dr_who@umcp-cs.UUCP (07/08/83)
Alan Wexelblat has indeed clarified his point. The privacy of the mental is
not something I wish to dispute. I thought he was arguing that given the
quality-of-life criterion of value, we can't tell whether someone's life is
good or bad. I still maintain that we can determine to a high degree of
probability, whether someone is happy on balance or not. But, it seems that
Alan Wexelblat sees the problem in *quantifiability*.
I'm not sure that Lorenzo Sadun, who proposed the quality-of-life criterion,
intended to offer a standard that would tell us the *degree* to which a life
is good or bad. Sadun was just arguing against the Objectivist claim that
life itself is the basis of value. To refute that claim, it is only
necessary to show that something else is more fundamental.
Nevertheless, comparing quanities of happiness is necessary for
utilitarianism, for example. So it is still an interesting issue. While
such comparisons are indeed shaky, I don't think that they are hopeless.
I'm not sure whether Alan Wexelblat doubts that
1. There *are* interpersonal quantities of happiness; for example, it is
coherent to say that A is twice as happy as B, even if only God (if God
exists) knows this; OR
2. *We can compare* interpersonal quantities of happiness; for example, we
might reasonably believe that A is (probably) twice as happy as B.
As for 1, I don't know how I would defend it. If one believes that our
mental life has a physical basis in the brain (a la Hofstadter's Godel,
Escher, Bach), then 1 would be hard to deny. Anyway, I've never seen any
good argument against it. I think that Alan Wexelblat is worried about 2,
however.
2 raises some hard problems in the philosophy of probability and induction.
Once we concede the privacy of the mental, all we have to go on are the
similarities and observable differences between people. Referring back to
brains and minds, I think the similarity of human brains means that we
ought to believe that people are equal in happiness unless we have reasons
to think otherwise. Reasons to think otherwise will refer to the circum-
stances under which people live. For example, suppose we know nothing about
two people except that one's income is $4,000 and the other's is $40,000,
and suppose that studies of "utility of money" show that people typically
say that they would be 1.5 times as happy if they earned $40,000 vs. $4,000.
Then until we get more evidence, we should take the richer one's life to be
1.5 times as happy. The example is very crude, but it is intended to
illustrate how such probabilistic reasoning might work.
The crucial premise here is what might be called "the assumption of
mediocrity." This premise is often used in such efforts as predicting the
number of humanly habitable planets in the galaxy on the basis of limited
astronomical data we have about our own corner of the universe.
-- Paul Torek, U of MD College Park
p.s. Nothing crucial hangs on my use of the word "happiness" above. It
simply stands for whatever a utilitarian or other theory specifies as
constituting the "quality of life."