Out Of Their Depth?
selected for by evolution. 2 Many advantageous traits plausibly contaminate most
objective list theories: honesty, kindness and reciprocity, fairness, aesthetic
appreciation, rationality, a “will to truth,” etc. And preference -based theories are
contaminated by the obvious evolutionary advantage that comes with satisfying our
preferences.
Should LRS counter that skepticism or nihilism about welfare lacks the
“independent agreement of other careful thinkers,” I would caution: the jury is still
out. For many careful thinkers, one of these views is indeed the most self-evident, or
plausible, theory. I, for one, am increasingly appreciating the appeal of these views.
If, then, skepticism or nihilism (or agnosticism) about welfare is more reliable
an intuition than realism about it, then UB’s justification— which requires some
belief in welfare — is on shaky grounds.
LRS’ Mistaken Defen se of Hedonism
An important detour on LRS’s attempt to defend hedonism against evolutionary
debunking. In their defense, LRS seem to conflate normative and motivating senses
of “bad”— ironic, because in chapter two they were at pains to distinguish normative
from motivating reasons. They write,
Pain that is the result of an illusion is no less bad than pain that is the result
of something real, and pain that is the result of evolutionary selection is no
less bad than pain that has other origins, whatever they might be (p. 268).
I agree of course, but only if we take “bad” to refer to the qualitative aspect of
pain that I hate so much. The fact that I hate pain, the fact of its qualitative
badness, and the fact that it motivates me to make it stop, however, do not settle
2 Many advantageous traits plausibly contaminate most objective list theories: honesty, kindness and reciprocity, fairness, aesthetic appreciation, rationality, a “will to truth,” etc. Preference -based theories are contaminated by the obvious evolutionary advantage that comes with satisfying our preferences.
Volume VI (2023)
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