that needs to be made is that the consequences of leaving the experience machine are dire. As we have seen, there is such a thing as enjoyment, which appends itself to experiences of happiness that we have. It is important to note that one form of enjoyment is nostalgia, where we enjoy the acts we do through hindsight.

If Nozick has any viable intuitions here, it is that very good virtual experiences would involve the desire for the authentic achievement of one’s goals. Let’s grant him that. (If we refuse to grant him that, the objection to utilitarianism would be automatically defused; but that’s hardly interesting.)

Now let’s imagine a person wakes from the experience machine. How would they feel? How would it feel to realize that all which one finds meaningful has been a lie? We all know the experience of waking from very good dreams, and feeling distraught at the realization that they are false (before the memories of them fade in the process of waking). If this same sense were generalized to a sufficient portion of one’s life, then it would surely be an excruciating experience. Yet even this comparison may not capture quite the psychological impact of it. Perhaps the best analogue would be to the cases of refugees whose families and homes were destroyed in war. Surely these are not enviable positions to be in.

But in order for the Nozickian argument to carry, they would not seem to be enough to compel us not to enter the machine. Perhaps, they would argue, the participant’s pain in that brief moment would be outweighed by a lifetime of good future experiences in the machine. Let’s grant them that the machine produces great horror upon waking, but that is but a moment in time, and the memories of the subject were wiped upon re-entering the machine. Are the participants obligated to continue with it?

Before settling on a good reply to Nozick, I should consider a few replies which I think are insufficient.

The creed, “agency is an incorrigible value”, has had the power to deal with some objections so far. However, it does not seem to have much power here. An incorrigible value is trumped by an intrinsic value, and the only thing of intrinsic value is happiness. And Nozick’s example is a critique of precisely this: hedonism. Indirectly, it may play some role, though, in that agency produces enjoyment and its related concepts.

Enjoyment, and nostalgia, can be inverted: their twins are regret and embitterment. And these are precisely the things a person should avoid in a contented life, but which are inevitable results of the experience machine. The moment of misery upon waking creates a sense of embitterment which seeks to countermand every single happy experience created by the machine. However, the counterweight of bitterness only applies for the length of time in which a person is outside of the machine, which is a comparatively short period of time. Thus, this still may not be enough to save utilitarianism. However, it should be noted that the sting of bitterness present here is exquisite, which even a calamatous instance like that of the refugee doesn’t necessarily have to suffer.

What about supererogation? It would say, as would objective utilitarianism, that the person has no hope of behaving virtuously in the supererogative sense. But this is barely the point, as I’ve admitted that virtue is ultimately a means to an end, just like anything else. And it was unreliable anyway.

What would the person do? Would they go back into the machine? Likely not. But that’s not the point, Nozickians would insist: the point is that utilitarianism requires them to go back. Their actual choice afterwards is irrelevant.

We must wonder, what experiences did the person have in the machine, such that they would want to go back? Nozick’s example involves virtual reality, where the experiences are identical to real experiences. Knowing what we know — that agency is incorrigible — we may suspect the drive for authenticity would have demanded experiences that were contingent upon perceived authenticity while in the machine — it would be part of the person’s goal. Thus, it seems as though the participant’s goals, desires, and preferences aren’t being satisfied; and that this would be a way out. Indeed, a number of utilitarians have taken this route, exclaiming that ‘true satisfaction of goals’ is an aspect of happiness alongside length, intensity, purity, and so on. But I don’t believe that this position works, either. For there is a difference between a goal and the state of affairs which the goal maps onto. The goal is critically tied to a person’s intention and perceived experience, while the state of affairs is objective. And only goals are significant, because they’re a part of the person’s experiences, and the actual state of affairs is not necessarily available to the participant.

We can postulate that the person would, if they entered the machine, lead a happy life. What we can’t postulate is that the person would KNOW they would lead a happy life if they entered, or even that it would be reasonable to believe it, because of the circumstances of their waking. If we were given the same knowledge as he, then we couldn’t advise him to re-enter the machine. Because he would run the risk of future rediscovery of this world-crushing incident.

Now let’s presume that Joe is sound of mind, and change the experiment slightly: Joe was born and raised in an ordinary life, and was offered the opportunity to enter the machine, and is assured that he will never wake. If he is sound of mind, the outcome would be the same, the difference being that the negative consequences are provided by Joe’s imagination, and not through firsthand revelation.

A clever interlocutor might say (as Brian Berkey did recently), “Aha! But what about our obligation to know? It would seem that insofar as Joe doesn’t know that his future in the machine is happy, he would be in violation of his agentic duties!” The obligation to know can be defended radically, as with W.K. Clifford, who wrote: “it is wrong always, everywhere, and for any one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence”. It may also be defended modestly, by saying something like, “Believing in the truth tends to produce good, but not always”. I support the latter sort of view, because of the ‘dying mother’ example we encountered in the promise-keeping objection.

