The philosophies of Epicurus and the Buddha aim to free us from suffering by helping us to recogn... more The philosophies of Epicurus and the Buddha aim to free us from suffering by helping us to recognize how ignorance and delusion lead us to pursue harmful desires. Since the problem lies in our attitudes, the solution is to change our attitudes. Like doctors healing the sick, they offer therapeutic practical advice, to remove the groundless opinions and the unhealthy desires that cause suffering. Although various misconceptions may lead us to conceive of these two thinkers as quite different with respect to values and ethics, there are remarkable similarities. Indeed, their practical advice for how to live has the same normative basis: they counsel us to avoid craving and clinging, so that we avoid the harmful ways of living that make most people unhappy. Epicurus and the Buddha advocate a selective elimination of desire, and on the same basis. As we choose how to live, we are like gardeners weeding out harmful desires and cultivating healthy desires that will make our lives flourish. This article clarifies the notions of craving and clinging, which are often conflated in Buddhist studies, and uses them to improve on our understanding of Epicurus' categorization of desires.
Part of a series of papers on Hedonism about wellbeing:
Epicurus' theory of what is good for a pe... more Part of a series of papers on Hedonism about wellbeing: Epicurus' theory of what is good for a person is hedonistic: only pleasure has intrinsic value. Critics object that Epicurus is committed to advocating sensualist excess, since hedonism seems both to imply that more pleasure is always of some good for you, and to recommend even debauched, sensual kinds of pleasure. However, Epicurus can respond to this objection much like J. S. Mill responds to the objection that hedonism is a " doctrine worthy only of swine ". I argue that Epicurus' hedonism is a version of qualitative hedonism on which static pleasure is intrinsically superior to other kinds of pleasure. I also argue that Epicurus conceives of pleasure as a phenomenal or felt quality of experience, and that this is compatible with his troublesome claim that there is an upper limit to pleasure and wellbeing.
Each person has a special relation to his or her own well-being. This rough thought, which can be... more Each person has a special relation to his or her own well-being. This rough thought, which can be sharpened in different ways, is supposed to substantially count against objectivist theories on which one can intrinsically benefit from, or be harmed by, factors that are independent of one's desires, beliefs, and other attitudes. It is often claimed, contra objectivism, that one cannot be alienated from one's own interests, or that improvements in a person's well-being must resonate with that person. However, I argue that every theory of wellbeing must allow that we can be alienated from our own well-being, and that sophisticated objectivists can accept and make use of a resonance constraint against their opponents.
Metaethical cognitivism allegedly has trouble explaining how moral judgments are practical, becau... more Metaethical cognitivism allegedly has trouble explaining how moral judgments are practical, because it claims that moral thoughts are beliefs that need not involve motivation. But motivation is not necessary to meet the practicality criterion on theories of moral thought and talk. A cognitivist about moral thought can adopt a prescriptivist account of moral talk, in a hybrid theory that supplements descriptive moral meanings in order to achieve interesting advantages over traditional descriptivist and expressivist theories as well as over other hybrid theories. This hybrid cognitivist-prescriptivist theory makes sense of amoralists who have moral judgments but no motivation, and offers a new diagnosis of why their use of moral language is infelicitous.
Part of a series of papers on Hedonism about wellbeing:
Pleasure is one of the most obvious c... more Part of a series of papers on Hedonism about wellbeing:
Pleasure is one of the most obvious candidates for directly improving wellbeing. Hedonists claim it is the only feature that can intrinsically make life better for the one living it, and that all of wellbeing derives from the relative pleasantness and unpleasantness of conscious experience. But Hedonism is incompatible with the 'heterogeneity' of pleasure: it cannot allow that distinct pleasures can feel completely differently, if experiences count as pleasant due to how they feel. I argue that a pluralistic variant of Hedonism can match its theoretical attractions while also accommodating the heterogeneity of pleasure. This has interesting implications for both the philosophical debate over the nature of wellbeing and psychological theories of how to measure and aggregate positive affect. In particular, my argument implies that there is no single dimension of 'valence' or 'intensity' on which pleasantness can be measured.
