Philos Stud (2010) 151:331–349

DOI 10.1007/s11098-009-9440-4

What do our intuitions about the experience machine

really tell us about hedonism?

Sharon Hewitt

Published online: 1 October 2009

 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

Abstract Robert Nozick’s experience machine thought experiment is often con-

sidered a decisive refutation of hedonism. I argue that the conclusions we draw from
Nozick’s thought experiment ought to be informed by considerations concerning the
operation of our intuitions about value. First, I argue that, in order to show that
practical hedonistic reasons are not causing our negative reaction to the experience
machine, we must not merely stipulate their irrelevance (since our intuitions are not
always responsive to stipulation) but fill in the concrete details that would make them
irrelevant. If we do this, we may see our feelings about the experience machine
becoming less negative. Second, I argue that, even if our feelings about the expe-
rience machine do not perfectly track hedonistic reasons, there are various reasons to
doubt the reliability of our anti-hedonistic intuitions. And finally, I argue that, since
in the actual world seeing certain things besides pleasure as ends in themselves may
best serve hedonistic ends, hedonism may justify our taking these other things to be
intrinsically valuable, thus again making the existence of our seemingly anti-hedo-
nistic intuitions far from straightforward evidence for the falsity of hedonism.

Keywords Pleasure
Pain
Hedonism
Utilitarianism
Experience machine

Intuitions
Metaethics
Thought experiments

Hedonism, whether as a theory of welfare or as a theory of the moral good, is given

little serious consideration by contemporary philosophers.1 This is rather surprising,
1
When hedonism does get discussed, it often serves as no more than a quick set-up to praising a desire-
based view of welfare. For example, in James Griffin’s 312-page book Well-being: Its Meaning,

S. Hewitt (&)
Department of Philosophy, MS 055, Brandeis University, 415 South Street, Waltham,
MA 02453, USA
e-mail: shewitt@brandeis.edu

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given the attention it’s historically received, both in antiquity2 and in the glory days of
British empiricism.3,4 One of the reasons for the twentieth century decline in interest in
hedonism is no doubt the rise of behaviorism and functionalism. These ideas continue
to have a strong influence on philosophy, despite their waning influence in
psychology.5 But contemporary moral philosophers likely also turn up their noses at
hedonism because of its historical tie to a hedonistic theory of desire: the theory that all
human desire is either for pleasure (and the avoidance of pain) or for means to pleasure
(and the avoidance of pain). Psychological hedonism may seem implausible, and if we
think that this theory is the primary reason for believing in hedonism as a normative
theory, then we will no doubt fail to find the latter very plausible either.
The influence of this connection to psychological hedonism seems to be
confirmed by the fact that contemporary philosophical discussions of hedonism are
dominated by references to Robert Nozick’s ‘‘experience machine’’ thought
experiment.6 Nozick’s thought experiment seems to show fairly clearly that we
care about things besides positive experiential states, and, for many philosophers,
that clinches the case against hedonism.
This attitude is unfortunate, since the falsity of psychological hedonism by no
means entails the falsity of normative hedonism. It is entirely possible that, while
we are disposed to desire many things besides pleasure as ends in themselves, only

