Reformed Philosophy

In the philosophy circles I’m acquainted with, it’s primarily Reformed Epistemology that gets the publicity (thanks by in large to folks like Plantinga, Alston, Wolterstorff, et. al.), but as of late I have been thinking more about what a proper Reformed Ethic would look like. One very popular and plausible option is hedonism, which has gained recognition by in large due to the efforts of the Reformed Baptist pastor Dr. John Piper. There are, however, two powerful arguments contrary to hedonism, namely the Philosophy of Swine Objection and Nozick’s Experience Machine Objection that should be dealt with if we are going to advocate hedonism as at least a part of the Reformed/Christian Ethic. In the fourth chapter of Roger Crisp’s Reasons and the Good, he advocates hedonism as a theory of well-being and tries to defend it against the aforementioned objections. What I will do in this post is look at Crisp’s response to these objections, and critique them as mutually incompatible with each other. That is to say, Crisp’s defense of hedonism against the Philosophy of Swine Objection is incompatible with his defense of hedonism against Nozick’s Experience Machine Objection. I will propose a way that Crisp could mend this inconsistency, though the result is less than wholly palatable to common intuitions. Before concluding, however, I will briefly propose that the Reformed may not be able to adopt Crisp’s brand of hedonism as a tenable response to these objections for theological reasons. Though the objections take on a new character in a Reformed worldview, they nonetheless help signify where the Reformed might part ways with Crisp.

This post will be broken down into the following three sections: First, we will briefly elucidate Crisp’s brand of hedonism along with his response to the Philosophy of Swine Objection. In contrast, we will look in Section II at Crisp’s reply to the Experience Machine Objection, and reveal both Crisp’s inconsistency and a possible way for him to avoid it (without taking worldview into account). Finally, I’ll consider how well Crisp’s hedonism and his response to the two objections might fit within the context of a Reformed worldview.

Section I: Crisp’s Hedonism and His Reply to the Philosophy of Swine Objection

Crisp’s hedonism is ‘a theory of well-being, that is, of what is ultimately good for any individual.’[1] Hedonism, for Crisp, is not an expression of a psychological need for more pleasure than pain, nor is it a method for determining moral rightness (i.e. hedonistic utilitarianism); rather, Crisp is interested in the question ‘What makes a life good for an individual?’[2] Crisp’s answer: Enjoyable experiences.[3] It is the abundance or lack of enjoyable experiences that makes someone’s life better or worse for them, and as such it is the simple property of being enjoyed and that alone which makes any given experience good for a person’s well-being.

To elaborate, Crisp’s hedonistic theory of well-being is monistic and internalist – that is to say, for Crisp, what makes enjoyable experiences enjoyable is the single shared feeling between all such experiences, namely the feeling of enjoyment. Some other internalist monists, perhaps like Hume and Bentham, have tried to argue that all enjoyable experiences share a common (extra) feeling like a tingling, itch, or flutter whenever an enjoyable experience is had; however, as Crisp points out, this seems empirically false. By introspection we can see that there is no common feeling, other than the feeling of enjoyment, that is common between, say, eating a sandwich and exercising.[4] Though enjoyable experiences are quite diverse, they all share the property of feeling enjoyable; in Crisp’s words, enjoyableness is a ‘determinable’ feeling and not a ‘determinate’ feeling.[5] For Crisp, ‘it is enjoyment alone that matters’ for a person’s well-being.[6]

            If all that makes a life good for an individual is enjoyable experience and enjoyable experience alone, then is there anything to make us prefer a life of refinement and reflection over a life of debauchery and base sensuality? What could make us choose the life of Socrates over the life of a pig? The thought that hedonism is unable to qualitatively distinguish between such lives has lead some philosophers to label hedonism the ‘philosophy of swine’. Crisp phrases this sort of objection in the case of ‘Haydn and the Oyster’:

Haydn and the Oyster: You are a soul in heaven waiting to be allocated a life on Earth. It is late Friday afternoon, and you watch anxiously as the supply of available lives dwindles. When your turn comes, the angel in charge offers you a choice between two lives, that of the composer Joseph Haydn and that of an oyster. Besides composing some wonderful music and influencing the evolution of the symphony, Haydn will meet with success and honour in his own lifetime, be cheerful and popular, travel, and gain much enjoyment from field sports. The oyster’s life is far less exciting. Though this is rather a sophisticated oyster, its life will consist only of mild sensual pleasure, rather like that experienced by humans when floating very drunk in a warm bath. When you request the life of Haydn, the angel sighs, ‘I’ll never get rid of this oyster life. It’s been hanging around for ages. Look, I’ll offer you a special deal. Hayden will die at the age of seventy-seven. But I’ll make the oyster life as long as you like’[7]

