I've got a quibble with your kitchen example. Why would leaving the kitchen dirty be painful in the first place, rather than just neutral? If the honest answer is that you've already internalized cleanliness as a value, then the pain is just the felt weight of that belief, not independent evidence for it. That's not hedonism explaining the behavior. That's a belief you already hold, felt as pain. If pleasure and pain are supposed to be the criterion, the criterion shouldn't already assume the conclusion it's testing.
Isn't the actual intrinsic value of cleaning the kitchen just having a clean kitchen? Easier cooking, less mess later, no hidden pleasure calculus required. Feels like adding a psychological mechanism where a plain, evident fact already does the job.
I also wonder whether Mill's move, each person's happiness is a good to that person, survives contact with cases where individual and aggregate happiness actually pull apart. Take the classic surgeon case: a doctor could save five dying patients by harvesting the organs of one healthy one. Aggregate happiness goes up. The individual whose happiness got treated as fungible would presumably disagree. Doesn't that expose exactly the gap "good to the aggregate of all persons" is supposed to paper over?
On the Pyrrhonism section, I generally agree with your read. It seems like there's more agreement here than disagreement. On avoiding pain and disturbance through the criteria of action, no real dispute there either. Where I'd mark a difference: Epicurus presents his claims as settled, where Pyrrhonism, as I understand it, would treat the same claims as non-evident, worth acting on, but not worth asserting as final.
Good questions, but not ones that I think the Epicureans have any fundamental difficulty in responding to.
First, on psychological hedonism and kitchen-cleaning: The point of psychological hedonism is *not* to make any claims about the "metaphysical root of all value" (as you word it in your follow-up note). As a purely descriptive theory, it issues no judgment as to the wisdom or necessity of our various possible motivations for cleaning the kitchen, but aims at a neutral description of our psychological reality.
You might have a fairly straightforward relationship with your kitchen, in which the task of cleaning it seems like it offers a simple benefit: it will be cleaner and more convenient to use. But if we survey human thinking, I think it is certainly true that some people will be motivated by more complex beliefs, such as shame ("I don't want my visiting parents to see this mess!") or guilt ("I look at this kitchen and feel like a terrible person whose life is a mess").
The Epicureans would largely agree with the practical recommendation that I think you're driving at: adding sources of pain to our lives based on unnecessarily beliefs is not a good way to increase our happiness. Recognizing the current sources of our pain (which are often empty beliefs) is a practice we want to encourage. That doesn't mean the pain isn't "real."
On Mill and aggregate happiness: I think the standard answer to your surgeon case would be some version of "rule utilitarianism," rather than to make one's hedonic calculus based on isolated situations ("act utilitarianism"). Most people have a very strong preference for living in a society in which their healthy organs will not be harvested from their living body against their will. It is therefore in society's overall hedonic interest to maintain laws and norms in which killing people for their organs is impermissible.
I've got a quibble with your kitchen example. Why would leaving the kitchen dirty be painful in the first place, rather than just neutral? If the honest answer is that you've already internalized cleanliness as a value, then the pain is just the felt weight of that belief, not independent evidence for it. That's not hedonism explaining the behavior. That's a belief you already hold, felt as pain. If pleasure and pain are supposed to be the criterion, the criterion shouldn't already assume the conclusion it's testing.
Isn't the actual intrinsic value of cleaning the kitchen just having a clean kitchen? Easier cooking, less mess later, no hidden pleasure calculus required. Feels like adding a psychological mechanism where a plain, evident fact already does the job.
I also wonder whether Mill's move, each person's happiness is a good to that person, survives contact with cases where individual and aggregate happiness actually pull apart. Take the classic surgeon case: a doctor could save five dying patients by harvesting the organs of one healthy one. Aggregate happiness goes up. The individual whose happiness got treated as fungible would presumably disagree. Doesn't that expose exactly the gap "good to the aggregate of all persons" is supposed to paper over?
On the Pyrrhonism section, I generally agree with your read. It seems like there's more agreement here than disagreement. On avoiding pain and disturbance through the criteria of action, no real dispute there either. Where I'd mark a difference: Epicurus presents his claims as settled, where Pyrrhonism, as I understand it, would treat the same claims as non-evident, worth acting on, but not worth asserting as final.
Good questions, but not ones that I think the Epicureans have any fundamental difficulty in responding to.
First, on psychological hedonism and kitchen-cleaning: The point of psychological hedonism is *not* to make any claims about the "metaphysical root of all value" (as you word it in your follow-up note). As a purely descriptive theory, it issues no judgment as to the wisdom or necessity of our various possible motivations for cleaning the kitchen, but aims at a neutral description of our psychological reality.
You might have a fairly straightforward relationship with your kitchen, in which the task of cleaning it seems like it offers a simple benefit: it will be cleaner and more convenient to use. But if we survey human thinking, I think it is certainly true that some people will be motivated by more complex beliefs, such as shame ("I don't want my visiting parents to see this mess!") or guilt ("I look at this kitchen and feel like a terrible person whose life is a mess").
The Epicureans would largely agree with the practical recommendation that I think you're driving at: adding sources of pain to our lives based on unnecessarily beliefs is not a good way to increase our happiness. Recognizing the current sources of our pain (which are often empty beliefs) is a practice we want to encourage. That doesn't mean the pain isn't "real."
On Mill and aggregate happiness: I think the standard answer to your surgeon case would be some version of "rule utilitarianism," rather than to make one's hedonic calculus based on isolated situations ("act utilitarianism"). Most people have a very strong preference for living in a society in which their healthy organs will not be harvested from their living body against their will. It is therefore in society's overall hedonic interest to maintain laws and norms in which killing people for their organs is impermissible.