Callicles on Well-Being

Hedonism: The only thing that is intrinsically good is pleasure. Epicureanism: The only thing that is intrinsically good is freedom from pain and trouble.

Suppose there was an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Super- duper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain…

Should you plug into this machine for life, preprogramming your life experiences? [...] Of course, while in the tank you won't know that you're there; you'll think that it's all actually happening [...] Would you plug in? Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia

Socrates: Now tell me, is the life you mean something like feeling hunger and eating when hungry? Callicles: Yes, it is. Socrates: And feeling thirst and drinking when thirsty? Callicles: Yes, and having all the other desires, and being able to satisfy them, and so with these enjoyments leading a happy life. Plato, Gorgias

The Desire-Satisfaction Theory: The only thing that is intrinsically good is getting what you want. Hedonism: The only thing that is intrinsically good is pleasure.

The Experience Machine The Mollusk Objection The Sadist Objection

Socrates: First of all, tell me whether a man who has an itch and wants to scratch, and may scratch in all freedom, can pass his life happily in continual scratching... Callicles: [Yes] I say that the man also who scratches himself will thus spend a pleasant life. Socrates: And if a pleasant one, a happy one also? Callicles: Certainly. Socrates: Is it so if he only wants to scratch his head? Or what more am I to ask you? See, Callicles, what your answer will be, if you are asked everything in succession that links on to that statement; and the culmination of the case, as stated—the life of catamites—is not that awful, shameful, and wretched? Or will you dare to assert that these are happy if they can freely indulge their wants?

The Desire-Satisfaction Theory: The only thing that is intrinsically good is getting what you want. The Idealized Desire-Satisfaction Theory: The only thing that is intrinsically good is getting what you would want under certain idealized conditions. The Appropriate Desire-Satisfaction Theory: The only thing that is intrinsically good is getting what you should want.

Subjectivism: Whether or not something is intrinsically good for a person is determined by that person’s attitudes.

Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer. Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus

Epicurus’ Argument 1)For any x, y, and t, x can only harm y at t if x occurs at or before t. 2)For any x, y, and t, x can only harm y at t if y exists at t. 3)If (1), death can’t harm us while we’re alive. 4)If (2), death can’t harm us while we’re dead. 5)If death can’t harm us while we’re alive or dead, then death does not harm us. 6)Death does not harm us.