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Crisp (Welfare and Pleasure (Desire accounts (Present desire account - a…
Crisp
Welfare and Pleasure
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Mill and Bentham: welfare consists only in your experience e.g. if you were spied on for years and never found out, it would not diminish your welfare
Bentham's hedonism is not the same as sensualism which says that one should live a life of luxury and excess - pleasure occurs when one undertakes an activity which makes them better off afterwards
Crisp argues that there is no way to distinguish higher and lower pleasures with a criteria because they will either be vague or not applicable in the vast majority of cases
If, however, we replace the categories of higher and lower with 'sensual' and 'intellectual', we can find more objective, exclusive categories - but is this reductive?
Mill claims that what makes higher pleasures higher is that nobility is the characteristic of the kind of person who lives a life of higher pleasures - link to virtue ethics
Full hedonism claims that what makes something good is solely that it is pleasurable - Mill uses the terms pleasure and enjoyment interchangeably
Lexical view of welfare maximisation: secondary value are to be promoted only when primary values have been promoted maximally
Desire accounts
Present desire account - a person's welfare consists in their present desires - e.g. young girl in a fit of rage desires to end her life = problematic
Comprehensive desire account: takes into account people's entire lives e.g. drug addiction fulfils your desires over the course of your life
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Informed desire account: what you'd desire if you were fully informed - but sometimes people might choose differently anyway
Competent judges: those who have experienced both higher and lower pleasures and are able to decide that higher are more valuable
The competent judge's findings are evidential - there is also the possibility, however, that they are incorrect
Mill feels that the decision of the majority must be respected - but can they competently judge if they haven't actually enjoyed both kinds of pleasure? Isn't enjoyment subjective? Different people experience different pleasures to different extents- the idea of one pleasure being unanimously thought of as superior seems inaccurate
It may be that the values required to enjoy/assess the higher pleasures are fundamentally opposed to those of the lower pleasures
Mill allows for disagreement between the competent judges, and says that in that case the majority is more likely to be right - but perhaps Mill doesn't take into account taste/subjectivity?
Mill does not advocate that everyone should try and get pleasure from higher pleasures, he says that everyone should do what gives them pleasure, but that higher pleasure have more value in comparison
Influenced by Aristotle's practical reason - the ability to enjoy things to the right extent and attach to those values the evaluative weight they deserve
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Mill's Proof
Assumptions
Aggregative assumption
gives no clue concerning how one can sum happiness given that Mill rejects Bentham's quantitive approach
Impartiality assumption
could be rejected by Mill's sympathisers who can find that other ends, like just, are important
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He accepts that people desire virtue for itself, although it is not necessarily an enjoyable experience
Associationism - the mind is a blank sheet of paper which our experiences colour/write on from birth
Once we see how experiences are connected, we can understand how the mind works
Therefore ingredients of happiness can be desired for their own sake - an association forms between these objects and happiness, meaning virtue for example is a good in itself, but also contributes to happiness
Inspired by the work of Aristotle, who found that a person's happiness is comprised of the goods that constitute happiness - thus happiness is the goods, not an abstract concept
Ideals/the good
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Things like nobility, knowledge, friendship etc.
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