PHL100Y1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, Experience Machine
Document Summary
A plausible answer to this question would tell us what a human person"s well-being consists in. Thus: what makes someone"s life go best = what their well-being consists in. Sowhat makes someone"s life go best: three theories of well-being: hedonism, the desire theory, and the objective list theory. Hedonism says that well-being consists in enjoying pleasurable experiences and avoiding painful ones. (don"t let the racy name mislead you. There need be nothing decadent or licentious about hedonism. ) A worry about bentham"s brand of hedonism is that it isn"t clear that there really is a specific type of sensation common to all pleasures and a (different) specific type of sensation common to all pains. And what sensation is common to, say, the pain of getting a root canal and the pain of watching a loved one with. To sidestep this problem let us suppose that there need be no such common sensations.