Second, the Nozickians are the ones fighting an uphill battle on the epistemic question, because it is manifest to the waker that the possibility of waking up again and again in the future is very real, given that he is presently experiencing wakefulness. The best evidence available to Joe tells him that he is, and in the future will be, in deep trouble. Asking a person to re-enter the machine is like asking a refugee to withstand another war on new soil.

That would be wrong.

2. Another interesting avenue for escape arises through the examination of the self. It may be that we need to understand the notion of the self as (at the very least) the coherant connectedness of memory and consciousness across time. Recall that Joe’s memory would be wiped if he were to enter the machine. If so, then he would be cutting ties to his past self. In a sense, the Waking Joe and the Sleeping Joe would be entirely different people. I don’t know the extent to which this consideration makes much of a difference to the Nozick objection, but ultimately, it has some impact.

8 and 9. The axiology objections.

At first glance, Harwood’s essay provides us with two objections as if they were separate. They are: (8) Utilitarianism wildly overstates our duties to animals; and (9) Utilitarianism panders to bigots and sadists. However, in fact, they’re just variants of the same confusion.

The first argument is a rephrasing of the old accusation, that utilitarianism is the philosophy of pigs; for utilitarianism seems to provide no distinction between the “higher pleasures” (presumably, drinking tea and listening to NPR) and “lower” ones (which don’t require enumeration here).

I think that this argument is propelled by the intuition that certain pleasure-seeking activities are evil, sinful, etc. Some acts really aren’t that great to perform. Still, the entire point of utilitarianism, from Bentham’s view, was to show that some acts tend to produce less happiness, and some produce misery in others, and so they are to be avoided. So certain “lower” acts would produce less happiness, and so, should be avoided.

Mill wasn’t entirely satisfied with Bentham’s quantitative view. Thus, Mill famously produced his doctrine of qualitative utilitarianism, whereby particular values are better or worse than one another because certain values somehow become a “part of” happiness with experience. The rank-ordering of values can be accomplished on the basis of opinions from competent judges, who have tested this and that pleasure and can rank them one after the other. Mill did not exactly disagree that Bentham had produced an adequate reply, but sought to supplement Bentham’s argument by showing the place of particular values, in order to make the doctrine seem more palatable.

I think Bentham’s original account was satisfactory. I must confess to being mystified both by Mill’s account, which contains outright bizarre claims (what does it mean for a thing to be a “part of” happiness?), and by the accounts of those critics who carry on with objections which are not only explicitly dealt with by a classic utilitarian, but are dealt with by the original utilitarian himself.

Why, though, is it better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied? First, I wouldn’t quite go that far; if asked whether I would rather be a tortured man or a happy pig, I would probably and quite naturally reply, “a happy pig”. Such exaggerated examples, which are meant to shock us into disavowal of a doctrine under scrutiny, don’t quite have the rhetorical force that’s being looked for when they make the case against them quite so costly. I think that the aphorism, though, could be rephrased and agreed to, if we were to say that “it is better to be a blasé Socrates than a happy pig”. Second, with the doctrine of enjoyment at our disposal, we can say that the person is able to have more experience of happiness than the pig is able to. Third, we might say that the human being is more capable of discerning pleasures than the pig, which would both mean that conscious pains are more sharp and horrible, and conscious pleasures are greater.

I think part of the confusion arises over utilitarianism’s commitment to the thesis that happiness is the only intrinsic value. Sometimes, this point is glossed over by critics, who declare (as Harwood does) that “utilitarianism insists that there is only one moral value, satisfaction”. This is not true. Rather, from what I understand, there is only one thing of intrinsic value, and this thing applies to explain the genesis of both moral and non-moral values. There are plenty of instrumental values, and as we’ve seen (with Bentham), they may be rank-ordered in order to produce moral guidance on the basis of however they produce happiness.

Similarly, we are told that the pleasure of bigots and sadists are not of intrinsic value, and so, hedonism is mistaken. However, I deny that the pleasure of any animal is without intrinsic value. But I declare that this proposition, when considered in context, amounts to nothing; for the worth of particular kinds of acts are evaluated separately from the worth of the happiness which they originate from. The experience of pleasure of the lion who eats a baby, and of a bigot who protests the funerals of hate crime victims, are activities that produce intense and personal misery in many others. They are immoral and unjust. But it is no contradiction to say that the pleasure of the sadistic act has intrinsic value, and then to say that it is grossly immoral. All that is asked is that the reader understand that that which is valuable is not necessarily that which is morally significant.

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