Footnote 1 continued
Measurement, and Moral Importance (1986), the discussion of hedonism occupies less than three pages
(pp. 7–10). [Crisp (2006a) points this out.] Will Kymlicka dispatches hedonism with similar speed in
Contemporary Political Philosophy (1990, pp. 12–14). Anti-hedonistic opinion has even reached the
point at which refuting the view can seem too trivial an accomplishment to justify writing an entire
article: Millgram (2000), after presenting some arguments against hedonistic utilitarianism, worries
that his readers will wonder whether his target ‘‘was not in fact a straw man,’’ and he proceeds to
address his attention to preference utilitarianism, because he wants them ‘‘to take away from this
exercise … a more important lesson than: that an already-discredited view has been further dis-
credited’’ (pp. 126–127).
There are some notable exceptions to the anti-hedonistic trend, however. See Edwards (1979), Katz
(1986), Sprigge (1988), Tännsjö (1998), Feldman (1997), Feldman (2004), Crisp (2006a; b, Chap. 4).
2
At least three Platonic dialogues—the Protagoras, the Philebus, and the Republic—seriously discuss
hedonism. So does Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics (7.11–14, 10.1–5). The Epicureans and Cyrenaics
defended the view, even as the Stoics went to pains to argue against it. On the Epicureans, see Cicero,
De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, 1.30–1.54. On Aristippus, founder of the Cyrenaic school, see
Xenophon (1970, ii.1). On the Stoics, see Diogenes Laertius (1972, 7.85–7.86).
3
See Thomas Hobbes, Human Nature: or the Fundamental Elements of Policy, 7.3; John Locke, An
Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 2.20.3; David Hume, Enquiry concerning the Principles of
Morals, app. 2.10; Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book 2, Part 3, Sect. 9; Jeremy Bentham, An
Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, 1.1; and John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism,
especially Chaps. 2 and 4.
4
I take these historical references from Crisp (2006a, p. 619).
5
Psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Carol Varey expressed as early as 1991 their regret that ‘‘[t]he
definition of utility in terms of choices still rules the sciences of decision, although operationalism and
behaviorism have largely lost their hold on psychology.’’ See Kahneman and Varey (1991, p. 128). For
evidence of new interest in subjective states in psychology, see Eid and Larsen (2008).
6
See, for example, Griffin (1986, pp. 9–10), Brink (1989, pp. 223–224), Darwall (1997, pp. 162, 178),
Sumner (1996, pp. 94–98), Finnis (1980, p. 33, 1983, pp. 37–42), Thomson (1987, p. 41), and Attfield
(1987, p. 33).

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pleasure has objective intrinsic value. And it may even be the case that there is
evidence for the intrinsic value of pleasure that there is not for the intrinsic value of
these other things.7
In this paper, I want to draw attention to the relevance of epistemological issues
to the hedonism debate. In particular, I want to discuss how the conclusions we draw
from Nozick’s thought experiment ought to be informed by considerations
regarding the operation of our intuitions about value. I will argue that, in light of
these epistemological issues, the experience machine thought experiment is
nowhere close to the decisive refutation of hedonism it’s often taken to be.
Before discussing our intuitions, however, it will be important first to see what
hedonistic reasons there are for not hooking up to the experience machine, so that we can
better assess to what extent our negative feelings about the machine could be a response
to these reasons. I use the term ‘hedonistic reasons’ to refer to both egoistic and altruistic
reasons that are based on the intrinsic value of pleasure or disvalue of pain. When I am
discussing only one of these sorts of hedonistic reasons, I will specify which, but the
reader should note that my goal will not be to defend hedonistic egoism, hedonistic
utilitarianism, or any other hedonistic theory in particular but rather to sketch the
capacity that hedonism in general has to account for our negative feelings about the
experience machine. Thus, in both Sects. 1 and 2, I will begin by discussing egoistic
hedonistic reasons but will then go on to show how hedonistic reasons regarding others
can also help to account for our negative feelings about the experience machine. I should
also mention that I will not distinguish in the body of the paper among hedonism as a
theory of welfare, hedonism as a theory of rationality, and hedonism as a theory of the
moral good. I take my arguments to be useful in defending any of these versions of
hedonism against appeals to the experience machine thought experiment.
In Sect. 1, I will begin by making some very general points about the practice of
hedonism, showing how a hedonist (of whatever stripe) must take into account not
only the intrinsic goodness and badness of pleasure and pain8 but also their
instrumental value as indicators of future prospects for pleasure and pain. In Sect. 2,
I’ll apply these considerations to the particular case of the experience machine and
then move to discussing whether these hedonistic reasons account for our negative
feelings about the experience machine. I will explain why, to answer this question,
we can’t rely on stipulating that hedonistic reasons are irrelevant and seeing whether
our feelings about the experience machine change. It’s essential to fill out these
stipulations with concrete details, and, when we do so, we find evidence that our
feelings are tracking hedonistic considerations more closely than is often assumed.
7
Let me sketch one way in which this might be true. Goodness seems to be in some way part of the very
phenomenology of pleasure. In experiencing pleasure, we seem to be, in a very direct way, experiencing
goodness. In fact, goodness seems to be the defining phenomenal property of pleasure. If it’s true that the
intrinsic goodness of pleasure is phenomenal, then we seem to be capable of being directly acquainted
with it. But we don’t seem to be acquainted with the goodness of other things we desire in anything like
this direct way. We take other things to be good, but it’s not clear that our epistemic position with regard
to their intrinsic natures is anywhere near as sure as our position with regard to the intrinsic goodness of
pleasure. An epistemic difference like this could thus give us reason to think normative hedonism is true
even if psychological hedonism is not.
8
I will use the term ‘pleasure’ to refer to all positive experiences and ‘pain’ to refer to all negative
experiences, in keeping with traditional hedonistic usage.