Given, the experience of composing wonderful music is indeed far more enjoyable than a single instance of floating drunk in a bath; however, if the good-for property in both experiences, namely, that it is enjoyable, is at base the same, what is to keep us from preferring a warm drunken bath that lasted ten-thousand years over the writing of wonderful music, say? It seems like no matter how many enjoyment-points Haydn accumulated over his seventy-seven years, surely a near-eternal oyster would eventually accrue more.

            A natural response to this objection would be to try to partition enjoyable experiences into classes such that no amount of drunken bath-time will ever be worth more than a higher-class enjoyable experience like composing wonderful music. This was the sort of response J.S. Mill provided. The problem with it, however, is that if the only difference between higher and lower enjoyments is the amount they are enjoyed, there does not seem to be a way to qualitatively separate them. If, on the other hand, one tries to separate drunken baths from writing music by establishing a criterion (i.e. nobility) beyond mere enjoyment level, it seems like he/she is breaking with hedonism by permitting non-hedonistic values.[8] That is the dilemma of the Philosophy of Swine Objection: Either ‘embrace the pork’ and agree that the life of a near-eternal pig or oyster would eventually be more valuable than Haydn’s, or part ways with hedonism.

            Though Crisp notes these concerns, he nonetheless thinks Mill was generally ‘on the right track’ in terms of a response to the Philosophy of Swine Objection.[9] To be clear about where Crisp parts ways with Mill, let us first explicate Mill’s position a little further. Mill, along with earlier empiricists, saw pleasure/enjoyment as a sensation with its value being determined by intensity and duration. In addition, Mill wanted to make a quality-quantity distinction, where the difference in quality can be determined by surveying adequately (empirically) informed individuals.[11] For example, people who have experienced both floating drunk in a bath and writing wonderful music will favor the latter more than the former so far as to prefer the latter over any amount of the former, and it is this phenomenon that signifies to Mill an objective difference in quality.[12]

            Crisp, in contrast, points out that talk of intensity and duration of pleasure/enjoyment is either redundant or empirically false.[13] If intensity or duration are meant to refer to the amount of enjoyment gleaned from an experience such that a more intense or a longer lasting sense of enjoyment are directly equivalent to greater enjoyment, then intensity and duration seem to be ‘just another property of the enjoyed experience.’[14] If, on the other hand, enjoyment value is related to the intensity or duration of the experience itself, then it looks like winning a trivial and drawn-out bar-fight should be deemed more enjoyable than, say, realizing that your love for another individual is reciprocal, yet this seems plainly empirically untrue. While duration and intensity may indeed play a role in how enjoyable some experiences are, what ultimately matters is the amount of enjoyment.

The more important dissimilarity, however, between Crisp and Mill is the different ways they view the quality-quantity distinction. Mill is interested in the judgments of adequately informed individuals insofar as they support his inclusion of an additional objective quality determining criterion.[15] As we noted earlier, trying to add such a criterion to determine the class of an enjoyment seems to lead to the acceptance of non-hedonistic values; any hope of creating, within hedonism, an objective catalogue of enjoyable experiences is ‘merely a dream’.[16] Crisp, on the other hand, is interested in the judgments of adequately informed individuals themselves. According to Crisp, all that is needed to surmount the Philosophy of Swine Objection, is the fact that people do (pre-theoretically) judge that no amount of base sensuality, like floating drunk in a bath, would ever make up for the loss of a ‘higher’ enjoyment like writing wonderful music; as Crisp says ‘[in] most cases, the final arbiter on how enjoyable some experience is, and how it compares to some other, is the subject herself ’ (emphasis mine).[17] No objective classification is needed; our judgments themselves are enough to establish what Griffin would call a ‘discontinuity’ between enjoyable experiences.[18]

It seems like Crisp is taking our pre-theoretical judgments as foundational for his theory of a quality-quantity distinction, and accordingly it becomes difficult to discern what exactly his theory is without turning the pre-theoretical into theory; however, my goal for this paper is not to criticize the coherence of Crisp’s solution to the Philosophy of Swine objection itself, but rather to criticize how consistent it is with his solution to the Experience Machine Objection. In any case, it will be helpful to be clear about Crisp’s position (as well as my concern for it), so let us make a rough distinction between first and second order judgments:

First-Order Judgment (FOJ): Judgments that are not recognized by the judger to be part or product of a theory; folk judgments; intuitional judgments.

