Blake Invitational 1 Kamiak nb aff

NC Util

NC

The standard is maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. Prefer:

Revisionary intuitionism is true and proves util

Yudkowsky 8: Eliezer Yudkowsky (research fellow of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute; he also writes Harry Potter fan fiction). “The ‘Intuitions’ Behind ‘Utilitarianism.’” 28 January 2008. LessWrong. http://lesswrong.com/lw/n9/the_intuitions_behind_utilitarianism/

I haven't said much about metaethics - the nature of morality - because that has a forward dependency on a discussion of the Mind Projection Fallacy that I haven't gotten to yet. I used to be very confused about metaethics. After my confusion finally cleared up, I did a postmortem on my previous thoughts. I found that my object-level moral reasoning had been valuable and my meta-level moral reasoning had been worse than useless. And this appears to be a general syndrome - people do much better when discussing whether torture is good or bad than when they discuss the meaning of "good" and "bad". Thus, I deem it prudent to keep moral discussions on the object level wherever I possibly can. Occasionally people object to any discussion of morality on the grounds that morality doesn't exist, and in lieu of jumping over the forward dependency to explain that "exist" is not the right term to use here, I generally say, "But what do you do anyway?" and take the discussion back down to the object level. Paul Gowder, though, has pointed out that both the idea of choosing a googolplex dust specks in a googolplex eyes over 50 years of torture for one person, and the idea of "utilitarianism", depend on "intuition". He says I've argued that the two are not compatible, but charges me with failing to argue for the utilitarian intuitions that I appeal to. Now "intuition" is not how I would describe the computations that underlie human morality and distinguish us, as moralists, from an ideal philosopher of perfect emptiness and/or a rock. But I am okay with using the word "intuition" as a term of art, bearing in mind that "intuition" in this sense is not to be contrasted to reason, but is, rather, the cognitive building block out of which both long verbal arguments and fast perceptual arguments are constructed. I see the project of morality as a project of renormalizing intuition. We have intuitions about things that seem desirable or undesirable, intuitions about actions that are right or wrong, intuitions about how to resolve conflicting intuitions, intuitions about how to systematize specific intuitions into general principles. Delete all the intuitions, and you aren't left with an ideal philosopher of perfect emptiness, you're left with a rock. Keep all your specific intuitions and refuse to build upon the reflective ones, and you aren't left with an ideal philosopher of perfect spontaneity and genuineness, you're left with a grunting caveperson running in circles, due to cyclical preferences and similar inconsistencies. "Intuition", as a term of art, is not a curse word when it comes to morality - there is nothing else to argue from. Even modus ponens is an "intuition" in this sense - it's just that modus ponens still seems like a good idea after being formalized, reflected on, extrapolated out to see if it has sensible consequences, etcetera. So that is "intuition". However, Gowder did not say what he meant by "utilitarianism". Does utilitarianism say... That right actions are strictly determined by good consequences? That praiseworthy actions depend on justifiable expectations of good consequences? That probabilities of consequences should normatively be discounted by their probability, so that a 50 probability of something bad should weigh exactly half as much in our tradeoffs? That virtuous actions always correspond to maximizing expected utility under some utility function? That two harmful events are worse than one? That two independent occurrences of a harm (not to the same person, not interacting with each other) are exactly twice as bad as one? That for any two harms A and B, with A much worse than B, there exists some tiny probability such that gambling on this probability of A is preferable to a certainty of B? If you say that I advocate something, or that my argument depends on something, and that it is wrong, do please specify what this thingy is... anyway, I accept 3, 5, 6, and 7, but not 4; I am not sure about the phrasing of 1; and 2 is true, I guess, but phrased in a rather solipsistic and selfish fashion: you should not worry about being praiseworthy. Now, what are the "intuitions" upon which my "utilitarianism" depends? This is a deepish sort of topic, but I'll take a quick stab at it. First of all, it's not just that someone presented me with a list of statements like those above, and I decided which ones sounded "intuitive". Among other things, if you try to violate "utilitarianism", you run into paradoxes, contradictions, circular preferences, and other things that aren't symptoms of moral wrongness so much as moral incoherence. After you think about moral problems for a while, and also find new truths about the world, and even discover disturbing facts about how you yourself work, you often end up with different