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334 S. Hewitt

Our feelings probably don’t track these hedonistic considerations perfectly,

however, and this makes relevant an investigation into the reliability of our
intuitions in cases where they diverge from hedonistic reasons. In Sect. 3, I’ll
present some reasons we have for doubting the accuracy of our anti-hedonistic
intuitions, especially the accuracy of our intuition about the intrinsic value of
relationships.
Finally, in Sect. 4, I’ll discuss the fact that, in the actual world, viewing things
besides pleasure as ends in themselves may best serve hedonistic ends. That is,
hedonism may actually justify our taking things besides pleasure to be intrinsically
valuable, meaning that many of our ‘‘non-hedonistic’’ values actually accord with
the practical demands of hedonism. This gives us one final reason for thinking that
our feelings about the experience machine are far from being straightforward
evidence for the falsity of hedonism: repugnance for the idea of living all of one’s
life hooked up to the experience machine is exactly what we ought to expect from
someone who has the attitudes necessary to be a successful hedonist.

1 Some general points about the practice of hedonism: pleasure

and pain as indicators

When many people hear or read the word ‘hedonist’, they conjure up images of
people who deny themselves no opportunity for pleasure, living in perpetual
indulgence of their appetites for food, drink, drugs, and sex. The fact that most people
who actually attempt such a lifestyle either abandon it rather quickly or die
prematurely should teach us something about the actual hedonistic value of such a
life. Constantly seeking to procure the most immediate pleasure and to avoid all pain
is not an effective method for producing the most pleasure and the least pain in the
long run. One important reason for this is that our bodies simply cannot support
constant stimulation and must be given time to rest and replenish themselves.
Constant intense stimulation, especially in the form of drugs, interferes with the
body’s sustaining of its most basic functions and leads to its ultimate breakdown.
Furthermore, continuous intense pleasure prevents us from consciously attending to
our bodies’ needs because it disconnects the state of our minds from the state of our
bodies. By directly inducing intense pleasure, drugs drown out the signals our bodies
otherwise send us as a reminder that they require attention: that they require
nutrients, water, and sleep, for example. The severity of the problem is demonstrated
by rats that have learned that they can electrically stimulate the ‘‘pleasure centers’’ of
their brains by pressing a lever. These rats choose pressing the lever over any other
activity, including eating, drinking, and copulating, and if allowed, they will press
the lever until they collapse.9 As for human beings, psychologists have found
evidence that habitually experiencing a ratio of positive to negative feelings that is
above 11-to-1 is associated with diminished physical and mental health, what
Barbara Fredrickson calls ‘‘diminished generativity and resilience.’’10

