Hedonic Psychology, Political Theory and Law (I): Is Welfarism Possible?

Abstract

I address a foundational question: to what extent is concept of welfare meaningful and coherent? Subjective welfarists have adopted two strategies, historically, to determine whether a person is with one state of affairs than another, and each ultimately subtly undermines other. The first, associated with Benthamite utilitarians, is to (try to) look directly at sensation: from this perspective, a person is better off if she feels more and less The second, associated with utilitarians and with modern economics, is to declare that a person is better off if (a certain class of her) preferences are met or realized. Not only is hedonic utilitarianism impracticable given incommensurability of emotional reactions, it is conceptually bankrupt. It does not seem to take adequate account of subjectivity: there is no reason for any particular subject to care about whether she experiences any particular set of sensations, like pleasure or pain. A group I dub the hedonic purport to measure hedonic states directly, but they are ultimately no more successful than Bentham was. There is no particular reason to believe that all people value what new hedonic describe as positive experience, and reflection on philosophical literature, particularly literature on personal identity, as well as a careful reading of both psychological literature on varieties of happiness and biological literature on role of happiness help us see that. But preference utilitarianism is just as problematic. There is a fundamental conceptual problem in connecting satisfaction of desire with experienced utility or well-being: desires are prospective and intentional while well-being is experienced. Our preferences are merely predictions about hedonic states that we will experience if certain end-states occur; like all predictions, they can be wrong. Thus, sophisticated preference utilitarians try to solve problem of error by respecting only sub-class of preferences most likely to be correct - those that are adequately and prudent. But what is critical to understand both at philosophical level and with careful consideration of empirical evidence adduced by hedonic psychologists that bears on this issue is that it is impossible to know when a desire is either prudent or adequately informed unless we know whether meeting it turned out to be hedonically satisfying and we eschewed hedonic utilitarianism precisely because we thought we could not determine directly what is and is not hedonically satisfying.