moral opinions than when you started out. This does not quite define moral progress, but it is how we experience moral progress. As part of my experienced moral progress, I've drawn a conceptual separation between questions of type Where should we go? and questions of type How should we get there? (Could that be what Gowder means by saying I'm "utilitarian"?) The question of where a road goes - where it leads - you can answer by traveling the road and finding out. If you have a false belief about where the road leads, this falsity can be destroyed by the truth in a very direct and straightforward manner. When it comes to wanting to go to a particular place, this want is not entirely immune from the destructive powers of truth. You could go there and find that you regret it afterward (which does not define moral error, but is how we experience moral error). But, even so, wanting to be in a particular place seems worth distinguishing from wanting to take a particular road to a particular place. Our intuitions about where to go are arguable enough, but our intuitions about how to get there are frankly messed up. After the two hundred and eighty-seventh research study showing that people will chop their own feet off if you frame the problem the wrong way, you start to distrust first impressions. When you've read enough research on scope insensitivity - people will pay only 28 more to protect all 57 wilderness areas in Ontario than one area, people will pay the same amount to save 50,000 lives as 5,000 lives... that sort of thing... Well, the worst case of scope insensitivity I've ever heard of was described here by Slovic: Other recent research shows similar results. Two Israeli psychologists asked people to contribute to a costly life-saving treatment. They could offer that contribution to a group of eight sick children, or to an individual child selected from the group. The target amount needed to save the child (or children) was the same in both cases. Contributions to individual group members far outweighed the contributions to the entire group. There's other research along similar lines, but I'm just presenting one example, 'cause, y'know, eight examples would probably have less impact. If you know the genearal experimental paradigm, then the reason for the above behavior is pretty obvious - focusing your attention on a single child creates more emotional arousal than trying to distribute attention around eight children simultaneously. So people are willing to pay more to help one child than to help eight. Now, you could look at this intuition, and think it was revealing some kind of incredibly deep moral truth which shows that one child's good fortune is somehow devalued by the other children's good fortune. But what about the billions of other children in the world? Why isn't it a bad idea to help this one child, when that causes the value of all the other children to go down? How can it be significantly better to have 1,329,342,410 happy children than 1,329,342,409, but then somewhat worse to have seven more at 1,329,342,417? Or you could look at that and say: "The intuition is wrong: the brain can't successfully multiply by eight and get a larger quantity than it started with. But it ought to, normatively speaking." And once you realize that the brain can't multiply by eight, then the other cases of scope neglect stop seeming to reveal some fundamental truth about 50,000 lives being worth just the same effort as 5,000 lives, or whatever. You don't get the impression you're looking at the revelation of a deep moral truth about nonagglomerative utilities. It's just that the brain doesn't goddamn multiply. Quantities get thrown out the window. If you have $100 to spend, and you spend $20 each on each of 5 efforts to save 5,000 lives, you will do worse than if you spend $100 on a single effort to save 50,000 lives. Likewise if such choices are made by 10 different people, rather than the same person. As soon as you start believing that it is better to save 50,000 lives than 25,000 lives, that simple preference of final destinations has implications for the choice of paths, when you consider five different events that save 5,000 lives. (It is a general principle that Bayesians see no difference between the long-run answer and the short-run answer; you never get two different answers from computing the same question two different ways. But the long run is a helpful intuition pump, so I am talking about it anyway.) The aggregative valuation strategy of "shut up and multiply" arises from the simple preference to have more of something - to save as many lives as possible - when you have to describe general principles for choosing more than once, acting more than once, planning at more than one time. Aggregation also arises from claiming that the local choice to save one life doesn't depend on how many lives already exist, far away on the other side of the planet, or far away on the other side of the universe. Three lives are one and one and one. No matter how many billions are doing better, or doing worse. 