9
Edwards (1979, p. 60).
10
Fredrickson (2008, p. 452). For the original research, see Fredrickson and Losada (2005).

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Thus, those who assume that a hedonist would aim at a life of constant pleasure
without pain have missed the important point that, even for a hedonist, pleasure and
pain are not only ends in themselves but also serve as means. Pleasure and pain have
an instrumental role to play, as indicators of the instrumental goodness or badness of
other things. Ironically, while the role pleasure and pain play in indicating the
goodness or badness of other things has been noted by many philosophers, their
having this indicative role is often taken as evidence against hedonism rather than
for it.11 Millgram writes, ‘‘Hedonists assume that because desires and goals change
in response to experienced pleasure and displeasure, these must be the actual goals.
But this view is naive: pleasure and displeasure are indications and signs of
desirability we use in determining what our goals should be.’’12 Millgram and others
ignore the fact that even hedonists can accept that pleasure and pain indicate the
desirability of other things, a desirability that consists in those things’ tendencies to
produce future pleasure or reduce future pain.
In fact, pleasure and pain are instrumentally valuable not just because they can
indicate prospects for their own promotion or avoidance but because they can
actually motivate us to take action towards their promotion or avoidance. We could
find other ways of informing ourselves about the state of our bodies—by
mechanically monitoring our vital signs, our blood sugar level, etc.—but simply
having information about what we ought to do to maintain our health is not enough
to get us to do it, especially when we are enjoying intense pleasure or have it as an
immediate prospect.13 The insufficient motivational power of mere information
about the harm our actions are doing our bodies has been documented by Paul
Brand, who spent years developing artificial sensing systems for victims of
leprosy.14 Since leprosy makes a patient insensitive to pain in their hands and feet,
Brand developed gloves and socks containing pressure sensors capable of indicating
when some action the patient was taking was having a harmful effect on their body.
Unfortunately, these indications that they were performing an action such that it
could lead to the destruction of a finger or toe did not stop patients from performing
the action. They were not sufficiently motivated by the evidence about their future
well-being, and the project ultimately failed.
What is needed in such cases is not just the knowledge that one’s present
behavior will have future negative consequences but a present negative conse-
quence—such as a pain—that directly motivates one to cease the harmful behavior.
Brand reports the comment of a colleague who said to him, ‘‘Paul, it’s no use. We’ll
never be able to protect these limbs unless the signal really hurts. Surely there must
be some way to hurt your patients enough to make them pay attention.’’15 In fact,
Brand and his colleagues did try an alternative system that responded to danger to
the limbs by inducing pain in a still sensitive part of the body. The problem with this
system was that patients preferred to turn it off rather than heed its warnings.
11
See, for example, Millgram (2000, 1997, Chap. 6) and Jollimore (2004).
12
Millgram (1997, p. 117).
13
Millgram (2000) makes a similar point on pp. 125–126.
14
See Brand and Yancey (1993, especially pp. 194–196).
15
Brand and Yancey (1993, p. 194).

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336 S. Hewitt

The moral being that feeling some present pain is crucial to motivating us to avoid
future negative consequences, and that, in order for pain to be so motivating, there
has to be no easier way to avoid the pain than to avoid the harmful behavior.
But pain is not only useful in motivating us to attend to the state of our bodies; it
also helps motivate us to take care of our social lives. It is crucial to our long-term
happiness that we have strong ties to others in our society and particularly strong
ties to a few individuals. We rely on others throughout our lives for food, housing,
medical care, and protection, as well as for the pleasures that come directly from
close personal relationships. Thus it’s essential to our happiness that we have the
capacity to live in community with others, and this requires sensitivity to the needs
of others and to the general requirements of membership in a group.
For instance, it’s important that, when we hurt a friend’s feelings, we feel
emotional pain. Without it, we might very well think little about what we’ve done
until the time comes when we need something from our friend, and by that point, we
may have permanently lost the friendship. We are also benefited by our ability to
experience shame, embarrassment, and discomfort at the disapproval of others.
These feelings motivate us to please others, and these people’s pleasure in turn
causes them to have positive personal associations with us and to see us as persons
who should be helped in the future.
Now so far I’ve been focusing on the way in which negative experience can
signal to us things we need to change in order to spare ourselves future problems.
However, if we are not just hedonistic egoists but are hedonistic utilitarians, for
example, then we will believe that our actions ought to be such as to maximize the
balance of pleasure over pain not just in our own lives but across all people’s lives.
If hedonistic utilitarianism (or some other version of hedonism that takes into
account others’ pleasure and pain) is true, it will be wrong to abandon oneself to
one’s own sensual or drug-induced delights if this causes one to neglect the interests
of those around one, where these latter are important enough to outweigh one’s
personal pleasure. And in fact, others’ interests have a high probability of
outweighing the pleasure one would gain from ignoring them. This is partly because
some of the suffering in the world is just so acute (and the cost of alleviating it so
low in comparison). But even in cases where there is no great suffering that one
could relieve, there is the fact that one could take pleasure in something that is not
self-contained like a drug-induced high, but rather is an act that simultaneously
brings pleasure to someone else. One of the most effective general strategies a
utilitarian has for achieving the greatest overall balance of pleasure over pain is
encouraging states of affairs in which different people’s pleasure is intercon-
nected.16 The more people there are who take pleasure in others’ pleasure, the better

16
Mill makes this point in Chap. 2 of Utilitarianism, writing that ‘‘utility would enjoin, first, that laws
and social arrangements should place the happiness or (as, speaking practically, it may be called) the
interest of every individual as nearly as possible in harmony with the interest of the whole; and secondly,
that education and opinion, which have so vast a power over human character, should so use that power as
to establish in the mind of every individual an indissoluble association between his own happiness and the
good of the whole—especially between his own happiness, and the practice of such modes of conduct,
negative and positive, as regard for the universal happiness prescribes….’’