Second-Order Judgment (SOJ): Theoretical judgments; judgments that are recognized by the judger as being made as a result of applying a theory.

Now, we can re-map Crisp’s position and his response to the Philosophy of Swine Objection. We start with a basic (monistic and internalist) hedonism:

Basic Hedonism Theory (BHT): the only thing that contributes to a person’s well-being is the feeling of enjoyment gleaned from the experiences that person enjoys.

From BHT, with no means to qualitatively distinguish enjoyed experiences, we seem to be able to make the Second-Order Judgment that:

SOJ[O>H]: A near-eternal oyster’s life will eventually be more valuable than the life of Haydn.

However, SOJ[O>H] clashes with the common first-order judgment that:

FOJ[O<H]: No amount of oyster-enjoyment can ever outweigh the kind of enjoyment experienced by Haydn.

It is this clash between SOJ[O>H] and FOJ[O<H] that makes the Philosophy of Swine Objection what it is; that is what gives the objection its strength. As such, philosophers like Mill and Crisp who want to avoid SOJ[O>H] will try to modify BHT such that SOJ[O>H] does not follow. Mill wanted to establish a criterion based first-order judgments to objectively rank enjoyed experiences (the quantity-quality distinction), which was to be added to BHT. As we have already seen, however, it seems like Mill’s criterion is either unhelpful or non-hedonistic. Crisp, like Mill, does not think SOJ[O>H] is an acceptable consequence, but how does he avoid it? Crisp, too, wants to establish a quality-quantity distinction, but, unlike Mill, Crisp is not advocating an objective criterion for classifying enjoyed experiences. Instead, Crisp points to (subjective) first-order judgments like FOJ[O<H] itself as part of his quality-quantity distinction.[19]

            Is this a sufficient response to the Philosophy of Swine Objection? I believe not. To say that we judge that writing wonderful music has a value that no amount of drunken bathing could account for, seems to me to simply be an expression of the intuitional force behind the Philosophy of Swine Objection in the first place. Though it is hard to see how holding first-order judgments on such a pedestal can be coherently translated into a theory that is both compatible with BHT and adequately prevents second-order judgments like SOJ[O>H], the important point to be made is that in so championing first-order judgments, Crisp is blocking his own response to the second major hurtle for any hedonistic theory, namely, Nozick’s Experience Machine.

Section II: Nozick’s Experience Machine

The Experience Machine: ‘Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank with electrodes attached to your brain…Would you plug in? What else can matter to us, other than how our lives feel from the inside?’ (emphasis is Crisp’s)[20] 

In Reasons & the Good Crisp rephrases Nozick’s Experience Machine in terms of two people, P and Q. P and Q have identical experiences of a fulfilled and valuable life, the only difference is that P’s experiences are actual while Q’s experiences are illusory, the product of an experience machine. It seems like according to Crisp’s brand of hedonism, we should have no reason to prefer P over Q; both lives, after all, feel exactly the same ‘from the inside’.[21] In keeping with our terminology, Nozick’s Experience Machine allows us to produce the following second-order judgment from BHT:

SOJ[P=Q]: If lives P and Q have identical experiences with the only difference being that P’s experiences were actual while Q’s were illusory as a result of an experience machine, then we have no reason to prefer life P over life Q.

Unfortunately, however, SOJ[P=Q] goes directly against our first-order judgment that:

FOJ[P>Q]: If lives P and Q have identical experiences with the only difference being that P’s experiences were actual while Q’s were illusory as a result of an experience machine, then we have a reason to prefer life P over life Q.

As was the case with the Philosophy of Swine Objection, it is the clash of judgments that creates and strengthens this objection. But unlike the Philosophy of Swine Objection, it looks like Crisp cannot simply accept our first-order judgments concerning experience machines and account for it with his theory, because first-order judgment like FOJ[P>Q] are directly contrary to Crisp’s hedonism. While Crisp could account for FOJ[O<H] by establishing an appropriate quality-quantity distinction, it seems like he cannot do the same for FOJ[P>Q] without giving up something in BHT.

