A New Puzzle for Hedonistic Theories of Value
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Most of us would feel awful if we discovered that our beloved had been unfaithful. But the hedonist, I argue, cannot consistently claim that a betrayal that goes undetected does not make your life worse off for you and, at the same time, that one ought to feel bad if one happens to discover that one has been betrayed. To claim that one ought to feel bad if one happens to discover that one has been betrayed requires adducing reasons for that reaction, but the hedonist either can adduce no such reasons or cannot make sense of the reasons we intuitively think we have. For it only makes sense to feel bad about things that make your life go worse for you, but a betrayal that went undetected did not make your life go worse for you, so feeling about bad about it makes no sense. The hedonist, one might think, has a variety of replies at her disposal. But I show that none of these responses is satisfactory. This puzzle indicates that accepting hedonism comes at an unusual cost: feeling devastated in this instance is no more rational than feeling terrified of ghosts that you assert do not exist. An attitudinal hedonist like Fred Feldman (2004) might claim that when you learn of the infidelity, you are pained by the fact that you were betrayed, and it is this attitudinal pain that makes your life go worse for you and, presumably, grounds your feeling hurt. Alternatively, the hedonist might argue that c) your emotional reaction is best understood as moral outrage, righteous indignation. The hedonist might otherwise insist that d) you are devastated not because of what has happened, but because of what will happen as a result of your discovery of the infidelity. Imagine being told that your spouse engaged in an extramarital affair a year ago, but that the affair has since ceased. During the period of the affair, it never once occurred to you that your spouse might be unfaithful. Quite plainly, there appear to be very good reasons for feeling hurt. But the hedonist, I argue, is unable to make sense of them. For why should you be devastated by an event that, by the hedonist’s own lights, was not a bad thing for you? What exactly is there to be upset about? Again, it only makes sense to be upset by something that is upsetting, and we’ve already stipulated that the infidelity during the period when it was undetected did not make your life go worse for you—and it is that event that serves as the object of your emotional reaction. Whatever one wants to say about your well-being after discovering the betrayal, the period before the discovery, because it was not marked by any unenjoyable experiences resulting from the infidelity, must be treated as an “hedonically neutral” event. But, mysteriously, that event is supposed to function as the object of your feeling devastated.