3 = 1 + 1 + 1, no matter what other quantities you add to both sides of the equation. And if you add another life you get 4 = 1 + 1 + 1 + 1. That's aggregation. When you've read enough heuristics and biases research, and enough coherence and uniqueness proofs for Bayesian probabilities and expected utility, and you've seen the "Dutch book" and "money pump" effects that penalize trying to handle uncertain outcomes any other way, then you don't see the preference reversals in the Allais Paradox as revealing some incredibly deep moral truth about the intrinsic value of certainty. It just goes to show that the brain doesn't goddamn multiply. The primitive, perceptual intuitions that make a choice "feel good" don't handle probabilistic pathways through time very skillfully, especially when the probabilities have been expressed symbolically rather than experienced as a frequency. So you reflect, devise more trustworthy logics, and think it through in words. When you see people insisting that no amount of money whatsoever is worth a single human life, and then driving an extra mile to save $10; or when you see people insisting that no amount of money is worth a decrement of health, and then choosing the cheapest health insurance available; then you don't think that their protestations reveal some deep truth about incommensurable utilities. Part of it, clearly, is that primitive intuitions don't successfully diminish the emotional impact of symbols standing for small quantities - anything you talk about seems like "an amount worth considering". And part of it has to do with preferring unconditional social rules to conditional social rules. Conditional rules seem weaker, seem more subject to manipulation. If there's any loophole that lets the government legally commit torture, then the government will drive a truck through that loophole. So it seems like there should be an unconditional social injunction against preferring money to life, and no "but" following it. Not even "but a thousand dollars isn't worth a 0.0000000001 probability of saving a life". Though the latter choice, of course, is revealed every time we sneeze without calling a doctor. The rhetoric of sacredness gets bonus points for seeming to express an unlimited commitment, an unconditional refusal that signals trustworthiness and refusal to compromise. So you conclude that moral rhetoric espouses qualitative distinctions, because espousing a quantitative tradeoff would sound like you were plotting to defect. On such occasions, people vigorously want to throw quantities out the window, and they get upset if you try to bring quantities back in, because quantities sound like conditions that would weaken the rule. But you don't conclude that there are actually two tiers of utility with lexical ordering. You don't conclude that there is actually an infinitely sharp moral gradient, some atom that moves a Planck distance (in our continuous physical universe) and sends a utility from 0 to infinity. You don't conclude that utilities must be expressed using hyper-real numbers. Because the lower tier would simply vanish in any equation. It would never be worth the tiniest effort to recalculate for it. All decisions would be determined by the upper tier, and all thought spent thinking about the upper tier only, if the upper tier genuinely had lexical priority. As Peter Norvig once pointed out, if Asimov's robots had strict priority for the First Law of Robotics ("A robot shall not harm a human being, nor through inaction allow a human being to come to harm") then no robot's behavior would ever show any sign of the other two Laws; there would always be some tiny First Law factor that would be sufficient to determine the decision. Whatever value is worth thinking about at all, must be worth trading off against all other values worth thinking about, because thought itself is a limited resource that must be traded off. When you reveal a value, you reveal a utility. I don't say that morality should always be simple. I've already said that the meaning of music is more than happiness alone, more than just a pleasure center lighting up. I would rather see music composed by people than by nonsentient machine learning algorithms, so that someone should have the joy of composition; I care about the journey, as well as the destination. And I am ready to hear if you tell me that the value of music is deeper, and involves more complications, than I realize - that the valuation of this one event is more complex than I know. But that's for one event. When it comes to multiplying by quantities and probabilities, complication is to be avoided - at least if you care more about the destination than the journey. When you've reflected on enough intuitions, and corrected enough absurdities, you start to see a common denominator, a meta-principle at work, which one might phrase as "Shut up and multiply." Where music is concerned, I care about the journey. When lives are at stake, I shut up and multiply. It is more important that lives be saved, than that we conform to any particular ritual in saving them. And the optimal path to that destination is governed by laws that are simple, because they are math. And that's why I'm a utilitarian - at least when I am doing something that is overwhelmingly more important than my own feelings about it - which is most of the time, because there are not many utilitarians, and many things left undone.