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the world will be. Those people will have an incentive to bring pleasure to others,
and every time they do, that pleasure will be multiplied by their own pleasure.
Thus we have seen that hedonism can respond to an objection commonly leveled
against it: that it does not take into account the fact that there are both fitting and
unfitting things in which to take pleasure. Hedonism can agree that pleasure ought to
be taken in things such as relationships and a job well done, and that it ought not to
be taken in hurting others. It can also agree that pleasure should not regularly be
derived from drugs or from electrically stimulating the pleasure centers of one’s
brain. And rather than taking these as brute facts, hedonism can explain why certain
things are the ones it’s fitting to take pleasure in: because taking pleasure in these
things leads to more pleasure overall, while taking pleasure in other, unfitting things
can end up causing a lot of pain, or preventing one from producing greater
pleasures.

2 Why the experience machine is a bad idea even if hedonism is true

Having laid out the basic reasons that a hedonist has to want her pleasure and pain to
reflect future prospects for pleasure and pain (whether just her own or also others’),
we can turn to applying these considerations to the case of Nozick’s experience
machine. In an attempt to show that experiences are not the only things valuable in
life, Nozick proposes the following thought experiment:
Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any
experience you desired. Superduper 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’s experiences? If you are
worried about missing out on desirable experiences, we can suppose that
business enterprises have researched thoroughly the lives of many others. You
can pick and choose from their large library or smorgasbord of such
experiences, selecting your life’s experiences for, say, the next two years.
After two years have passed, you will have ten minutes or ten hours out of the
tank, to select the experiences for your next two years. Of course, while in the
tank, you won’t know that you’re there; you’ll think it’s all actually
happening. … Would you plug in? … We learn that something matters to us in
addition to experience by imagining an experience machine and then realizing
that we would not use it.17
Our distaste for living our entire lives hooked up to an experience machine has
been cited by Nozick and many philosophers after him as evidence that hedonism is
false, that things besides pleasant experience are important to making one’s life (or
the world as a whole) as good as possible.

17
Nozick (1974, pp. 42–44).

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338 S. Hewitt

There are at least two basic problems with taking our feelings about the
experience machine as evidence that hedonism is false.18 As I mentioned in the
introduction, we can’t simply assume that our desiring things besides pleasant
experience, or even our perceiving things besides pleasant experience as valuable,
means these things are objectively valuable, that their presence makes our lives (or
the world) objectively better. In Sect. 3, I’ll discuss reasons we have to think that
our feelings about the experience machine don’t reflect objective value as reliably as
we might wish. But even if we think we are justified in trusting our feelings about a
life hooked up to the experience machine to tell us whether it’s objectively valuable,
this doesn’t automatically give us a reason to reject hedonism, since hedonism may
also tell us to refuse a life hooked up to the experience machine, for reasons along
the lines of those described in Sect. 1.
Consider first egoistic reasons a hedonist has not to live his life hooked up to the
experience machine. Being hooked up to the experience machine isolates him from
all information about his future welfare and renders him incapable of any action that
could improve his future balance of pleasure over pain. He is completely at the
mercy of the machine, those who are operating it, and anyone else who might come
into contact with him or the machine. He must trust those outside of the machine to
look out for his interests as well as he could himself if he were living in contact with
the external world. And he must trust that, if something goes wrong with the
machine or with his brain, such that he is no longer having pleasurable experiences
but painful ones, this will be noticed and he will be unhooked from the machine.
The unlikelihood that any people or machines could be as good at looking after our
interests without our conscious participation as with it gives our negative feelings
about living hooked up to the experience machine one very strong hedonistic
justification. And while we may not be consciously reflecting on this when we think
about the experience machine, it’s possible that this kind of concern is operating in
the background, giving us a general uneasiness about giving up our connection to
the external world.
Consider, in addition, that living hooked up to the experience machine wastes all
of the potential one has to improve the lives of others. Of course, we can imagine
that there might be some individuals who have dispositions such that their
interacting with the external world causes more pain than pleasure. Such people
have hedonistic reason not to be in contact with the external world, and isolating
them in an artificial world of pleasant experiences may be just the right thing to do.
It would certainly be better for them than putting them in prison, and it seems that
our intuitions about use of the experience machine in this kind of case will probably
be less negative. But there are nevertheless many others of us who have dispositions
such that our interaction with the external world normally benefits others, and this
could help to justify (and perhaps cause) our negative feelings about living hooked
up to the experience machine.
Now we should note that Nozick intends for us to put aside justifications for our
negative feelings about the experience machine that appeal to a concern for others’

18
In this paper, I use the term ‘feelings’ to refer collectively to the various desires, emotions, and
intuitions of value provoked by the experience machine thought experiment.