Part of a series of papers on Hedonism about wellbeing:
In this paper, I argue that Phenomenalis... more Part of a series of papers on Hedonism about wellbeing:
In this paper, I argue that Phenomenalists about pleasure can concede a key claim, Heterogeneity, commonly used to object to their theory. They also can then vindicate the aspirations of J. S. Mill's doctrine of higher pleasures, while grounding their value claims in a naturalistic metaethics. But once Phenomenalists concede Heterogeneity they can no longer consistently endorse Hedonism as the correct theory of wellbeing, since they implicitly commit to recognizing distinct kinds of pleasure that are independently good-making. I also explore further issues that arise for a Pluralist theory of pleasure: How could there be distinct kinds of pleasure? How can pleasures be measured? Is it possible for some pleasures to be superior in kind to others? What unifies the category of pleasant experiences? Is the value of pleasant experiences natural or non-natural?
Michael Ridge argues that metaethical expressivism can avoid its most worrisome problems by going... more Michael Ridge argues that metaethical expressivism can avoid its most worrisome problems by going ‘Ecumenical’. Ridge emphasizes that he aims to develop expressivism at the level of metasemantics rather than at the level of (first-order) semantics. This is supposed to allow him to avoid a mentalist semantics of attitudes and instead offer an orthodox, truth-conditional or propositional semantics. However, I argue that Ridge’s theory remains committed to mentalist semantics, and that his move to go metasemantic doesn’t bring any clear advantages to the debate between expressivism and its opponents.
Frege-Geach worries about embedding and composition have plagued metaethical theories like emotiv... more Frege-Geach worries about embedding and composition have plagued metaethical theories like emotivism, prescriptivism, and expressivism. The sharpened point of such criticism has come to focus on whether negation and inconsistency have to be understood in descriptivist terms. Because they reject descriptivist semantics, these theories must offer a non-standard account of the meanings of ethical and normative sentences and their semantic relations. This paper fills out such a solution to the negation problems, following some of the original emotivist ideas about the interplay of interests in conversation. We communicate both to share information and coordinate our actions, and we use distinctively normative language like deontic ‘must’ and ‘may’ to negotiate what people are to do. The kinds of disagreement involved in this interplay can help explain negation and inconsistency, in a dynamic semantic system that develops the scorekeeping model of conversation. This clarifies the significance of Frege-Geach worries for nondescriptive semantics.
Mark Schroeder's Being For explores the plausibility of metaethical expressivism by isolating a f... more Mark Schroeder's Being For explores the plausibility of metaethical expressivism by isolating a few core assumptions and constraints, and then drawing out the implications of how they can be developed into a semantic theory for a fragment of English. Its main virtue is that it shows how an expressivist can handle the 'Frege-Geach problem' by constructing a semantic system in which expressive language can embed in complex sentences that have the right semantic properties. For example, considerable effort is put into explaining why the sentence 'Murder is not wrong' is inconsistent with the simpler sentence 'Murder is wrong'. Additionally, Being For claims to develop 'non-cognitivism', a family of non-descriptivist theories of normative language of which expressivism is a popular version, in the best way possible. But, ultimately, it concludes pessimistically that expressivism is 'an extremely unpromising hypothesis about the workings of natural languages' (Schroeder 2008: 179).
Ridge broaches an impressive range of topics involving language, thought, motivation, rationality... more Ridge broaches an impressive range of topics involving language, thought, motivation, rationality, and disagreement, in order to defend Ecumenical Expressivism (EE), a sophisticated view about normative meanings.
Much of the best recent work in the normative areas in which Ethics publishes has resulted from a... more Much of the best recent work in the normative areas in which Ethics publishes has resulted from advances made in other fields, both within philosophy (metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind, for example) and without (economics, evolutionary biology, and theology, for example). With this issue Ethics offers the initial review in "From Outside of Ethics," an occasional series of reviews of books outside the bounds of moral, political, legal, and social philosophy that may nevertheless be of deep interest to people working in those fields. Richard, Mark. When Truth Gives Out. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. 184. $55.00 (cloth).
