class: center, middle, inverse, title-slide .title[ # Value Theory ] .date[ ### MSA 2025 ] --- # The question of value What has intrinsic, as opposed to instrumental, value? What is valuable for its own sake (independent of other things it might help attain)? What makes our life _better off_? --- # Experience machine Imagine there’s a machine that could make you experience anything you desire. When connected to this machine, you can feel what it’s like to be rich, be a celebrity, bring about world peace, or have an amazing and loving partner. You can fully experience the pleasures of these things as if they were real. If an experience doesn’t go as you hoped, you can reset or change it as much as you want. However, once you connect, you cannot return to reality. Would you connect to this machine and experience unlimited happiness, or stay in the real world? a. Yes, I would like to connect to this experience machine. b. No, I would like to stay in the real world. --- # Discussion questions 1. Nozick suggests that most people would choose not to plug in to an “experience machine” if given the opportunity. Would you plug in? Why or why not? 2. Hedonists such as Epicurus and Mill claim that pleasure is the only thing worth pursuing for its own sake. If some people would choose not to plug in to the experience machine, does this show that hedonism is false? 3. One reason Nozick gives for not getting into the experience machine is that “We want to do certain things, and not just have the experience of doing them.” Do some activities have value independent of the experiences they produce? If so, what is an example of such an activity? 4. Nozick claims that “Plugging into the machine is a kind of suicide.” What does he mean by this? Do you think he is right? --- # Candidates for things that are intrinsically valuable --- class: small-font # Diminishing marginal utility Money, as well as the majority of goods, has diminishing marginal utility: The next dollar you will gain is worth less than the previous dollar you already got. .center[ <img src="assets/marginal-utility-01.png" alt="" height="250"/> ] When something has diminishing marginal utility, each additional unit provides less and less utility. Compare: - Difference between having $0 and $1,000. - Difference between having $1,000,000 and $1,001,000. --- Not just money has diminishing marginal utility, other goods too. .center[ <img src="assets/marginal-utility-02.png" alt="" height="250"/> ] Typical example: food (the first bite is great, the next one is not as great as the first one, and if you eat excessively, it could make you feel worse than how you felt when you started eating) --- # Another experience machine Imagine someone tells you that you are currently connected to an experience machine, meaning everything and everyone you know is not real. This person also says there’s a way to disconnect and return to the real world. However, in reality, your life is indeed radically different from your current experience: you could be an elderly person, an inmate in prison, a rich person, a person of another sex or from another country, etc. The person also tells you that you can choose to stay in the machine and forget this information. Assume everything this person says is true. Would you choose to disconnect from the machine and face the real world, or stay in the machine and choose to forget this information? a. Disconnect from the machine and return to reality. b. Stay in the machine and forget this information. --- # Charlie's case Charlie wants to improve his quality of life. He has heard that it is philosophers who claim to be experts on this topic. so he looks through some philosophy journals at his library. He finds an artide claiming to have discovered the correct account of welfare. It is an objective theory that includes things like happiness, knowledge, love, freedom, friendship, the appreciation of beauty, creative activity, being respected, etc. The paper is in a pretty good journal. so Charlie decides to go about trying to increase his share of some of the items on the list. For example. to increase his freedom, he moves to a state with higher speed limits. Charlie is careful to make sure that the move won't have any detrimental side effects-that it won't cause him to fail to get less of any of the other goods on the list. After succeeding in increasing his freedom, Charlie finds that he doesn't care about it, that he is completely indifferent to it. Although he is free to drive faster, he never does (he never wants to). Nor does the freedom to drive faster get him anything else that he is interested in. Charlie considers whether he is any better off as a result of the increase in his freedom. He concludes that he is no better off. --- # Ted Bundy Consider, to take a real life example, the serial rapist and murderer Ted Bundy. What Bundy wanted most in his life was to inflict pain on innocent strangers, to wield power over them, and to watch them beg, suffer, and die at his own hand. For quite a number of years, Bundy got just what he wanted. Was Bundy's life _better off_ as a result of his desires being met, before he was caught? --- # Cherry pie Suppose that I have a strong craving for cherry pie, not knowing that I have recently developed a serious allergy to cherries. If I satisfy my desire, I'll need a shot of adrenaline to avoid suffocating to death. Still, in my ignorant state, cherry pie is what I want most. Would my life be _better off_ if I get to eat a cherry pie? --- # Questions for discussion - What is Nozick’s aim (objective) with the experience machine thought experiment? - What is the distinction between intrinsic and instrumental value? - What is the distinction between subjective and objective theories of value? - Is hedonism (pleasure) a subjective or objective theory of value? - What do you think about Charlie’s thought experiment, Ted Bundy’s case, and the cherry pie case? What is their objective, or what are they trying to demonstrate? ---