All Morality is Hedonism

The secret Big Ethics doesn’t want you to know

“Crouching Woman,” Eugène Delacroix (1827)

I challenge you to find any of the following:

1. A virtue ethicist who advocates for some virtue and will say, “if everyone has this virtuous trait and acts based on it, then, in the long term, I am certain we will all live miserable, unhappy lives, but nevertheless we should.”

2. A deontologist who will advocate for some duty or principle and say, “if all act in accordance with this principle, then, in the long term, I am certain we will all live miserable, unhappy lives, but nevertheless we should.”

3. A divine command theorist who will say, “if all obey God, then, in the long term, I am certain we will all live miserable, unhappy lives, but nevertheless we should.”¹

4. A Buddhist who will say, “if all achieve enlightenment, I am certain we will all live miserable, unhappy lives, but nevertheless we should.”

5. A consequentialist who will say “when striving to cause the best outcomes, it is totally irrelevant to make claims about general rules and principles that people should live in accordance with, or to consider the sorts of traits that it’s good for a person to have.”

I’ll freely admit there are perhaps some marginal cases that might satisfy one of the above – and likely many if not most non-consequentialists will contend that long-term misery, if considered as a consequence, is irrelevant to their analysis - but on balance, I suspect, people offering arguments that would fall into one of the above categories are shockingly rare, if they exist at all. Why?

I’d argue – because positive and negative experience is a form of moral evidence. If something results in widespread and long-term misery, this falsifies the claim that it is good, regardless of the validity or intuitive soundness of the syllogisms one might have employed in reaching the claim. When we observe that something reliably and foreseeably makes life worse for others in the long term, this is an a posteriori fact about the world, and if our ethical model does not account for that fact, it must be adjusted to fit – not the other way around.

Real hedonism has never been tried

Ethical hedonism is the position that moral evidence comes from experience, and, ultimately, nowhere else. On the ethical hedonist’s account, if a thing causes enjoyment, that is evidence that it is good, and if a thing causes suffering, that is evidence that it is bad.² Of course, good things can cause suffering (knee surgery) and bad things can cause enjoyment (heroin); these experiences only supply the evidence, and all the pieces of moral evidence for a thing must be weighed against each other and considered for the self and for all others, in the long term.

Ethical hedonism is frequently confused with “folk hedonism” – the rockstar lifestyle of wacky sex, fancy cocktails, and heroin – but of course it’s a different thing entirely. There are strong hedonistic arguments against heroin use – in the long term, it very reliably makes life less pleasant for you and for others. Ethical hedonism is also frequently considered a form of egoism – and there’s nothing saying egoists couldn’t be hedonists, but these are simply two separate schools of thought. Hedonism is a purely methodological claim – it just says, if you want moral evidence, here is where to look. What conclusions the evidence lends itself to is not going to be prescribed by hedonism itself – any more than the scientific theory will tell you the gravitational constant!

In practice, I find that most people agree that virtuous traits generally lead to right choices, which generally lead to good outcomes.

Why does everyone disagree, then?

By my lights there are two primary points of disagreement, and this is where the “meat” of moral disputes can be found:

First, explanatory priority. Is an outcome good because it is the product of a right choice? Or is a choice right because it (in the long term, overall) brings about good outcomes? Is a trait virtuous because it (in the long term, overall) brings about right choices? Or is a choice right because it is the product of a virtuous trait?

Second, there is disagreement on the evidentiary force of intuition. If intuition serves as an alternate and independent source of moral evidence, rather than mere experience, we cannot say that experience is the ultimate source of moral evidence. Certain things which we do not experience directly still “seem good” to us: if someone makes a choice which intuitively seems right to us, we respond with approval, and if someone has a trait which intuitively seems virtuous to us, we respond with admiration. Does a choice intuitively “seeming right” in this sense constitute evidence of its intrinsic rightness in the same way enjoyment “seeming good” is evidence of its intrinsic goodness? Does a trait intuitively “seeming virtuous” in this sense constitute evidence of its intrinsic virtuousness?

I will begin by answering the second set of questions, because I believe it supplies the answer to the first – no. The intuitive rightness and virtuousness of choices and traits, respectively, are ultimately explainable in terms of experience, to the extent they constitute moral evidence. The apparent goodness of enjoyment and the apparent badness of suffering have a unique status because they are not intuitions – they are direct contents of experience. The intuitions we have about rightness, wrongness, virtuousness, and viciousness, are explainable in terms of our prior experiences, our cultural norms, and perhaps instinctual tendencies, rather than any sort of inborn truth-tracking process. Which isn’t to say they can’t be relied upon – just that they are not the ultimate source of moral evidence.