The philosophies of Epicurus and the Buddha aim to free us from suffering by helping us to recogn... more The philosophies of Epicurus and the Buddha aim to free us from suffering by helping us to recognize how ignorance and delusion lead us to pursue harmful desires. Since the problem lies in our attitudes, the solution is to change our attitudes. Like doctors healing the sick, they offer therapeutic practical advice, to remove the groundless opinions and the unhealthy desires that cause suffering. Although various misconceptions may lead us to conceive of these two thinkers as quite different with respect to values and ethics, there are remarkable similarities. Indeed, their practical advice for how to live has the same normative basis: they counsel us to avoid craving and clinging, so that we avoid the harmful ways of living that make most people unhappy. Epicurus and the Buddha advocate a selective elimination of desire, and on the same basis. As we choose how to live, we are like gardeners weeding out harmful desires and cultivating healthy desires that will make our lives flourish. This article clarifies the notions of craving and clinging, which are often conflated in Buddhist studies, and uses them to improve on our understanding of Epicurus' categorization of desires.
Part of a series of papers on Hedonism about wellbeing:
Epicurus' theory of what is good for a pe... more Part of a series of papers on Hedonism about wellbeing: Epicurus' theory of what is good for a person is hedonistic: only pleasure has intrinsic value. Critics object that Epicurus is committed to advocating sensualist excess, since hedonism seems both to imply that more pleasure is always of some good for you, and to recommend even debauched, sensual kinds of pleasure. However, Epicurus can respond to this objection much like J. S. Mill responds to the objection that hedonism is a " doctrine worthy only of swine ". I argue that Epicurus' hedonism is a version of qualitative hedonism on which static pleasure is intrinsically superior to other kinds of pleasure. I also argue that Epicurus conceives of pleasure as a phenomenal or felt quality of experience, and that this is compatible with his troublesome claim that there is an upper limit to pleasure and wellbeing.
Each person has a special relation to his or her own well-being. This rough thought, which can be... more Each person has a special relation to his or her own well-being. This rough thought, which can be sharpened in different ways, is supposed to substantially count against objectivist theories on which one can intrinsically benefit from, or be harmed by, factors that are independent of one's desires, beliefs, and other attitudes. It is often claimed, contra objectivism, that one cannot be alienated from one's own interests, or that improvements in a person's well-being must resonate with that person. However, I argue that every theory of wellbeing must allow that we can be alienated from our own well-being, and that sophisticated objectivists can accept and make use of a resonance constraint against their opponents.
Metaethical cognitivism allegedly has trouble explaining how moral judgments are practical, becau... more Metaethical cognitivism allegedly has trouble explaining how moral judgments are practical, because it claims that moral thoughts are beliefs that need not involve motivation. But motivation is not necessary to meet the practicality criterion on theories of moral thought and talk. A cognitivist about moral thought can adopt a prescriptivist account of moral talk, in a hybrid theory that supplements descriptive moral meanings in order to achieve interesting advantages over traditional descriptivist and expressivist theories as well as over other hybrid theories. This hybrid cognitivist-prescriptivist theory makes sense of amoralists who have moral judgments but no motivation, and offers a new diagnosis of why their use of moral language is infelicitous.
Part of a series of papers on Hedonism about wellbeing:
Pleasure is one of the most obvious c... more Part of a series of papers on Hedonism about wellbeing:
Pleasure is one of the most obvious candidates for directly improving wellbeing. Hedonists claim it is the only feature that can intrinsically make life better for the one living it, and that all of wellbeing derives from the relative pleasantness and unpleasantness of conscious experience. But Hedonism is incompatible with the 'heterogeneity' of pleasure: it cannot allow that distinct pleasures can feel completely differently, if experiences count as pleasant due to how they feel. I argue that a pluralistic variant of Hedonism can match its theoretical attractions while also accommodating the heterogeneity of pleasure. This has interesting implications for both the philosophical debate over the nature of wellbeing and psychological theories of how to measure and aggregate positive affect. In particular, my argument implies that there is no single dimension of 'valence' or 'intensity' on which pleasantness can be measured.
Part of a series of papers on Hedonism about wellbeing:
In this paper, I argue that Phenomenalis... more Part of a series of papers on Hedonism about wellbeing:
In this paper, I argue that Phenomenalists about pleasure can concede a key claim, Heterogeneity, commonly used to object to their theory. They also can then vindicate the aspirations of J. S. Mill's doctrine of higher pleasures, while grounding their value claims in a naturalistic metaethics. But once Phenomenalists concede Heterogeneity they can no longer consistently endorse Hedonism as the correct theory of wellbeing, since they implicitly commit to recognizing distinct kinds of pleasure that are independently good-making. I also explore further issues that arise for a Pluralist theory of pleasure: How could there be distinct kinds of pleasure? How can pleasures be measured? Is it possible for some pleasures to be superior in kind to others? What unifies the category of pleasant experiences? Is the value of pleasant experiences natural or non-natural?