2. Phenomenal introspection is reliable and proves that util’s true.

Sinhababu Neil (National University of Singapore) “The epistemic argument for hedonism” http://philpapers.org/archive/SINTEA-3 accessed 2-4-16

The Odyssey's treatment of these events demonstrates how dramatically ancient Greek moral intuitions differ from ours. It doesn't dwell on the brutality of Telemachus, who killed twelve women for the trivial reasons he states, making them suffer as they die. While gods and men seek vengeance for other great and small offenses in the Odyssey, no one finds this mass murder worth avenging. It's a minor event in the denouement to a happy ending in which Odysseus (who first proposes killing the women) returns home and Telemachus becomes a man. That they Greeks could so easily regard these murders as part of a happy ending for heroes shows how deeply we disagree with them. It's as if we gave them a trolley problem with the 12 women on the side track and no one on the main track, and they judged it permissible for Telemachus to turn the trolley and kill them all. And this isn't some esoteric text of a despised or short-lived sect, but a central literary work of a long-lived and influential culture. Human history offers similarly striking examples of disagreement on a variety of topics. These include sexual morality; the treatment of animals; the treatment of other ethnicities, families, and social classes; the consumption of intoxicating substances; whether and how one may take vengeance; slavery; whether public celebrations are acceptable; and gender roles.12 Moral obligations to commit genocide were accepted not only by some 20th century Germans, but by much of the ancient world, including the culture that gave us the Old Testament. One can only view the human past and much of the present with horror at the depth of human moral error and the harm that has resulted. One might think to explain away much of this disagreement as the result of differing nonmoral beliefs. Those who disagree about nonmoral issues may disagree on the moral rightness of a particular action despite agreeing on the fundamental moral issues. For example, they may agree that healing the sick is right, but disagree about whether a particular medicine will heal or harm. This disagreement about whether to prescribe the medicine won't be fundamentally about morality, and won't support the argument from disagreement. I don't think the moral disagreements listed above are explained by differences in nonmoral belief. This isn't because sexists, racists, and bigots share the nonmoral views of those enlightened by feminism and other egalitarian doctrines – they don't. Rather, their differing views on nonmoral topics often are rationalizations of moral beliefs that fundamentally disagree with ours.13 Those whose fundamental moral judgments include commitments to the authority of men over women, or of one race over another, will easily accept descriptive psychological views that attribute less intelligence or rationality to women or the subjugated race.14 Moral disagreement supposedly arising from moral views in religious texts is similar. Given how rich and many-stranded most religious texts are, interpretive claims about their moral teachings often tell us more about the antecedent moral beliefs of the interpreter than about the text itself. This is why the same texts are interpreted to support so many different moral views. Similar phenomena occur with most moral beliefs. Environmentalists who value a lovely patch of wilderness will easily believe that its destruction will cause disaster, those who feel justified in eating meat will easily believe that the animals they eat don't suffer greatly, and libertarians who feel that redistributing wealth is unjust will easily believe that it raises unemplreoyment. We shouldn't assume that differing moral beliefs on practical questions are caused by fundamental moral agreement combined with differing nonmoral beliefs. Often the differing nonmoral beliefs are caused by fundamental moral disagreement. As we have no precise way of quantifying the breadth of disagreement or determining its epistemic consequences, it's unclear exactly how much disagreement the argument requires. While this makes the argument difficult to evaluate, it shouldn't stop us from proceeding, as we have to use the unclear notion of widespread disagreement in ordinary epistemic practice. If 99.9 of botanists agree on some issue about plants, non-botanists should defer to their authority and believe as most of them do. But if disagreement between botanists is suitably widespread, non-botanists should remain agnostic. A more precise and systematic account of when disagreement is widespread enough to generate particular epistemic consequences would be very helpful. Until we have one, we must employ the unclear notion of widespread disagreement, or some similar notion, throughout epistemic practice. Against the background of widespread moral disagreement, there may still be universal or near-universal agreement on some moral questions. For example, perhaps all cultures agree that one should provide for one’s elderly parents, even though they generally disagree elsewhere. How do these narrow areas of moral agreement affect the argument? This all depends on whether the narrow agreement is reliably or unreliably caused. If narrow agreement results from a reliable process of belief-formation, it lets us avoid error, defeating the argument from disagreement. But widely accepted moral beliefs mconsultay result from widely prevailing unreliable processes leading everyone to the same errors. There's no special pressure to explain agreement in terms of reliable processes when disagreement is widespread. Explaining agreement in terms of reliable processes is prefersable when we have some reason to think that the processes involved are generally reliable. Then we would want to understand cases of agreement in line with the general reliability of processes producing moral belief. But if disagreement is widespread, error is too. Since moral beliefs are so often false, invoking unreliable processes to explain them is better than invoking reliable ones. The next two sections discuss this in more detail. We have many plausible explanations of narrow agreement on which moral beliefs are unreliably caused. Evolutionary and sociological explanations of why particular moral beliefs are widely accepted often invoke unreliable mechanisms.15 On these explanations, we agree because some moral beliefs were so important for reproductive fitness that natural selection made them innate in us, or so important to the interests controlling moral education in each culture that they were inculcated in everyone. For example, parents' influence over their children's moral education would explain agreement that one should provide for one's elderly parents. Plausible normative ethical theories won't systematically connect these evolutionary and sociological explanations with moral facts. If disagreement and error are widespread, they'll provide useful ways to reconcile unusual cases of widespread agreement with the general unreliability of the processes producing moral belief. 1.3 If there is widespread error about a topic, we should retain only those beliefs about it formed through reliable processes Now I'll defend 3. First I'll show how the falsity of others' beliefs undermines one's own belief. Then I'll clarify the notion of a reliable process. I'll consider a modification to 3 that epistemic internalists might favor, and show that the argument accommodates it. I'll illustrate 3's plausibility by considering cases where it correctly guides our reasoning. Finally, I'll show how 3 is grounded in the intuitive response to grave moral error. First, a simple objection: “Why should I care whether other people have false beliefs? That's a fact about other people, and not about me. Even if most people are wrong about some topic, I may be one of the few right ones, even if there's no apparent reason to think that my way of forming beliefs is any more reliable.” While widespread error leaves open the possibility that one has true beliefs, it reduces the probability that my beliefs are true. Consider a parallel case. I have no direct evidence that I have an appendix, but I know that previous investigations have revealed appendixes in people. So induction suggests that I have an appendix. Similarly, I know on the basis of 1 and 2 that people's moral beliefs are, in general, rife with error. So even if I have no direct evidence of error in my moral beliefs, induction suggests that they are rife with error as well. 3 invokes the reliability of the processes that produce our beliefs. Assessing processes of belief-formation for reliability is an important part of our epistemic practices. If someone tells me that my belief is entirely produced by wishful thinking, I can't simply accept that and maintain the belief. Knowing that wishful thinking is unreliable, I must either deny that my belief is entirely caused by wishful thinking or abandon the belief. But if someone tells me that my belief is entirely the result of visual perception, I'll maintain it, assuming that it concerns sizable nearby objects or something else about which visual perception is reliable. While providing precise criteria for individuating processes of belief-formation is hard, as the literature on the generality problem for reliabilism attests, individuating them somehow is indispensable to our epistemic practices.16 Following Alvin Goldman's remark that “It is clear that our ordinary thought about process types slices them broadly” (346), I'll treat cognitive process types like wishful thinking and visual perception as appropriately broad.

