• Hedonistic Psychological Egoism
    "the mistake of treating hedonic entities like pleasure and pain as physical contents rather than organizational processes directly reflecting the struggles of cognitive sense-making."

    I'm not sure what you mean. could you rephrase it?

    "We are goal-directed, anticipatory creaturesWe don’t need arbitrary mechanisms like hedonic modules to motivate us, Sense making is intrinsically self-motivating."

    What do you mean by "sense making"?
    I agree we are goal-directed if you mean that the content of our ultimate desires can be more than pleasure (I-hedonists would not agree, but R-hedonists would). But as far as a psychological mechanism for motivation, for desire, I can't imagine anything else responsible for that besides a hedonic module (first time I've heard this term, I like it). And this is an empirical question, whether or not all desires are associated with positive or alleviation/avoidance of negative hedonic states.
  • Hedonistic Psychological Egoism
    What do you mean by Anti-Hedonism?
  • Hedonistic Psychological Egoism
    It is dense. I had to read a few parts several times over before I got it.
    I find value in the distinction within the context of psychological egoism (the position that humans act only in self-interest, that there is no true altruism). R-Hedonism is more accurate and withstands criticism more than I-Hedonism, I think.
    In what ways do the views clash with your experience of desire and pleasure? Is it both I-hedonism and R-hedonism that you have a problem with or just one of them?
  • Hedonistic Psychological Egoism
    Which position? I-Hedonism or R-Hedonism? What do you think?
  • Non-Cognitivsm
    I'm not sure what you're getting at actually. Could you rephrase it?

    I understand truth-apt to mean "capable of being true or false".
    Descriptive sentences/statements are truth-apt because the statement either describes something accurately or it describes something inaccurately.

    Questions, commands, and expressive sentences are not truth-apt because these types of sentences are not propositions, not making claims about reality.
    Emotivists think moral utterances are expressive.
    Prescriptivists think moral utterances are commands.
  • Non-Cognitivsm
    You're right, non-cognitivists say there is no moral thing, meaning there are no moral facts or properties. But what the non-cognitivist is trying to do is explain what people are doing when they use moral language. If, when people moralize, they are not actually referring to some moral fact, then what are they actually doing? So the non-cog is not trying to account for the "non-thing" of morality but trying to account for moral language.
  • Non-Cognitivsm
    Non-Cognitivism is a group of meta-ethical positions that claim moral language is not truth-apt (meaning it cannot be true and cannot be false) and that when people make moral claims, they are not actually asserting propositions.
    An ethical cognitivist would understand "killing is wrong" to mean "killing has the property of wrongness". But a non-cognitivist would claim killing has no moral properties and that moral language like "killing is wrong" does not actually describe or refer to anything in the world.

    Emotivism and Prescriptivism both fall under the Non-Cognitivist category.

    Emotivism is the view that what people are doing when they moralize is expressing their emotions or attitude. So from the Emotivist perspective, a moral claim like "killing is wrong" is interpreted as "boo killing!".

    The Prescriptivist would say that when people moralize, they are are making commands. So "killing is wrong" actually means "don't kill!".
  • Non-Cognitivsm
    Can you rephrase that? I'm not sure what you mean.