DeLong Shot
Brad DeLong takes issue with my recent attacks no utilitarianism. In reply to my claim, against Layard, that if happiness is self-evidently good, then so are lots of other things, such as freedom, DeLong writes:
The response–against which Wilkinson has no defense except to issue squidlike clouds of obfuscating ink–would be that Wilkinson believes that if he were to sacrifice his freedom for his happiness, that if he were to do so he would then look back on the choices he made and look ahead to his future life, and that he would be unhappy. If Wilkinson says otherwise–that he would look back on the choices he made and look ahead to his future life and be happy, but that he would still regret what he had done and wish he had done otherwise–Wilkinson is simply saying, “Baa baa buff.” He would be demonstrating that he does not understand the rules of conversation using the English language.
I wonder if DeLong has carried on a conversation in the English language. Games of rational and moral justification sometimes but rarely terminate in reasons of happiness, much less in reasons of pleasure. He must hear “Baa baa buff” almost every time someone explains himself. Or BD just refuses to listen, uncharitably reads his philosophical theories into people’s heads, and so assumes that they are offering reasons of happiness when they are evidently not. DeLong’s argument, if I am making it out correctly, is that the following proposition deserves a little linguist’s star of semantic deviance:
(a) Happiness without freedom is not worth having.
English speakers, lend me your ears! Does (a) violate the intuitive semantic constraints of it’s constituent terms?
Well, if “worth having” in English means “conducive to pleasure” it sure does. But that’s not what “worth having” means in English. That’s what it means in Benthamese, the vulgar dialect of the morally insensate (economists, Asperger’s cases, etc.) “Worth having” in English means something like” valuable” or “good,” and there is surpassingly little evidence to be gleaned from the semantic practice of competent English speakers that “valuable” and “good” are synonymous with “pleasurable” or “happy making”. (a) is far from “Baa baa buff.” In context, it’s surely true!
My defense, then, is the truth of the claim that there are conditions under which being happy would be worse than not being happy. I take it that DeLong would agree that if a mad scientist rigged his brain such that slaughtering his own beloved children would bring him the most exalted, never-ending, guilt-free bliss, this would not be happiness worth having. Or is this, too, just “baa baa buff?”
Anyway, refusing to do violence to one’s language, or, more importantly, the complexity of moral experience, in the service of an ill-supported theory does not strike me as a project of obfuscation.
More later on Delong’s inability to understand the experience machine thought experiment.
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Outside his professional competency, DeLong strikes me as a pretty mediocre thinker, whose having a big Internet presence (combined with the natural tendency of economists to aggrandize their intellectual importance) leads him to believe he owns a general portfolio on all matters of faith and morals. Which means he’s out of his depth a lot—and when he’s out of his depth he turns to polemic, without much in the way of scruples about his use of language. (Did you notice his ugly rant last month about Gunter Grass?) You just happen to have run afoul of one of DeLong’s items of faith (and of what seems to be a rather stunted ethical imagination), and he doesn’t really have a good, rational response to you, so he’s piqued. I’m afraid it’s DeLong who’s blowing the squid ink here.
Will,
I thought that you DIDN’T go in for the claim that the experience machine thought experiment shows that happiness isn’t the most important thing.
Have you changed your mind? Am I wrong about what you used to think? Or are you merely saying that expressions like ‘worth having’, ‘valuable’, and ‘good’ aren’t synonymous with ‘happy-making’?
Luka, Yeah, I’ve changed my mind. I went through a short entirely subjectivist stage, but I’m done with it now. I now think the normal reaction to the experience machine helps show us that we are responsive to values that may not show up experientially.
There is a normal reaction to the experience machine? Does that make my reaction abnormal for wanting to plug in?
Yes! Freak.
Just a little nitpick, but isn’t reading your own philosophical theories into other people’s heads normally considered charity rather than uncharity? I mean, they’re less likely to come out saying something that seems (to you) obviously false that way. Though I guess you’re right that in this case it’s uncharity, because it makes your claims senseless rather than merely false.
And just for the record, I’m willing to plug in to the machine too. Someone should do an actual study on what responses people actually give. I’ve had too many people tell me that platonism is the position of the man on the street to believe everything philosophers tell me is the opinion of the man on the street.
A philosophical nitpick: technically, assuming that it is anything like the end of the matter what we want to do when confronted with Nozick’s expereince machine gives far too much argumentative ground to the subjectivist straight away, because, after all, if we’re not all subjectivists, at least some of us think that things other than what we want matter. I think there are situations in which I might want to go into the experience machine, but I’d be wrong to do so.