He Continues

The argument forces us to give up the pre-existing moral beliefs against which we test various moral propositions in reflective equilibrium. While we may be justified in believing something because it coheres with our other beliefs, this justification goes away once we see that those beliefs should be abandoned. Coherence with beliefs that we know we should give up doesn't confer justification. Now I'll consider conceptual analysis. It can produce moral beliefs about conceptual truths – for example, that the moral supervenes on the nonmoral, and that morality is objective. It also may provide judgments about relations between different moral concepts – perhaps, that if the only moral difference between two actions is that one would produce morally better consequences than the other, doing what produces better consequences is right. I regard conceptual analysis as reliable, so that the argument from disagreement does not force us to give up the beliefs about morality it produces. Unfortunately, if analytic naturalism is false, as has been widely held in metaethics since G. E. Moore, conceptual analysis won't provide all the knowledge we need to build a normative ethical theory.21 Even when it relates moral concepts like goodness and rightness to each other, it doesn't tell us that anything is good or right to begin with. That's the knowledge we need to avoid moral skepticism. So far I've argued that our epistemic and anthropological situation, combined with plausible metaethical and epistemic principles, forces us to abandon our moral beliefs. But if a reliable process of moral belief-formation exists, 4 is false, and we can answer the moral skeptic. The rest of this paper discusses the only reliable process I know of. 2.1 Phenomenal introspection reveals pleasure's goodness Phenomenal introspection, a reliable way of forming true beliefs about our experiences, produces the belief that pleasure is good. Even as our other processes of moral belief-formation prove unreliable, it provides reliable access to pleasure's goodness, justifying the positive claims of hedonism. This section clarifies what phenomenal introspection and pleasure are and explains how phenomenal introspection provides reliable access to pleasure's value. Section 2.2 argues that pleasure's goodness is genuine moral value, rather than value of some other kind. In phenomenal introspection we consider our subjective experience, or phenomenology, and determine what it's like. Phenomenal introspection can be reliable while dreaming or hallucinating, as long as we can determine what the dreams or hallucinations are like. By itself, phenomenal introspection doesn't produce beliefs about things outside experience, or about relations between our experiences and non-experiential things. So it doesn't produce judgments about the rightness of actions or the goodness of non-experiential things. It can only tell us about the intrinsic properties of experience itself. Phenomenal introspection is generally reliable, even if mistakes about immediate experience are possible. Experience is rich in detail, so one could get some of the details wrong in belief. Under adverse conditions involving false expectations, misleading evidence about what one's experiences will be, or extreme emotional states that disrupt belief-formation, larger errors are possible. Paradigmatically reliable processes like vision share these failings. Vision sometimes produces false beliefs under adverse conditions, or when we're looking at complex things. Still, it's so reliable as to be indispensible in ordinary life. Regarding phenomenal introspection as unreliable is about as radical as skepticism about the reliability of vision. While contemporary psychologists reject introspection into one's motivations and other psychological causal processes as unreliable, phenomenal introspection fares better. Daniel Kahneman, for example, writes that “experienced utility is best measured by moment-based methods that assess the experience of the present.”22 Even those most skeptical about the reliability of phenomenal introspection, like Eric Schwitzgebel, concede that we can reliably introspect whether we are in serious pain.23 Then we should be able to introspectively determine what pain is like. So I'll assume the reliability of phenomenal introspection. One can form a variety of beliefs using phenomenal introspection. For example, one can believe that one is having sound experiences of particular noises and visual experiences of different shades of color. When looking at a lemon and considering the phenomenal states that are yellow experiences, one can form some beliefs about their intrinsic features – for example, that they're bright experiences. And when considering experiences of pleasure, one can make some judgments about their intrinsic features – for example, that they're good experiences. Just as one can look inward at one's experience of lemon yellow and recognize its brightness, one can look inward at one's experience of pleasure and recognize its goodness.24 When I consider a situation of increasing pleasure, I can form the belief that things are better than they were before, just as I form the belief that there's more brightness in my visual field as lemon yellow replaces black. And when I suddenly experience pain, I can form the belief that things are worse in my experience than they were before. Having pleasure consists in one's experience having a positive hedonic tone. Without descending into metaphor, it's hard to give a further account of what pleasure is like