Happiness without reality
On the axis: The highest good · a life
Would a life of perfect but wholly simulated pleasure be the highest good, or does the highest life require contact with reality, and not merely the feeling of happiness?
This problem is brought out by the thought experiment The experience machine:
Imagine a machine that could give you any experience you desire. Neuropsychologists would stimulate your brain so that you believed you were writing a great novel, making wonderful friends, or living the most thrilling adventures, while in reality you floated in a tank with electrodes attached to your skull. Once plugged in, you would no longer know the experiences are simulated: from the inside, your life would feel perfectly happy. You can program an entire lifetime of happiness in advance, with no risk of malfunction. You are offered the chance to plug in for the rest of your life.
Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974)
Would you plug in? If you hesitate, what does that reveal: that a good life requires something more than pleasant experiences, however perfect they may be?
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Justification
Bentham starts from what he takes to be a fact of nature: pleasure and pain are the only two things we actually seek and shun as ends. Good and evil then have no separate content: to call a thing "good" says no more than that it tends to produce pleasure or ward off pain. Hence a at once psychological and moral, welding fact to norm through the same two sovereign masters and leaving no room for a flourishing or perfection distinct from the agreeable, against the objective goods of the Aristotelian tradition.
Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. I, §1
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. I, §1
Anchors: Nozick · Bentham