Research Talk by Vivian Feldblyum
Research Talk by Dr. Vivian Feldblyum
Birger Hall, First Floor Conference Room
Friday, April 12, 2024 | 1:30 PM to 3:30 PM
Talk Title: Classic Hedonism Reconsidered
Few views have seen a more precipitous fall from grace than hedonism, which once occupied a central position in the history of ethics. Recently, however, there have been efforts to revive interest in the view, ranging from arguments in staunch defense of hedonism to well-motivated pleas for contemporary ethicists to at least take the view seriously. In this article, I argue for the seriousness of hedonism on metaethical grounds. Taking John Stuart Mill’s argument for hedonism in Utilitarianism as a test case, I show that historically classic hedonism was not argued for in isolation as an ethical view, but was rather grounded metaethically via a commitment to two positions: (1) an empiricist epistemology, and (2) the view that pleasure occurs in sensation. Together, these two positions provided principled grounds for various iterations of classic hedonism. Moreover, these two positions are still serious options in both contemporary epistemology and the contemporary literature on the nature of pleasure. Insofar as a contemporary ethicist takes those two views seriously, they ought to take classic hedonism seriously as well. That is, to truly discount classic hedonism as a viable position in value theory, one must argue against at least one of those positions, and this is a non-trivial task.