than to say that when one has it, one feels good. As Aaron Smuts writes in defending the view of pleasure as hedonic tone, “to 'feel good' is about as close to an experiential primitive as we get.” 25 Fred Feldman sees pleasure as fundamentally an attitude rather than a hedonic tone.26 But as long as hedonic tones are real components of experience, phenomenal introspection will reveal pleasure's goodness. Opponents of the hedonic tone account of pleasure usually concede that hedonic tones exist, as Feldman seems to in discussing “sensory pleasures,” which he thinks his view helps us understand. Even on his view of pleasure, phenomenal introspection can produce the belief that some hedonic tones are good while others are bad. There are many different kinds of pleasant experiences. There are sensory pleasures, like the pleasure of tasting delicious food, receiving a massage, or resting your tired limbs in a soft bed after a hard day. There are the pleasures of seeing that our desires are satisfied, like the pleasure of winning a game, getting a promotion, or seeing a friend succeed. These experiences differ in many ways, just as the experiences of looking at lemons and the sky on a sunny day differ. It's easy to see the appeal of Feldman's view that pleasures “have just about nothing in common phenomenologically” (79). But just as our experiences in looking at lemons and the sky on a sunny day have brightness in common, pleasant experiences all have “a certain common quality – feeling good,” as Roger Crisp argues (109).27 As the analogy with brightness suggests, hedonic tone is phenomenologically very thin, and usually mixed with a variety of other experiences.28 Pleasure of any kind feels good, and displeasure of any kind feels bad. These feelings may or may not have bodily location or be combined with other sensory states like warmth or pressure. “Pleasure” and “displeasure” mean these thin phenomenal states of feeling good and feeling bad. As Joseph Mendola writes, “the pleasantness of physical pleasure is a kind of hedonic value, a single homogenous sensory property, differing merely in intensity as well as in extent and duration, which is yet a kind of goodness” (442).29 What if Feldman is right and hedonic states feel good in fundamentally different ways? Then phenomenal introspection suggests a pluralist variety of hedonism. Each fundamental flavor of pleasure will have a fundamentally different kind of goodness, as phenomenal introspection more accurate than mine will reveal. This isn't my view, but I suggest it to those convinced that hedonic tones are fundamentally heterogenous. If phenomenal introspection reliably informs us that pleasure is good, how can anyone believe that their pleasures are bad? Other processes of moral belief-formation are responsible for these beliefs. Someone who feels disgust or guilt about sex may not only regard sex as immoral, but the pleasure it produces as bad. Even if phenomenal introspection on sexual pleasure disposes one to believe that it's good, stronger negative emotional responses to it may more strongly dispose one to believe that it's bad, following the emotional perception model suggested in section 1.4. Explaining disagreement about pleasure's value in terms of other processes lets hedonists maintain that phenomenal introspection univocally supports pleasure's goodness. As long as negative judgments of pleasure come from unreliable processes instead of phenomenal introspection, the argument from disagreement eliminates them. The parallel between yellow’s brightness and pleasure’s goodness demonstrates the objectivity of the value detected in phenomenal introspection. Just as anyone's yellow experiences objectively are bright experiences, anyone's pleasure objectively is a good experience.30 While one's phenomenology is often called one's “subjective experience”, facts about it are still objective. “Subjective” in “subjective experience” means “internal to the mind”, not “ontologically dependent on attitudes towards it.” My yellow-experiences objectively have brightness. Anyone who thought my yellow-experiences lacked brightness would be mistaken. Pleasure similarly is objectively good. It's true that anyone's pleasure is good. Anyone who denies this is mistaken. As Mendola writes, the value detected in phenomenal introspection is “a plausible candidate for objective value” (712). Even though phenomenal introspection only tells me about my own phenomenal states, I can know that others' pleasure is good. Of course, I can't phenomenally introspect their pleasures, just as I can't phenomenally introspect pleasures that I'll experience next year. But if I consider my experiences of lemon yellow and ask what it would be like if others had the same experiences, I must think that they would be having bright experiences. Similarly, if in a pleasant moment I consider what it's like for others to have exactly the experience I'm having, I must think that they're having good experiences. If they have exactly the same experiences I'm having, their experiences will have exactly the same intrinsic properties as mine. This is also how I know that if I have the same experience in the future, it'll have the same intrinsic properties. Even though the only pleasure I can introspect is mine now, I should believe that others' pleasures and my pleasures at other times are good, just as I should believe that yellow experienced by others and myself at other times is bright. My argument thus favors the kind of universal hedonism that supports utilitarianism, not egoistic hedonism.

