User:Christofurio
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I hope soon to write an article, even if just a stubby one, about this important institution: http://www.mcxindia.com/
Awhile back, in one of the talk pages of an article on ethical philosophy, user Robbrown wrote a fascinating discussion of which I will quote only the final sentences, and his open ended question, "In any case, my point is that the concept of good is tied very tightly to the concept of happiness, and with happiness defined in an objective, completely non-circular way, I think you (or I) could start to reduce the areas of the goodness article where it simply surrenders and claims the word is effectively 'unknowable' or 'undefinable'.
"Any thoughts?"
This was so provocative (in a good way) that I replied several times. I combine my replies here.
Here are four thoughts. First, happiness isn't pleasure. Second, pleasure and pain aren't necessarily on the same scale, even if they are both naturalistically understood. Third, monism in value theory is misguided. Fourth, authenticity is as rational a value as any. Lets take those in that order. I, for one, don't value pleasure more highly than I value, say, wisdom. If I could make the choice to live a pleasant but idiotic life, dependent upon the care of others, in contrast to a wise and well-informed life that would entail a good deal of suffering, I would likely choose the latter over the former. So if happiness simply means "pleasure," I would reject it under that name, too, as part of the same choice. This kind of example proves that a non-circular understanding of the good is trickier than you suggest.
Second, it isn't clear to me that causing pleasure and causing a lessening of pain are, as you explicitly assume, the "same thing." We tend to think of pleasure and pain as on the same scale, like the positive and the negative numbers, but that might be naive. Increasing a masochist's pleasure entails increasing his/her pain, doesn't it? Likewise, perhaps I am willing to suffer the pain of the hangover tomorrow in order to enjoy the pleasures of boozing it up tonight. Decreasing my pain would come at the expense of the proposed increase of my pleasure. They aren't the same goal, and they are at least at times conflicting goals, then.
From those considerations a conclusion follows, my third thought here. One ought to avoid any monistic conception of the good, and your confusion of monism with cognitivism in ethics.
As an addendum, consider the movie "The Matrix." What if I could voluntarily agree to be strapped into a machine, as people 'really' are according to that movie, and passively fed experiences that make it appear as if I'm living an active life? What if I made a deal that ensured that my intra-matrix experiences would be pleasant ones? And I could take the red pill, causing me to forget I had ever made that choice and to believe the machine-created life to be real? Wouldn't such a choice still be craven? The desire to live an authentic life, even if one suffers for it, doesn't seem inherently irrational.
And here's a quote I like, from an essay by Isaiah Berlin about the development of the Russian intelligentsia in the 19th century. He has just been discussing German "storm and stress" ....
"The Russians merely took this process of reasoning one step further. They rightly judged that if youth, barbarism, and lack of education were criteria of a glorious future, they had an even more powerful hope of it than the Germans. Consequently the vast outpouring of German romantic rhetoric about the unexhausted forces of the young, unwearied German nation, directed as it was against the 'impure', Latinised, decadent western nations, was received in Russia with understandable enthusiasm."
Understandable, surely. And, by the same token, we can understand a certain treaty concluded in 1939, and subsequent events.
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