Ryberg’s Doubts About Higher and Lower Pleasures –Put to Rest?

Abstract

I am going to show that Ryberg's arguments against Mill-superiority can easily be met if one gives up a controversial additivity assumption that underlies his reasoning. Ryberg refers to the claim that some pleasures are Mill-superior to oth ers as "the discontinuity view"3 and he readily admits that the view in ques tion seems to have a strong backing in our well-informed preferences. Thus, it seems to pass Mill's famous preference test, according to which what decides the superiority issue is that persons who are "competently ac quainted" with both kind of pleasures would prefer a single pleasure of one kind to "any quantity of the other pleasure which their nature is capa ble of (cf. Mill, 1991 [1863], p. 138) To use one of Ryberg's examples, a higher pleasure might consist in enjoying Verdi's // Trovatore, while lower pleasures might accompany listening to music. Our preferences may be such that "no number of units of pleasure generated by listening to music