            So, in order to counter Nozick’s Experience Machine Objection, Crisp focuses almost entirely on belittling and undermining our first-order judgments.[22] He argues that first-order judgments like FOJ[P>Q] are secondary principles that have arisen for evolutionary reasons as a means to the end of primary principles like hedonism.[23] As humans evolved we championed those of us who were the best hunters and the best gatherers due to the (hedonistic) well-being they could provide for the community, that is, we evolved to value real accomplishment as a means to our hedonistic desires. According to Crisp, our first order judgments have developed over time such that we value accomplishment in and of itself; accordingly such first-order judgments are simply misleading when it comes to our evaluation of Nozick’s Experience Machine. In addition, Crisp tries to further undermine judgments like FOJ[P>Q] by pointing out that when we look at our lives from ‘the view from nowhere’, there really doesn’t seem to be much of a difference between real experiences and illusory ones, whether it be real accomplishments or only one’s experienced via an experience machine. In other words, in the grand scheme of the universe, which will apparently either (depending on who you ask) peter-out or implode before a re-Big Bang, Crisp doesn’t think there is much of a difference between the real experiences and illusory ones.[24]

            By degrading first-order judgments like FOJ[P>Q], Crisp has effectively removed the teeth from the bite of Nozick’s Experience Machine. The problem, however, is that this strategy is directly contrary to his response to the Philosophy of Swine Objection. Either we philosophically value these sorts of pre-theoretical judgments or we do not. Either they compose a central characteristic of our theories as we saw in Crisp’s response to the Philosophy of Swine Objection, or they are a wrong-headed distraction from the true ethical theory as Crisp implied in his response to Nozick; there doesn’t seem to be a non-arbitrary way to divide these  first-order judgments so Crisp could have it both ways. Given there may be different classes of first-order judgments, but the two in question certainly seem to be of the same ilk.

Assuming what I have said is correct, how can Crisp get around this predicament? He could try to establish a method for discerning pre-theoretical judgments which would produce the result that FOJ[O<H] is philosophically valuable while FOJ[P>Q] is not, but the prospects of doing this without being ad hoc are dim. Besides, in accord with the thesis of this paper, I think Crisp has a better option; Crisp has a very viable route (viable from his theory’s perspective, but not necessarily form a Reformed perspective) in simply being more consistent in how he views these first-order judgments. As I already noted, it does not look like Crisp can preserve his brand of hedonism and accept FOJ[P>Q] like he does with FOJ[O<H], but why cannot he downplay both of them? FOJ[O<H] could be argued to be just as causally related to evolution as FOJ [P>Q]; it could be argued that as humans evolved they naturally developed a self-preservation intuition that favored human life over any other (indeed, over any amount of oyster-lives). Moreover, Crisp could even argue that intuitional strength behind FOJ[O<H] dissolves like it does for FOF[P>Q] when we look at the world from ‘the view from nowhere’, when we look at it from the big-picture of the universe.

But if Crisp does allow for the conclusion of the Philosophy of Swine Objection, doesn’t that make his theory hopelessly disconnected from our intuitions? I do not think so. There are other intuitions in favor of Crisp’s brand of hedonism, and in real life (where there are not life-divvying angels offering special deals) Crisp’s theory doesn’t seem to yield the horrible results we might expect from a ‘philosophy of swine’. It just so happens that we only have the life we have and as such our well-being will indeed be higher if we spend our time writing wonderful music than if we fill our lives with drunken baths.

            This is not to say that there is no cost to be paid for Crisp to ‘embrace pork’. By allowing for the Philosophy of Swine Objection’s conclusion, he is abandoning any quality-quantity distinction in his theory and as such he would be distinctly parting ways with Mill. That said, though Crisp would have to make some modifications, the end result preserves the core of Crisp’s hedonistic theory of well-being and seems to provide him a more consistent and viable position against the Philosophy of Swine Objection and Nozick’s Experience Machine Objection.

