So then, how ought I to decide what I should and shouldn't do? Afterall, that is the whole point of ethics, to make me in a better position to take decisions. — Agustino

I don't think these are important questions. What matters is what you are going to do, not what you should do, since even if you resolve the latter, you won't have taken even a step toward resolving the former (since you can just do what you shouldn't anyway), which is all that actually matters. And as for what you are going to do, it is a category error to ask for a philosophical position that says what you are going to do, since by definition only actually doing it can decide that. Actions, so to speak, do not follow from philosophical doctrines, and so it is a mistake to ask a philosophical doctrine to make you do something.

Most usually what is considered good is what is considered moral. — darthbarracuda

Hedonism is not in my view a moral position, and I don't think ethics primarily has to do with morality. Morality is a kind of social convention that deals with strictures on behavior. Ethics is, in the Greek sense, an inquiry into what is good, and also the practice of cultivating a good life. 'Moral' and 'good' clearly don't mean the same thing in the sense, that, even if something is good, the question 'is this moral?' is unanswered. Personally, I think morality is a kind of epiphenomenon, and not philosophically important.

should I take it? — Agustino

Hedonism, as I view it, is a position on what is good, not on what you should or should not do.

Sure it can. It just means life is complicated. But it will not help that complication ot confuse yourself about what is good and bad, or to invent stories about what else is good or perfectly good.

Besides, as I said before, this presupposes that the meaningful unit of inquiry is a 'life.' This is dubious since one never experiences a 'life,' which is more of a moralizing abstraction.

Yes, but if it is impossible to have the pleasure without the pain, then does it not follow that that specific pleasure is also bad — Agustino

No. It follows that often pleasure can cause or be associated with bad things.

Agreed, but where do we go from here? You're not using pleasure as commonly used. The activity of taking the pill is called pleasurable in everyday discourse, even though it also brings pain in the long term. — Agustino

Yes I am. 'Pleasure' is a non-technical term whose meaning is established independently of philosophical investigations. It is called pleasurable, and it is: and if it causes pain in the long term, we say that as well. Yet it is the pain which is bad, not the pleasure.

However - here lies the problem. Some distinctions need to be made about pleasure, because, as it can clearly be seen, some pleasures inevitably bring pain along with them. (like taking and living on the pill) Hence only some pleasures are good (those which never bring pain). Am I getting something wrong? — Agustino

If pleasures bring pain with them, then they are not bad insofar as they are pleasant, but insofar as pain is bad. Thus it is still the pain which is bad, not the pleasure, though pleasure may be an effiicient cause of bad things.

Pain by itself is not worth anything. — darthbarracuda

Sure, it is. Pain is intrinsically bad.

There must be an entity that attributes a value to this experience. This is why pain is not necessarily equal to suffering. A person who is into BDSM, for example, wouldn't consider the pain associated with it to be suffering. They would actively pursue it. — darthbarracuda

What do you mean by, attributes value to? If you mean that someone must feel the pain, then of course, otherwise it wouldn't be pain, since pain is a feeling.

What else would 'attribute a value to it' mean? Have an opinion on it? Put a price on it? But none of these things alter what is relevant to pain being bad, i.e. its very painfulness. So what difference does it make if you e.g. have an opinion that pain is not bad? So long as it's still just as painful, it's still just as bad.

As to BDSM, first, there is no contradiction in saying people actively seek out or want to inflict bad things on themselves. Second, there is no contradiction in saying that some bad things might be pursued because they are intermixed with good things (i.e., one can find pleasure in pain, but then one must in some sense find the act pleasant, or they are not 'into' BDSM to begin with).

Pleasure by itself it not worth anything in the same way as well. For example, let's there's a box of chocolates next to me. Eating them will stimulate my taste buds, release some dopamine to be sure, and give me a "pleasurable" experience. But say I want to lose weight. What then? Am I still enjoying this box of chocolates if I know I need to lose weight? — darthbarracuda

Of course you are. This might extrinsically cause some other bad thing, like gaining weight, but that too is only bad insofar as it is somehow painful to have more weight. Put anther way, eating the chocolate is not bad insofar as it is pleasant, but insofar as it causes you to gain weight. To see this, note that the dilemma disappears if the chocolate no longer causes you to gain weight, but is still just as pleasant.