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experiences. I’m not sure that we can easily isolate our feelings about what makes a
life good for the individual living it from our feelings about what makes a life good
in more instrumental ways,19 but in an effort to help us narrow the scope of our
intuitions, Nozick tells us to consider not a world where we alone are hooked up to
an experience machine, but a world where everyone could be.20 The assumption is
that, since everyone in such a situation would be capable of automatically obtaining
as much pleasure as possible, there would be no need for any individual to look after
the needs of others, or after his own future interests. Everyone could be equally
taken care of by the experience machine. Thus a hedonist whose intuitions were
previously affected by concern for others should see no problem with hooking up to
the experience machine in a world like this.
But let’s examine such a situation in detail. If there is to be absolutely no need for
any of us to have knowledge of what is going on in the non-virtual world, a huge
number of things will have to be taken care of. Everyone’s body will have to be fed
and hydrated, and its health otherwise maintained. This will require that the
production of food, water, and energy, as well as the provision of medical care, all
be entirely automated. It will have to be the case as well that the experience machine
(not to mention all of the machines providing food, water, energy, and medical care)
will never break or run out of fuel or crash due to software glitches. They must
never run out of stimulating experiences, and, if we are utilitarians, then we will
believe that they must also see to human reproduction—or to keeping the same
bodies alive forever—in order to ensure that as much pleasure as possible continues
to be produced as long into the future as possible.
Now some defenders of Nozick’s thought experiment have dismissed these
practical details as irrelevant.21 (Nozick himself tells us to ‘‘[i]gnore problems such
as who will service the machines if everyone plugs in.’’22) Their idea seems to be
that our negative intuitions can’t be due to these details because, if we stipulate that
these problems have been solved, our negative feelings about the experience
machine remain. Indeed, our negative feelings do seem to remain, but to assume that
this shows that they are not caused by these practical details is to assume that our
feelings are always responsive to the conscious ruling-out of reasons. If our feelings
were always responsive to this kind of abstract stipulation, however, we would not
need to appeal to concrete thought experiments in the first place. We could evaluate
the truth of hedonism directly, considering it as an abstract principle. But if we are
going to privilege in some way our responses to concrete cases, then we should
make sure that these cases really are concrete. And when we are looking for the
possible sources of our responses, we shouldn’t rule out the very concrete factors the
presumed influence of which led us to examine a concrete case in the first place. So,

19
In accordance with Mill’s recommendation (see note 16), we seem to have done a good job of
integrating the demands of our family, friends, and society into our ideas about our own interests and our
own self-worth.
20
Nozick (1974, p. 43).
21
See, for example, Glover (1984, pp. 93–94). For an example of someone who does recognize the
potential importance of these practical details, see Sumner (1996, pp. 94–95).
22
Nozick (1974, p. 43).