3. Only consequentialism can explain moral substitutability

Sinnott-Armstrong 92: Sinnott- Armstrong, Walter. “An Argument For Consequentialism” Dartmouth College. Philosophical Perspectives, 6, Ethics, 1992. RW

Since general substitutability works for other kinds of reasons for action, we would need a strong argument to deny that it holds also for moral reasons. If moral reasons obeyed different principles, it would be hard to understand why moral reasons are also called 'reasons' and how moral reasons interact with other reasons when they apply to the same action. Nonetheless, this extension has been denied, so we have to look at moral reasons carefully. I have a moral reason to feed my child tonight, both because I promised my wife to do so, and also because of my special relation to my child along with the fact that she will go hungry if I don't feed her. I can't feed my child tonight without going home soon, and going home soon will enable me to feed her tonight. Therefore, there is a moral reason for me to go home soon. It need not be imprudent or ugly or sacrilegious or illegal for me not to feed her, but the requirements of morality give me a moral reason to feed her. This argument assumes a special case of substitutability: (MS) If there is a moral reason for A to do X, and if A cannot do X without doing Y, and if doing Y will enable A to do X, then there is a moral reason for A to do Y. I will call this 'the principle of moral substitutability', or just 'moral substitutability'.

He continues:

Of course, there are many other versions of deontology. I cannot discuss them all. Nonetheless, these examples suggest that it is the very nature of deontological reasons that makes deontological theories unable to explain moral substitutability. This comes out clearly if we start from the other side and ask which properties create the moral reasons that are derived by moral substitutability. What gives me a moral reason to start the mower is the consequences of starting the mower. Specifically, it has the consequence that I can am able to mow the grass. This reason cannot derive from the same property as my moral reason to mow the lawn unless what gives me a moral reason to mow the lawn is its consequences. Thus, any non-consequentialist moral theory will have to posit two distinct kinds of moral reasons: one for starting the mower and another for mowing the grass. Once these kinds of reasons are separated, we need to understand the connection between them. But this connection cannot be explained by the substantive principles of the theory. That is why all deontological theories must lack the explanatory coherence which is a general test of adequacy for all theories. I conclude that no deontological theory can adequately explain moral substitutability.