Michael Ridge argues that metaethical expressivism can avoid its most worrisome problems by going... more Michael Ridge argues that metaethical expressivism can avoid its most worrisome problems by going ‘Ecumenical’. Ridge emphasizes that he aims to develop expressivism at the level of metasemantics rather than at the level of (first-order) semantics. This is supposed to allow him to avoid a mentalist semantics of attitudes and instead offer an orthodox, truth-conditional or propositional semantics. However, I argue that Ridge’s theory remains committed to mentalist semantics, and that his move to go metasemantic doesn’t bring any clear advantages to the debate between expressivism and its opponents.
Frege-Geach worries about embedding and composition have plagued metaethical theories like emotiv... more Frege-Geach worries about embedding and composition have plagued metaethical theories like emotivism, prescriptivism, and expressivism. The sharpened point of such criticism has come to focus on whether negation and inconsistency have to be understood in descriptivist terms. Because they reject descriptivist semantics, these theories must offer a non-standard account of the meanings of ethical and normative sentences and their semantic relations. This paper fills out such a solution to the negation problems, following some of the original emotivist ideas about the interplay of interests in conversation. We communicate both to share information and coordinate our actions, and we use distinctively normative language like deontic ‘must’ and ‘may’ to negotiate what people are to do. The kinds of disagreement involved in this interplay can help explain negation and inconsistency, in a dynamic semantic system that develops the scorekeeping model of conversation. This clarifies the significance of Frege-Geach worries for nondescriptive semantics.
Mark Schroeder's Being For explores the plausibility of metaethical expressivism by isolating a f... more Mark Schroeder's Being For explores the plausibility of metaethical expressivism by isolating a few core assumptions and constraints, and then drawing out the implications of how they can be developed into a semantic theory for a fragment of English. Its main virtue is that it shows how an expressivist can handle the 'Frege-Geach problem' by constructing a semantic system in which expressive language can embed in complex sentences that have the right semantic properties. For example, considerable effort is put into explaining why the sentence 'Murder is not wrong' is inconsistent with the simpler sentence 'Murder is wrong'. Additionally, Being For claims to develop 'non-cognitivism', a family of non-descriptivist theories of normative language of which expressivism is a popular version, in the best way possible. But, ultimately, it concludes pessimistically that expressivism is 'an extremely unpromising hypothesis about the workings of natural languages' (Schroeder 2008: 179).
Ridge broaches an impressive range of topics involving language, thought, motivation, rationality... more Ridge broaches an impressive range of topics involving language, thought, motivation, rationality, and disagreement, in order to defend Ecumenical Expressivism (EE), a sophisticated view about normative meanings.
Much of the best recent work in the normative areas in which Ethics publishes has resulted from a... more Much of the best recent work in the normative areas in which Ethics publishes has resulted from advances made in other fields, both within philosophy (metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind, for example) and without (economics, evolutionary biology, and theology, for example). With this issue Ethics offers the initial review in "From Outside of Ethics," an occasional series of reviews of books outside the bounds of moral, political, legal, and social philosophy that may nevertheless be of deep interest to people working in those fields. Richard, Mark. When Truth Gives Out. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. 184. $55.00 (cloth).
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Papers by Andrew Alwood
Epicurus' theory of what is good for a person is hedonistic: only pleasure has intrinsic value. Critics object that Epicurus is committed to advocating sensualist excess, since hedonism seems both to imply that more pleasure is always of some good for you, and to recommend even debauched, sensual kinds of pleasure. However, Epicurus can respond to this objection much like J. S. Mill responds to the objection that hedonism is a " doctrine worthy only of swine ". I argue that Epicurus' hedonism is a version of qualitative hedonism on which static pleasure is intrinsically superior to other kinds of pleasure. I also argue that Epicurus conceives of pleasure as a phenomenal or felt quality of experience, and that this is compatible with his troublesome claim that there is an upper limit to pleasure and wellbeing.