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340 S. Hewitt

filling in these details about Nozick’s case is not just an amusing diversion. It’s a
serious attempt at illuminating what may be some of the complex sources of our
intuitions in this case.
The practical details mentioned above make it the case that, in order for it to be
clearly a good idea for us all to plug into the experience machine, we will have to
have created machines that are better problem-solvers than we are. We will have to
have created machines that are better at dealing with all of the unpredictable aspects
of life—weather, climate change, and fuel shortages, to name a few—than we
ourselves are. (Not to mention the fact that, if there are some people who choose not
to live hooked up to experience machines, our machines will also have to manage
our relationship to those people, preventing them from harming us and our cadre of
machines by engaging in diplomacy, and perhaps even fighting wars.) It is hard to
believe that we could create machines so superior to ourselves, not just in making
numerous computations, but in dealing creatively with new situations. It seems that
there is very little chance that we would ever be better off putting ourselves
permanently at the mercy of a machine we’ve created than in dealing with the world
face to face. And perhaps an intuition about our own superiority in dealing with the
external world is part of what causes us to reject putting our lives in the hands of a
machine.
It might be suggested that we would not have to entrust ourselves to our own
ability to create a machine capable of all this. We might receive such a machine as a
gift from some much more intelligent species. This doesn’t greatly improve our
situation, however, since we now have the problem of determining whether this
species is indeed intelligent enough to make such a foolproof machine and whether
their intentions are as altruistic as they appear. Trusting someone else’s experience
machine does not seem clearly better than trusting our own. Our best bet still seems
to be to guard our capacity to monitor the external world and our ability to take
action should the need arise.
We should acknowledge, though, that hooking up to the experience machine
doesn’t have to be an irrevocable decision.23 In creating an experience machine, we
could build in a feature whereby we would be disconnected from time to time, in
order to make an evaluation of our situation in the external world and to deal with
any problems. One difficulty with this solution, however, is that problems might
arise that need to be solved before our next programmed ‘‘wake-up’’ date. Even if
we program the experience machine to wake us up whenever there’s a problem it
can’t solve, we still have to rely on the machine’s ability to recognize such problems
in time for something to be done about them. And even if we assume that we can
manage to get ourselves woken up whenever there’s a problem at hand that the
machine can’t solve, it’s still unclear that we will be able to solve the problem if we
haven’t been living in contact with the external world. We won’t have had all of the
day-to-day experiences that normally teach us about our environment and make us
good problem-solvers in it.

23
Nozick’s original example mentions that one could come out of the machine from time to time, and
Tännsjö (1998, pp. 111–112) has reiterated this point.

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Intuitions about the experience machine 341

In sum, hooking up to an experience machine for long stretches of time would be

a bad idea in any world with problems as complex as those of the actual world. We
have hedonistic reasons to put our problem-solving capacities to work by regularly
interacting with the external world, in order to protect both our own future interests
and those of others, and these kinds of concerns could be a source of our negative
reaction to the prospect of living hooked up to the experience machine.
We should also note one further reason to prefer interacting with the world
ourselves over having a machine surrogate. Someone who is concerned with
producing the most pleasure possible, over the longest time possible, is going to
have to be concerned with questions of efficiency and sustainability. Such a person
must ask whether it is likely that any machine we create to sustain the human race
will be as efficient and as ecologically sound as the method that nature herself has
developed over millions of years of trial and error. We may strive to create
machines that are solar-powered, built of organic materials, self-repairing, and self-
replicating, as well as perceptive and able to deal intelligently with novel problems,
but nature has already given us such machines—our own bodies and brains—and
our best bet would seem to be to use them. It’s no doubt wishful thinking to believe
that these concerns about efficiency and sustainability have any influence on our
intuitive response to the experience machine case, but they do nonetheless provide
an additional hedonistic justification for our negative response.
It thus appears that our negative feelings about spending our lives hooked up to
the experience machine are not at odds with the demands of hedonism in the actual
world or in any worlds similar to it in complexity. Of course, this doesn’t prove that
our negative feelings about the experience machine are caused by any of these
hedonistic reasons, in whole or even in part. For all we’ve seen so far, it could be
that we’re actually responding to the intrinsic goodness of having true beliefs or of
having real interaction with other human beings, and that these reasons just happen
to give us the same negative verdict about the experience machine that hedonism
gives us, in worlds close to the actual one.
It’s hard to know whether this is the case, since the reasons for our feelings aren’t
nearly as obvious to us as the feelings themselves. We should be very careful,
however, not to assume that certain factors cannot be influencing our feelings if we
aren’t conscious of their doing so. One of our purposes in using thought experiments
is to consult our pre-reflective (because hopefully theory-independent) intuitions.
Yet precisely because these intuitions are pre-reflective, their sources are not
transparent to us. And we should not assume that by reflecting on them afterward we
can make their sources transparent. Introspection on our negative feelings about the
experience machine may reveal no more than that we are concerned, in some way,
about lacking a connection to external reality. The fact that we are not conscious of
any further reasons for this concern may lead us to conclude that we must value a
connection to external reality intrinsically, as an end in itself. But it may be that our
negative feelings about lacking a connection to external reality are actually due to
some further reasons that are opaque to us. We can only test for the presence of such
further, opaque reasons by conducting further thought experiments, in which we
change the details of the case in order to eliminate instrumental reasons for being
connected to external reality.

