A serious dilemma for any utilitarians out there, if there are any left. This is not the usual interpersonal utility comparison thing, that can be solved, in my analysis, by making utilitarianism a moral philosophy which operates over yourself as an individual, rather than over society. Eating a pizza would make me happy, so I should eat a pizza. Stealing it would make me feel guilty, and thus unhappy, so I should not steal a pizza. I stuck to this idea for a long time, until this thought came up.
How would you feel about having all the parts of your brain gutted out, with the exception of the pleasure centers and the bare minimum to uphold subjective experience, with the pleasure values blared to maximum at all times? The question is not how you would feel after the procedure: You’d obviously be absolutely ecstatic then. The question is, how do you right now, with your current brain and your current values, feel about such a scenario?
I don’t know how you feel about it, but I, and many others, do not like the prospect. Which, when you consider this from the perspective of personal utilitarianism, is quite a paradox. People want to be happy, don’t they? If they went through with the procedure they’d be way happier than they could ever be by pursuing natural means. What’s the problem here?
The problem is people don’t want to be happy, per se. Happiness is an indicator, not the goal most people directly strive for. (Though plenty do; See the large numbers of drug addicts.) When people say they want to be “happy” they don’t mean they want to spend the rest of their life doped up. They just use the term as a catch-all for the various things that happiness indicates. In the course of obtaining the referents, they get happiness as well.
Needless to say, this problem isn’t insurmountable either. The obvious solution is to define utility by the presence of the referents, not the presence of the indicator. Here we tread heavily into objective-morality territory by divorcing utility from the content of anyone’s actual brain. We define utility by the output of a computation performed by the brain, but not necessarily the output the brain produces (as the brain is capable of returning an incorrect result). Changes to the brain change the brain’s output, but not the correct result of the actual computation.
But this just leads us to another problem.
We are not continuous streams of consciousness. I value heavily different things now than I did 5 years ago. Some of the kinds of choices I prefer to make now would have horrified my past self if she had considered the prospect. But why should my current self overrule my past preferences? After all, a change in the brain doesn’t change the correct output of the utility computation, just my brain’s output. If we reject this justification, then we’re right back to the issue described before.
This analysis is, to my knowledge, original. The only way to have any sort of coherence in our reasoning is to pick a single rightness-function, not defined by any individual’s preferences, and apply it universally. When we accept this, we are no longer dealing with a brand of moral relativism, but an objective morality.