Tag: is-ought

Difficulty: What the hell

In 1974, Robert Nozick offered, in his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia, a thought experiment, which he later revised in his book The Examined Life (1989). We will focus on this second version, which I’ve summarized:

You have access to a machine that could give you any experience(s) that you might desire. When plugged into this machine, you can experience writing a great poem, bringing about world peace, or loving someone and being loved in return, and you can feel “from the inside” the pleasures that these things bring. You can program this machine to give you experiences this week, this year, or for the rest of your life. If you should run out of ideas for pleasurable experiences, you can consult a library of suggestions taken from biographies and from novelists and psychologists. Would you want to be plugged into this machine for the rest of your life? If not, why not?

Further, Nozick stipulates that upon entering the machine, you will not remember having done so. You can optionally program uncertainty by using a randomizer built into the machine.

This thought experiment is Nozick’s attempt to refute the central argument for hedonism about well-being—that the goodness and badness of our lives, for ourselves, is wholly determined by the pains and pleasures we experience.

Simplified, Nozick’s argument can be formulated as a deductive argument:

Premise 1: If hedonism is true, then the vast majority of people would want to plug themselves into the experience machine.

Premise 2: It is not true that the vast majority of people would want to plug themselves into the experience machine.

Therefore, hedonism is false.

This argument is logically valid (it follows the form of modus tollens). The real question is whether Premise 1 is true.

Alternatively, we might reconstruct Nozick’s argument in a different, more controversial way:

Premise 1: The vast majority of reasonable people value reality in addition to pleasure.

Premise 2: If the vast majority of reasonable people value X, then X has intrinsic prudential value.

Conclusion 1: Therefore, reality has intrinsic prudential value.

Premise 3: If something besides pleasure has intrinsic prudential value, then hedonism is false.

Conclusion 2: Therefore, hedonism is false.

Here, “prudential” means “what is good for a person,” which corresponds to “well-being.” So something that has “intrinsic prudential value” is good for a person in itself, not merely as a means to something else.

Some quick examples:

Prudential values (good for you):

• health
• friendship
• pleasure

Intrinsic values (good in themselves):

• pleasure (for hedonists)
• not money (since money is just useful for getting other things)

So something has intrinsic prudential value if it makes your life go better just by being part of it, not because it leads to something else.

The is-ought dichotomy

The deductive interpretation

The problem with this second interpretation is that it moves from what philosophers call an “is” to an “ought.” That is, just because something is the case doesn’t mean it ought to be the case.

For instance, it is the case that most people value money. That doesn’t allow us to conclude that people ought to value money.

This version of the argument assumes that what people happen to value determines what is genuinely valuable. That’s a controversial move, and without it, the argument doesn’t go through.

The abductive interpretation

So instead of interpreting Nozick’s argument as deductive, philosophers more charitably interpret it as abductive—an inference to the best explanation (IBE).

What the hell does that mean?

Say that you see smoke coming out of your car hood. You consider the following explanations:

• You absent-mindedly left a cigarette in there.
• Some part of the car is malfunctioning.
• Criminals planted a stick of dynamite.

The best explanation is the simplest one: something is wrong with the car.

Applied to Nozick’s argument:

What’s the best explanation for the fact that many people care about reality, not just pleasurable experiences? One possible answer is that reality itself has intrinsic value.

This doesn’t prove that hedonism is false, but it gives us a reason to doubt it.

So there you have it: Nozick’s Experience Machine Thought Experiment (EMTE) in a nutshell. In future posts, I will present objections, counterarguments, and all that good philosophy shit. It gets complicated fast, so be prepared to move from “what the hell” to “what the fuck.”