The problem I see with pure hedonism is that it inevitably leads to unsavory scenarios. Situations such as being jacked up on drugs simply because they make you feel pleasure. Even if I don't want to take these drugs, I would still be obligated to as a hedonist because pleasure is seen as good no matter what. This is otherwise known as the experience machine thought experiment. — darthbarracuda

Hedonism as such is a claim about the good, and so makes no claims about obligations.

But why would this be bad? To say this scenario would be bad would be to appeal to something other than the experience of pleasure. This is, as I have said, the preferences of the individual. — darthbarracuda

Why would what be bad? Again, the point is not to elicit intuitions from external viewpoints about something being bad -- the point is, is the thing itself bad on its own terms? If your answer is no, what do your extrinsic, arbitrary opinions that nonetheless it is bad matter?

Well said, only insofar as it is good, which is admitting that pleasure is not always good

I don't see how you can claim this unless you think pleasure is either always good or always not good. After all, the features of it relevant to its goodness are always the same qua pleasure. It is good in virtue of being pleasant, and pleasure is of course always pleasant. So it seems to me to take this position you must claim that being pleasant is never a good thing. Which is what the Stoic says, but this is not true.

But if I myself lived such a life I would be unsatisfied, and unhappy. Why is that?

Are dissatisfaction and unhappiness kinds of pain? If not, then what are they? If they are, then ex hypothesi haven't you stipulated by your very example that you are not unsatisfied or unhappy?

But, the same cannot be said about pleasure. If someone says they're having great pleasure, I can proceed to ask "So what? What's great about that?". There will be no acceptable answer to me, if I don't already consider pleasure to be intrinsically good. I might think that you're wasting your time, as pleasure itself is empty - neither good, nor bad - as such it is to be expected that you will not be able to answer in any way as pleasure itself is a dead-end for you. Notice that this underlies that "the good" is more than just simple pleasure. Maybe it's pleasure associated/derived from virtue. Maybe virtuous pleasure. But certainly pleasure alone is not sufficient to qualify as good. — Agustino

But insofar as pleasure is good, there is no extrinsic reason for its being good. It is not 'good because of...' and nothing can be added to it other than pleasure itself to make it any better (as with pain).

For example, if someone could be given a pill to feel intense happiness and pleasure all the time - and they decided to take it - and then proceeded to sit on the couch for their whole life - I would not consider them to be living a good life. — Agustino

First, the question is what is good, not what a good life is -- the latter presupposes that a 'life' is the appropriate unit of consideration for what counts as good. Second, your consideration that this is not good is a mere extrinsic opinion, while the pleasure itself is good on its own terms, and so external opinions as to whether it is good don't matter to it (since nothing external can 'make it bad').

Why not? — darthbarracuda

Because if you could, all problems would be trivial, and in effect there would be no problems, since you could just decide that they were not problems. But this is not so.

Bullshit, we don't have that kind of omnipotent control over our preferences. I can't just say that being stabbed is okay to make it okay. It's not okay. I would prefer not to get stabbed because I prefer to not feel the sensation of suffering. But suffering alone without any preference has no value. Same with pleasure. — darthbarracuda

So you seem to be making a strange claim here:

1) We cannot control our preferences.
2) The reason we cannot control our preferences is because we cannot control what causes us to suffer.
3) Yet our preferences are in some sense independent from this suffering.

But how so? Note that 'suffering' sounds a lot like 'pain,' and if you believe this, you will collapse into the hedonist position.

So it is our preference that we not feel suffering, but that preference might be different? But how? How is it possible to prefer suffering? And is this meta-preference itself something that can be changed at whim? If not, and we have no control over it, what is this preference? And if the preference collapses just into feeling suffering itself -- viz., feeling suffering itself means a kind of 'dispreference,' then we have hedonism yet again.