He continues:

All other moral reasons are non-consequential. Thus, a moral reason to do an act is non-consequential if and only if the reason depends even partly on some property that the act has independently of its consequences. For example, an act can be a lie regardless of what happens as a result of the lie (since some lies are not believed), and some moral theories claim that that property of being a lie provides a moral reason not to tell a lie regardless of the consequences of this lie. Similarly, the fact that an act fulfills a promise is often seen as a moral reason to do the act, even though the act has that property of fulfilling a promise independently of its consequences. All such moral reasons are non-consequential. In order to avoid so many negations, I will also call them 'deontological'. This distinction would not make sense if we did not restrict the notion of consequences. If I promise to mow the lawn, then one consequence of my mowing might seem to be that my promise is fulfilled. One way to avoid this problem is to specify that the consequences of an act must be distinct from the act itself. My act of fulfilling my promise and my act of mowing are not distinct, because they are done by the same bodily movements.10 Thus, my fulfilling my promise is not a consequence of my mowing. A consequence of an act need not be later in time than the act, since causation can be simultaneous, but the consequence must at least be different from the act. Even with this clarification, it is still hard to classify some moral reasons as consequential or deontological,11 but I will stick to examples that are clear. In accordance with this distinction between kinds of moral reasons, I can now distinguish different kinds of moral theories. I will say that a moral theory is consequentialist if and only if it implies that all basic moral reasons are consequential. A moral theory is then non-consequentialists or deontological if it includes any basic moral reasons which are not consequential. 5. Against Deontology So defined, the class of deontological moral theories is very large and diverse. This makes it hard to say anything in general about it. Nonetheless, I will argue that no deontological moral theory can explain why moral substitutability holds. My argument applies to all deontological theories because it depends only on what is common to them all, namely, the claim that some basic moral reasons are not consequential. Some deontological theories allow very many weighty moral reasons that are consequential, and these theories might be able to explain why moral substitutability holds for some of their moral reasons: the consequential ones. But even these theories cannot explain why moral substitutability holds for all moral reasons, including the non-consequential reasons that make the theory deontological. The failure of deontological moral theories to explain moral substitutability in the very cases that make them deontological is a reason to reject all deontological moral theories. I cannot discuss every deontological moral theory, so I will discuss only a few paradigm examples and show why they cannot explain moral substitut- ability. After this, I will argue that similar problems are bound to arise for all other deontological theories by their very nature. The simplest deontological theory is the pluralistic intuitionism of Prichard and Ross. Ross writes that, when someone promises to do something, 'This we consider obligatory in its own nature, just because it is a fulfillment of a promise, and not because of its consequences.'12 Such deontologists claim in effect that, if I promise to mow the grass, there is a moral reason for me to mow the grass, and this moral reason is constituted by the fact that mowing the grass fulfills my promise. This reason exists regardless of the consequences of mowing the grass, even though it might be overridden by certain bad consequences. However, if this is why I have a moral reason to mow the grass, then, even if I cannot mow the grass without starting my mower, and starting the mower would enable me to mow the grass, it still would not follow that I have any moral reason to start my mower, since I did not promise to start my mower, and starting my mower does not fulfill my promise. Thus, a moral theory cannot explain moral substitutability if it claims that properties like this provide moral reasons.

4. Ethical frameworks must be theoretically legitimate. Any standard is an interpretation of the word ought-thus framework is functionally a topicality argument about how to define the terms of the resolution. Definitions should be subject to theoretical contestation in the same way other words should be. My framework interprets ought as maximizing happiness. To clarify- this is a framework warrant, not a reason to drop the debater. Prefer:

A. Ground and Clash- every argument has a weighable util impact as long as you explain why it causes pain or pleasure, whereas other frameworks like meta-ethics, kant, and skepticism are narrowly designed to exclude offense

B. Predictability- Policy and LD debate have been using util for decades. No framework is more predictable

C. Topic Lit- most people write about empirical circumstances form a utilitarian perspective- proven by the fact that phil debaters read more analytics

5. We have no unified consciousness

Parfit 84: (Derek, Reasons and Persons) brackets for gender

Some recent medical cases provide striking evidence in favour of the Reductionist View. Human beings have a lower brain and two upper hemispheres, which are connected by a bundle of fibres. In treating a few people with severe epilepsy, surgeons have cut these fibres. The aim was to reduce the severity of epileptic fits, by confining their causes to a single hemisphere. This aim was achieved. But the operations had another unintended consequence. The effect, in the words of one surgeon, was the creation of ‘two separate spheres of consciousness.’ This effect was revealed by various psychological tests. These made use of two facts. We control our right arms with our left hemispheres, and vice versa. And what is in the right halves of our visual fields we see with our left hemispheres, and vice versa. When someone’s hemispheres have been disconnected, psychologists can thus present to this person two different written questions in the two halves of their visual field, and can receive two different answers written by this person’s two hands.

This means consequentialism – moral theories can’t focus on individuals since there’s nothing that unifies them across time. Only states of affairs can have value.