redgreenvines said:

ask your tension botnik philosopher

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Rahz said:

redgreenvines said:

ask your tension botnik philosopher

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What does that mean and how does it contribute to the conversation?

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Quote:

This is a good challenge for Integrative Tension because he's pressing directly on the normative premise: why should flourishing count as good at all, and does “good” ultimately collapse into pleasant experience?

I think there are two claims here that should be separated. The first is that all value is value for some valuing being. IT can be quite sympathetic to that. I don't think we need a cosmic meter registering Justice = 93 units and Good Movie = 2 units. If there were no beings capable of experience, agency, relationship, flourishing, suffering, etc., it isn't obvious what it would mean for justice to matter to the universe.

But his second move doesn't follow from the first: that because value exists in relation to beings, all value therefore reduces to how good those beings feel. That's hedonism, and considerably more has to be established to get there.

Take his movie example. Suppose I deliberately watch the terrible movie because my friend desperately wants to see it. I enjoy it less. Yet something else may have gone better: friendship, generosity, keeping a promise, sharing something important to my friend. Or suppose telling someone an unpleasant truth makes both of us substantially less happy for a year but enables them to make an informed decision about their own life. It isn't obvious that the unpleasantness exhausts what happened evaluatively. Agency, truth, relationship, integrity and justice can matter precisely when respecting them makes somebody feel worse.

His meditation example actually risks accepting the spiritualist's hierarchy and then translating it into pleasure. I wouldn't do either. Meditation doesn't become a higher good merely because its pleasure is deeper or longer-lasting. Nor does a good meal become a lower good merely because its pleasure is fleeting. A fifteen-minute pleasure can be a perfectly legitimate good. Meditation might contribute to attention, understanding, emotional regulation, self-knowledge or simply enjoyment; dinner might contribute to pleasure, nourishment, companionship, culture and relationship. Their value depends upon what actually occurs in relation to a life, not their placement on a preassigned spiritual/material ladder.

There's also a revealing problem with reducing everything to “pleasure chemicals.” Neurochemical realization doesn't establish evaluative equivalence. The neural activity accompanying discovering that your child survived an accident and the neural activity accompanying eating excellent ice cream are both physical events. That doesn't establish that the difference between them is merely quantity or duration of pleasure. That's essentially the same reduction problem we've been discussing with rgv: explaining phenomena at a lower level doesn't automatically eliminate distinctions visible at the level where those phenomena occur.

Where I think the poster has found a genuine difficulty is in the phrase “inherent value, beyond the realm of human life.” IT doesn't actually need that. Its normative commitment is more modest and explicit: beings such as ourselves have experiences, agency, relationships, capacities, vulnerability to suffering, and possibilities for flourishing, and their flourishing has normative significance. That's an evaluative starting point rather than something supposedly deduced from physics.

I'd probably respond to him by focusing on the hidden inference:

Why does “value exists in relation to human life” entail “the only human value is pleasure”?

Those aren't the same proposition. If he can establish the latter, he has an argument for hedonism. But pointing out that justice, truth, agency, friendship, meditation, sex, dinner and movies ultimately matter to beings capable of caring about them hasn't established it. It may instead establish something much closer to IT's position: value is relational without therefore being reducible to a single value.

And there's a nice connection to your recent thought about the seed of good. His movie pleasure doesn't have to be dismissed as “mere hedonism” for justice to matter more greatly in some circumstances. Pleasure is already a good. The question isn't how we escape pleasure into some metaphysically higher realm of Value; it's how pleasure stands in relation to all the other things through which a human life can go well.

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redgreenvines said:

what if they are the same positive feelings, but pleasure is easy to attribute to single point sources like candy and heroin which can become addictive.

meanwhile joy is less easy to attribute to a single point source, it is more of an overall gestalt appreciation with positive feelings.

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