Prove it. — Agustino

One way to test whether something is intrinsically good or bad, rather than merely relative to something, is to do the 'so what?' test. The question is, given that something happens that someone claims is intrinsically good, can one sensibly ask 'so what?' and force to be given an intelligible answer? If so, then it seems there is some external reason for holding that the initial thing is good.

Suppose, for example, I claim money is intrinsically good. If I then hold up some money I got and say 'look, I have money!' I might ask, 'so what?' What's good about that? And there is an answer to this question: so, I can buy things, I can show off my status, etc. But then, it is being able to buy things, and showing off one's status, that is good, and money is only an efficient cause of this, that is, good only insofar as it leads to those things, and not good insofar as it doesn't. Money therefore stops being good in an apocalyptic wasteland where it no longer affords me those purported goods. When whatever I answer 'so what?' with can't be acquired, then the value of the merely extrinsically good thing disappears.

Notice that this is impossible with pleasure or pain. If someone is in pain, then to ask 'so what?' is pointless. There is no other reason that pain is bad, and nothing that can be added to it, that is not pain, that can make it worse. That is, the pain itself already answers that question, as by virtue of it being pain, it is impossible not to care about it precisely to the extent that it is pain, and not because of anything else. Pain's value, its badness, is thus intrinsic. Notice that virtue is not like this: we may find virtue instrumentally bad where it is not serviceable to something else.

No, the reason rape is bad is because the act is severely disregarding the preferences of another person. It can presumably still be rape and not "feel bad" in terms of pain. — darthbarracuda

What do you mean by 'preferences?' One thing you might mean are pleasures and pains, which doesn't help. Another thing you might mean is what people, when asked, say they approve and disapprove of; but this is clearly of not help, since you can't make something good or bad just by holding a certain opinion or saying it is. If that were true, there would be no problems, since you could just decide to approve of everything that happened and make it good. So 'preferences' must be something in that sense beyond your control. But then, what are they?

Well, you said your position was that pleasure is the only good. — darthbarracuda

Yes.

Again, I don't know what he's talking about and don't think engaging in the discussion would be fruitful. What it has to do with existence being a property, or how you concluded that, I have no idea.

A man rapes a woman. This woman does not want to be raped, even though she might actually be feeling pleasure. Does this mean it is good? — darthbarracuda

The reason rape is bad is that it is traumatic and highly painful, both during and for a long period of time afterward.

Oftentimes our preference are motivated by pleasure. But not always. Satisfied Preference is my conception of good. — darthbarracuda

I never said our preferences are always motivated by pleasure. But it does follow, quite obviously, that not all of our preferences are motivated by what is good.

No offense but this is a total cop-out argument. I mean, how am I supposed to have a discussion with someone who will just say that I'm blind to the obvious (that pleasure is good)? It won't matter if I disagree with the proposition that pleasure is an intrinsic good. — darthbarracuda

I'm not saying you're blind to the obvious, I'm saying that the above defense of Stoicism seemed to operate on the premise that what is good in some sense depends on what you think is good, and so what is helpful will depend on what philosophy you adopt. But I am denying this.

I might disagree that pleasure is intrinsically good. — darthbarracuda

You can disagree with whatever you want. But if you disagreed, you would simply be wrong.

And when I say "aid someone" I mean to help someone with problems they might be facing.

It may be that a philosophy that is wrong about what is good nonetheless is an efficient cause of good things. But it can't be so on its own terms, if you like -- only by accident.

Hypothetically speaking I could disagree. You could call me out and say I'm wrong, but how would you actually formulate an argument except by simply copping out and proclaiming that you are right even if I don't recognize it? — darthbarracuda

I would ask you to elucidate your position on what is good, and because it would be internally inconsistent, draw out a contradiction from it.

Pleasure may be defined differently. — darthbarracuda

No it may not. 'Pleasure' is a word of English whose meaning arises from usage. You cannot stipulate that its definition is whatever you want it to be.

