Lecture 5: Value I

Lecture Objectives (which is also what you want to take from the text.
Note:  lecture objectives also serve as your final exam study guide.  That is, the exam questions will be designed to test your comprehension of the lecture objectives.

1.  Understand Plato’s three kinds of goods.
2.  Understand the thesis of hedonism, and be able to articulate the two kinds of pleasure.
3.  Understand and apply Mill’s competent judge test.
4.  Be able to articulate the two kinds of non-hedonism.

Lecture 6: Value II

Mill's competent judge test:
Mill: the “competent judge” test:

“If one of the two [pleasures] is, by those who are competently acquainted with both, placed so far above the other that they prefer it, even though knowing it to be attended with a greater amount of discontent, and would not resign it for any quantity of the other pleasure which their nature is capable of, we are justified in ascribing the preferred enjoyment a superiority in quality so far outweighing quantity as to render it it, in comparison, of small account.”

“Now it is an unquestionable fact that those who are equally acquainted with and equally capable of appreciating and enjoying both do give a most marked preference to the manner of existence which employs their higher faculties.  Few human creatures would consent to be changed into any of the lower animals for a promise of the fullest allowance of a beast’s pleasures; no intelligent human being would consent to be a fool, no instructed person would be an ignoramus, no person of feeling and conscience would be selfish and base, even though they should be persuaded that the fool, the dunce, or the rascal is better satisfied with his lot than they are with theirs.”

“Better a Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.”

Mill on passive pleasures:

I, for the first time, gave its proper place, among the prime necessities of human well-being, to the internal culture of the individual.  I ceased to attach almost exclusive importance to the ordering of outward circumstances, and the training of the human being for speculation and for action.

     I had now learnt by experience that the passive susceptibilities needed to be cultivated as well as the active capacities, and required to be nourished and enriched as well as guided.  I did not, for an instant, lose sight of , or undervalue, that part of the truth which I had seen before; I never turned recreant to intellectual culture, or ceased to consider the power and practice of analysis as an essential condition both of individual and of social improvement.  But I thought that it had consequences which required to be corrected, by joining other kinds of cultivation with it.  The maintenance of a due balance among the faculties, now seemed to me of primary importance.  The cultivation of the feelings became one of the cardinal points in my ethical and philosophical creed.

Lecture 6: Value II

• Be able to describe what is meant by the “Euthyphro problem,” and how it relates to the objective/subjective distinction in value-theory.
• Be able to articulate and apply the theory of indirect-hedonism.

Do we desire something because it is good, or is something good because we desire it?

Does we respond to something because it has a certain property intrinsically, or does it have that property because we respond to it in a certain way?

(1) The only intrinsic good is (satisfactional) pleasure.
(2) The best way to achieve this pleasure is to act from the belief that our activities, projects, commitments, and so on have objective value independently from the pleasure they produce.