Crisp should, from the perspective of his own theory, ‘embrace the pork’, so to speak, and embrace the conclusion of the Philosophy of Swine Objection, that a supernaturally long-living pig or oyster will eventually accrue more well-being than a normal human life no matter how superb it might be. Though an impractical scenario, the results may go against some of our first-order judgments but that in itself should not be considered a knock-down defeater for Crisp’s hedonism. In this paper, we elucidated Crisp’s inconsistency in relying on first-order judgments in his response to the Philosophy of Swine Objection but totally belittling them in his response to Nozick’s Experience Machine. In order to rectify this, I proposed that Crisp embrace the conclusion of the Philosophy of Swine Objection and respond to it by belittling our first-order judgments to the contrary.

Section III: A Brief Christian Response

      Thus far, we have been looking at Crisp’s theory in and of itself, divorced from any worldview. What I intend to do now is look briefly at how the two aforementioned objections pan-out when applied to a monistic and internalistic hedonism, like Crisp’s, that is framed in a Reformed worldview. I have two pertinent presumptions concerning what should be a part of any Reformed Ethic:

 1.A human life should be considered more valuable than an oyster’s, no matter how long the oyster lives.

 2. A human life with real experiences is to be preferred over a human life with illusory experience machine experiences.

I will, for present purposes, hold theses assumptions as theological bedrock, such that if there is an inconsistency between a hedonism like Crisp’s and theses assumptions then so much for the hedonism. One might think that since I suggested that the most consistent option for Crisp’s theory is to belittle the first-order judgments that are behind both of these assumptions, that Crisp’s theory is incompatible with Reformed ethics; however, though this may indeed be the case, enjoyment from within a Reformed worldview has a different character and context, and what we will have to consider at the end of this post is whether this context amounts to any non-hedonistic value that would depart from Crisp’s pure hedonism.

            Within a Reformed worldview we have the ideas of heaven and hell, and depending on the circumstance either the Philosophy of Swine Objection doesn’t form or it helps us signify a point of departure from Crisp’s pure hedonism. For the Reformed, there is no such thing as having a life like Haydn’s living for 77 years and then presumably ceasing to exist; people either go to heaven or hell. If Haydn was a Christian, then he lives eternally in heaven and accordingly accruing fantastic enjoyments – no eternal-oyster will ever be able to catch up to him. What if, in contrast, Haydn went to hell? It seems like in that case, as far as brute enjoyment is concerned, a near-eternal oyster will indeed have a more valuable life than Haydn’s. We could try to alter the first assumption so that it excludes the cases where people go to hell, but, like I said, I am taking that first assumption as theological bedrock. I suspect that any Reformed theory of value must give some account of Imago Dei (‘Image of God’), such that sustains the first assumption no matter what someone’s eternal destination happens to be.[25] Insofar as Imago Dei is a non-hedonistic value, then that is a point at which the Reformed must part ways with Crisp; we cannot try to belittle the first-order judgments for at their foundation is the idea that humans are made in the image of God and as such qualitatively different from oysters.

            How might a Christian hedonism similar to Crisp’s respond to Nozick’s Experience Machine Objection and yet sustain the second presumption? Admittedly, this objection touches on theology that I am not currently prepared to respond with or to, so what follows may not be much more than hand-waving and conjecture. At the outset we should note that I take it as a metaphysical impossibility that there be a heaven or hell experience machine; hence, the objection will immediately take on a different character once considered from a Christian worldview. In the case where an individual goes to heaven, a pure hedonism might be sustained if heaven will be in some way better for the individual who lived a real-life than for the individual who lived an illusory life.[26] This might be vindicated if we put some weight on the idea that our enjoyment is linked to God’s glory and that God is more glorified in real accomplishments than in illusory one’s. We will have to consider in another post whether or not this view can consistently be maintained. In the case where an individual goes to hell, the only way to maintain a pure hedonism, with no non-hedonistic values, would be if hell was somehow better for the individual who lived a real life, but I am not sure what theological concepts could be mustered in support of such a position that would nonetheless remain true to Crisp’s brand of hedonism. This too may be a point of departure from Crisp if some sort of hedonism is to be adopted as the Reformed Ethic.

References

Crisp, Roger. Reasons and the Good. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Griffin, J. Well-Being: Its Meaning, Measurement, and Moral Importance. Oxford, UK:

Oxford University Press, 1987.

Mill, J.S. Utilitarianism. ed. Roger Crisp. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1998.