Also, pleasure being a "good" is really only based on the arbitrary basis of our conscious experiences and our opinions of them. — darthbarracuda

No, it is not. It doesn't matter if your opinion is that e.g. pain is not bad, it still will be. To see, this just note that someone can't make what is bad about pain go away by deciding to have the opinion that it isn't bad.

A nihilist could just as easily say this is all bullocks and that there is no good or bad experiences. — darthbarracuda

They can say whatever they please -- but they would be wrong. There are good and bad experiences, regardless of what the nihilist thinks -- i.e., pleasant and painful ones.

Insofar that it leads to eudaimonia, which is not equal to pleasure.

Pain is intrinsically good, whether it leads to eudaimonia or not. Eudaimonia, on the other hand, is in itself indifferent, and only good insofar it leads to pleasure.

But for those who do not subscribe to a strictly hedonistic philosophy of living, Stoicism might be of aid. — darthbarracuda

I do not think what is good depends on what you think is good, or what philosophy you ascribe to. In other words, I do not see hedonism as a kind of attitude one adopts toward the world which somehow makes pleasure good; rather, pleasure is good, and hedonism is the recognition of this, and it is true whether you recognize it in a doctrine or not.

So it makes no sense to say that what will be of aid to you depends on which philosophy you adopt, if by 'be of aid' you mean 'be good,' and what is good isn't dependent on your philosophical worldview.

And yes, Stoicism says pleasure and pain aren't inherently good or bad, but this is wrong. Pleasure and pain are the only things that are good or bad on their own terms. Things like virtue, and so on, are only good in virtue of certain arbitrary opinions, customs, consequences, social norms, etc., and then only insofar as they are efficient causes of pleasure. In other words, virtue is always 'good insofar as...' whereas there is no 'insofar as' for pleasure and pain. Virtue is sometimes an efficient cause of both pleasure and pain, and so intrinsically is neither good nor bad, but indifferent.

I don't know what you're talking about, so I'm not going to respond.

One thing that annoys me about a great deal of contemporary materialist approaches to mind is an overemphasis on brains. — StreetlightX

You seem to be confused. You see, this annoys the authors you read, and from which you gleaned this opinion. If it annoyed you, you would have to have some particular opinion of your own on the subject.

No, that's not what I'm claiming. I was claiming that while I know what it means to conceive of an object, I don't know what it means to conceive of 'the possibility of an object.' An object's possibility is not like its color, or something like that.

Generally, Stoicism is interested in extirpating the passions, and sees pleasure as an indifferent. I can't get on board with that, insofar as I am a hedonist and think pleasure is a good, and since it is a passion, eliminating the passions can't help. If you want to eliminate the passions, kill yourself, amen.

OK, I wasn't being sarcastic, but whatever.

A hallucination of a tiger is a real hallucination; it is by definition not a real tiger. What makes it not a real tiger is that it does not experientially cohere in the way a real tiger does.

I'm not sure what it means to conceive of the possibility of an object. I'm trying to do it and I don't know what it is.

This is not true. Even if all things are experiential, one can draw a distinction between things imagined and real things, by the differences in their experiential content. That is how we can tell the difference between them to begin with: by experiencing them differently.

Yeah. Don't think too hard, I guess.

SX, let's say we assume a distinction between concepts and objects.

Is your claim now that,

'I conceive of something no one is conceiving of'

Is not a contradiction? I would say that you don't understand English if you think that, not that you need to reexamine your metaphysical assumptions.

But it only leads to a contraction if it is assumed that the two are not distinct. That's why it's a contradiction. Which means the claim that B. assumes that there is a distinction is wrong. — StreetlightX

How does it lead to a contradiction only if you assume they're not distinct?

'It is possible to conceive of something no one is conceiving' is a fucking contradiction. As in, put it in the predicate calculus and it can't be true on any interpretation.

I do not understand any part of it, i.e. the point you are making or its purpose in the train of dialogue.

Quite the reverse: it is the assumption that the difference between concept and object is always internal to the concept—that every difference is ultimately conceptual—that needs to be defended — StreetlightX

Who assumes this?