To illustrate: suppose Bob was raised in a society where everyone claims that apples are blue. He never saw an apple, personally, but his friends and family all say apples are blue, and all the media he was exposed to reinforced this claim. Naturally, the blue-ness of apples becomes intuitive to him, in the same way “zebras are black and white” is intuitive to you and I, and was before we ever set eyes on a zebra. One day, while walking in a secluded forest, Bob comes across an apple tree. But all the apples are red!

Bob may be resistant at first – perhaps this is a trick of the light, or perhaps someone painted the apples, or perhaps when he returns from the forest he persuades himself he must have misremembered. But if Bob keeps finding red apple trees, he will eventually discard his intuitions. Bob’s intuitions about the colors of apples are, fundamentally, grounded in predictions about the sorts of experiences he will have in the long term – if these predictions keep failing, the intuitions will fade. It is just so with suffering and enjoyment. Our intuitions about the rightness of choices and the virtuousness of traits are, fundamentally, grounded in predictions about the sorts of experiences they will lead to in the long term – and if these predictions fail, if no such experiences ever arise, the relevant intuitions will fade.

Thus, our intuitions about virtue and rightness are important, and perhaps reliable as a general principle – likely even more useful, on a day-to-day basis, than direct claims about quality of outcome – but they are ultimately checkable with reference to resultant experiences! This resolves the question of explanatory priority:

A choice must derive its rightness from the fact that it reliably leads to good outcomes, because if a choice reliably leads to bad outcomes in the long term, what reason could we possibly offer in its defense? What evidence could we muster – what intuition could we appeal to which, in time, would not fade?

A trait must derive its virtuousness from the fact that it reliably leads to right choices, because if a trait reliably leads to wrong choices in the long term, what reason could we possibly offer in its defense? What evidence could we muster – what intuition could we appeal to which, in time, would not fade?

Conclusion

We can reverse-engineer this account to take a stab at offering substantive descriptions of the nature of rightness and virtue:

A choice is right if, based on all information available to the chooser, its foreseeable long-term consequences are more likely to promote the enjoyment and/or prevent the suffering of all people overall.

A choice is wrong if, based on all information available to the chooser, its foreseeable long-term consequences are more likely to prevent the enjoyment and/or promote the suffering of all people overall.

A trait is virtuous if, in the long term, a person with that trait is more likely to make right choices, or less likely to make wrong choices.

A trait is vicious if, in the long term, a person with that trait is less likely to make right choices, or more likely to make wrong choices.

We can even offer an account of what these virtues might be - a form of “virtue hedonism.” When presented with a set of choices, each ultimately derives its goodness from its consequences. The virtuous traits are the ones which make a person more likely to choose rightly. So, all else equal, it is better if a person has knowledge of the consequences of each choice, so that they can more reliably ascertain a choice’s rightness. A person with more power will have more choices available to them, and thus, will have the ability to make righter choices – so this trait is virtuous as well. But a person who knows the right choice, and can make it, might still lack the inclination to, if a suboptimal choice would serve them better, personally – so one must also have love, in the sense that they afford the enjoyment and suffering of others equal weight to their own, when weighing which choice to make.

And many traits which we consider virtuous take some form of knowledge, power, or love. Bravery requires power over one’s own fear. Temperance requires knowledge of the long-term downsides of excessive consumption. Generosity requires love for others, and a willingness to share resources when doing so confers a greater benefit to another than the detriment to oneself. And so on.

But one might still wonder whether knowledge, power, and love, taken together, offer an exhaustive account of virtue. Consider a person with perfect knowledge, perfect power, and perfect love – is there anything left to improve in such a person? Perhaps not!

Could it even possibly be a coincidence that this is how we conceive of God?

1. Counting the afterlife!

2. I use “enjoyment” and “suffering” here, rather than “pleasure” and “pain,” although the latter pair is more common in technical philosophical works. Pleasure, to me, connotes specifically tactile stimulation, and even though it can of course be stipulated to have a broader meaning, I find that “enjoyment” more intuitively captures this general sense. Likewise, “pain” to me tends to refer to the firing of nociceptors, rather than unpleasant experience more generally, which I think “suffering” better captures in contemporary colloquial speech - it is possible to enjoy pain, but not to enjoy suffering!