Pleasure is one of the most obvious candidates for directly improving wellbeing. Hedonists claim it is the only feature that can intrinsically make life better for the one living it, and that all of wellbeing derives from the relative pleasantness and unpleasantness of conscious experience. But Hedonism is incompatible with the 'heterogeneity' of pleasure: it cannot allow that distinct pleasures can feel completely differently, if experiences count as pleasant due to how they feel. I argue that a pluralistic variant of Hedonism can match its theoretical attractions while also accommodating the heterogeneity of pleasure. This has interesting implications for both the philosophical debate over the nature of wellbeing and psychological theories of how to measure and aggregate positive affect. In particular, my argument implies that there is no single dimension of 'valence' or 'intensity' on which pleasantness can be measured.
In this paper, I argue that Phenomenalists about pleasure can concede a key claim, Heterogeneity, commonly used to object to their theory. They also can then vindicate the aspirations of J. S. Mill's doctrine of higher pleasures, while grounding their value claims in a naturalistic metaethics. But once Phenomenalists concede Heterogeneity they can no longer consistently endorse Hedonism as the correct theory of wellbeing, since they implicitly commit to recognizing distinct kinds of pleasure that are independently good-making. I also explore further issues that arise for a Pluralist theory of pleasure: How could there be distinct kinds of pleasure? How can pleasures be measured? Is it possible for some pleasures to be superior in kind to others? What unifies the category of pleasant experiences? Is the value of pleasant experiences natural or non-natural?
sentences and their semantic relations. This paper fills out such a solution to the negation problems, following some of the original emotivist ideas about the interplay of interests in conversation. We communicate both to share information and coordinate our actions, and we use distinctively normative
language like deontic ‘must’ and ‘may’ to negotiate what people are to do. The kinds of disagreement involved in this interplay can help explain negation and inconsistency, in a dynamic semantic system that develops the scorekeeping model of conversation. This clarifies the significance of Frege-Geach
worries for nondescriptive semantics.
Epicurus' theory of what is good for a person is hedonistic: only pleasure has intrinsic value. Critics object that Epicurus is committed to advocating sensualist excess, since hedonism seems both to imply that more pleasure is always of some good for you, and to recommend even debauched, sensual kinds of pleasure. However, Epicurus can respond to this objection much like J. S. Mill responds to the objection that hedonism is a " doctrine worthy only of swine ". I argue that Epicurus' hedonism is a version of qualitative hedonism on which static pleasure is intrinsically superior to other kinds of pleasure. I also argue that Epicurus conceives of pleasure as a phenomenal or felt quality of experience, and that this is compatible with his troublesome claim that there is an upper limit to pleasure and wellbeing.
Pleasure is one of the most obvious candidates for directly improving wellbeing. Hedonists claim it is the only feature that can intrinsically make life better for the one living it, and that all of wellbeing derives from the relative pleasantness and unpleasantness of conscious experience. But Hedonism is incompatible with the 'heterogeneity' of pleasure: it cannot allow that distinct pleasures can feel completely differently, if experiences count as pleasant due to how they feel. I argue that a pluralistic variant of Hedonism can match its theoretical attractions while also accommodating the heterogeneity of pleasure. This has interesting implications for both the philosophical debate over the nature of wellbeing and psychological theories of how to measure and aggregate positive affect. In particular, my argument implies that there is no single dimension of 'valence' or 'intensity' on which pleasantness can be measured.
In this paper, I argue that Phenomenalists about pleasure can concede a key claim, Heterogeneity, commonly used to object to their theory. They also can then vindicate the aspirations of J. S. Mill's doctrine of higher pleasures, while grounding their value claims in a naturalistic metaethics. But once Phenomenalists concede Heterogeneity they can no longer consistently endorse Hedonism as the correct theory of wellbeing, since they implicitly commit to recognizing distinct kinds of pleasure that are independently good-making. I also explore further issues that arise for a Pluralist theory of pleasure: How could there be distinct kinds of pleasure? How can pleasures be measured? Is it possible for some pleasures to be superior in kind to others? What unifies the category of pleasant experiences? Is the value of pleasant experiences natural or non-natural?
sentences and their semantic relations. This paper fills out such a solution to the negation problems, following some of the original emotivist ideas about the interplay of interests in conversation. We communicate both to share information and coordinate our actions, and we use distinctively normative
language like deontic ‘must’ and ‘may’ to negotiate what people are to do. The kinds of disagreement involved in this interplay can help explain negation and inconsistency, in a dynamic semantic system that develops the scorekeeping model of conversation. This clarifies the significance of Frege-Geach
worries for nondescriptive semantics.