If you like, SX, another way of thinking about Berkeley's arguments is to say that he does assume that these two are distinct to begin with, shows how this leads to a contradiction, and so discharges the assumption that led to said contradiction.

I don't understand what you are saying in this post.

What does it get wrong about the realist position?

because he doesn't establish a priori distinction between concepts and objects

I don't understand what this means. What do you mean by, a priori? Is the realist committed to the position that he cannot possibly be wrong about the distinction, and so any argument that purports to show that the distinction is invalid is wrong because he has ruled out that possibility to begin with? If that is not what you are saying, what are you saying? If it is what you are saying, what interest is there in an argument that simply assumes its conclusions a priori? You can assume anything you want a priori.

What are you trying to say here?

The argument against this seems to be that we cannot conceive of anything without that thing being conceived of by us — Pneumenon

The 'argument,' which is not an argument but a result of the realist's own claim, from which a contradiction is drawn, is that we cannot conceive of things that no one is conceiving of (i.e., we cannot conceive of precisely what the realist is interested in dealing with).

But this is a non-sequitur: in order to conceive of an unconceived object, the object need only be unconceived within the conception.

Realists are not interested in what is conceived of to be unconceived; they are interested in what is unconceived.

First, why should I accept the premise? I can't conceive of a person of whom I am not currently conceiving, so why should I assume that other people are conceiving things without me? After all, I can't conceive of it. Unless you're asking me to accept things I can't conceive of, in which case the master argument fails anyway. — Pneumenon

I think the Master Argument does not establish idealism; what it does establish is that the realist is committed to talking about things he can't conceive of. I think it's consistent to just bite the bullet and accept that, but the realist usually doesn't want to. Berkeley can only establish idealism by further assuming that what is inconceivable is impossible, which I do not think is an acceptable premise.

OK, first of all, Brassier does not even understand that the argument is a reductio, which it is. So clearly he cannot have the form of the argument right if even this basic point eludes him. Second, Brassier attributes to Berkeley a tautological premise that he never espouses.

he says that the realist is committed to arguing that he can think of things without thinking of them ('a manifest repugnance'). — StreetlightX

No. This is not what he says the realist is committed to. He does not say they are committed to saying they can think about things without thinking about them. He is committed to saying that he can think of things that no one is thinking of. Please, Lord.

No, he does not begin by distinguishing a concept from an object, and go on to argue that they are the same.

But this is precisely what he does, in Principles of Human Knowledge. I mean, exactly, literally, precisely, unequivocally. The only way you could think it wasn't is if you haven't read it. He literally starts out by outlining the various sorts of ideas people have, then the various sorts of objects that are in the world, and then drawing the conclusion from various arguments that they are identical.

Here is what I take to be the essential form of Berkeley's argument, using quotes form the text itself. It does not have the structure that Brassier attributes to it.

1) But, say you, surely there is nothing easier than for me to imagine trees, for instance, in a park, or books existing in a closet, and nobody by to perceive them.

2) But do not you yourself perceive or think of them all the while?

3) To make out this, it is necessary that you conceive them existing unconceived or unthought of, which is a manifest repugnancy.

This argument has the form of a reductio. In 1), the 'say you' is an indication that Berkeley is taking a premise provided by his opponent; in 3), he is showing that this results in a 'repugnancy,' i.e. a contradiction that requires discharging the premise.

SX, show me how the conclusion is built into the argument. Show me the premise, and show me the conclusion, and how one is contained in the other. Without that, your words are just hot air.

Dude, seriously.

What do you mean by, he does not distinguish? He comes to the conclusion that they are the same; he does not assume this from the outset.

Do you understand the difference between a premise and a conclusion? Are you saying that any conclusion to the effect that X is Y is question begging? It seems to me you don't understand the structural difference between concluding that two things are the same, and assuming they are all along.

The assumption is implicit in the equivocation between 'things' qua ideata and things simpliciter. And of course Berkeley doesn't make the distinction - but that's precisely the problem. The feature is bug. — StreetlightX

What equivocation? Where is it? Berkeley concludes that things are ideas; he does not assume this.