123
342 S. Hewitt

So let’s try again to imagine a world in which there are no hedonistic instrumental
reasons—either self-regarding or other-regarding—against hooking ourselves up to
the experience machine. As I’ve already said, it’s important to do this in a concrete
way, not merely by stipulating that there are no such reasons, but by imagining how
that could be the case, and how we could know that it is. It’s going to have to be that
every instrumentally useful thing that we could do better than a machine—e.g.,
everything that we could do to solve problems of hunger, health, politics, war,
resources, technology, and natural disasters—has already been done. For this to be
the case, and for us to know that it’s the case, we will have to have close to exhaustive
knowledge of our environment and of human biology and psychology—both in
general and as regards the characteristics of particular individuals.
If this is the case, however, then what is it we plan to do if we refuse to plug into
the experience machine? We know how to keep everyone happy and healthy, and the
machine can carry this out as well as—if not better than—we can. There aren’t any
experiences for us to have that haven’t already been had, and that haven’t already
been fully analyzed as to their phenomenal and physiological characteristics and
catalogued in the experience machine. What things remain to be learned about the
universe are going to be things we know, a priori, can have no effect on improving
anyone’s health or the subjective quality of anyone’s life—things like the exact
number of atoms there are, or historical facts that are so specific that they don’t reveal
to us any general truths about the world or human nature that we weren’t already
aware of.24 Faced with a choice between living in a world where all that remains to
be done or discovered are things of no possible hedonistic instrumental value, and
plugging into the experience machine where at least one has the experience of doing
and discovering these more useful things, the experience machine doesn’t look quite
so bad. Once we actually imagine what the world would have to be like in order for
contact with the external world not to have hedonistic instrumental value, hooking up
to the experience machine in such a case may even seem reasonable.25
We should note, too, that even in the actual world, there are cases in which there
are no strong hedonistic reasons to refrain from cutting oneself off from the external
world for a limited period of time, and many of us do just that. Many of us
participate on a daily basis in something very much like the experience machine: by
watching television, going to the movies, playing video or computer games, reading
books, and sleeping. And we disconnect from the larger world for even longer
periods of time when we spend a day at the spa or a week on a tropical beach. These
activities avoid some of the major disadvantages of plugging into the experience
machine, because (1) even while we are engaged in them, they allow us to remain at
least somewhat alert to things in the ‘‘real’’ world that may require our attention, and

24
Discussion with Sharon Street was of particular help in developing this point.
25
Of course, we don’t like the thought of being in a world where we’re so useless. Our sense of our own
worth is very much tied up with our beliefs about our instrumental worth, to the extent that this may be
one of the primary reasons we dislike the thought of living hooked up to the experience machine: we
don’t like being useless. We seem to care so much about being useful that we would wish we could be
useful even in the absence of any remaining valuable goals (as in this example). Yet that doesn’t prove
that being useful is intrinsically valuable (what an odd kind of intrinsic value that would be!), just that our
feelings of self-worth are very sensitive to it.

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Intuitions about the experience machine 343

(2) they absorb only a portion of our lives and thus still allow us to remain agents
capable of promoting our own happiness and that of others. On the other hand, to the
extent that these activities do not meet these criteria, we usually do consider
engaging in them worrisome. Here, too, our feelings about maintaining connection
to the external world seem generally to track hedonistic reasons.

3 The reliability of our intuitions about intrinsic value

It’s likely, though, that our feelings do not perfectly track these reasons. For
example, some people will probably feel that, even in a world in which all problems
are solved and we have all hedonistically valuable knowledge about everything and
everyone, there would still be some value to living in contact with the external
world rather than plugging into the experience machine. Perhaps some people will
insist that real, interactive relationships with others are intrinsically valuable even in
such a world, and that the value of having these relationships gives us some reason
not to plug into the experience machine, even if it might be outweighed by the need
to escape from boredom.
I think all of us probably have some feelings that are at odds with hedonistic
reasons, at least in worlds very different from the actual one, and I think this is
because many of us do value things besides pleasurable experience as ends in
themselves. For instance, we value not just having the experience of having a family
but actually having a family. We think it would be a terrible thing if, instead of
interacting with flesh-and-blood family members as we think we’re doing, we were
only interacting with computer simulations. And we don’t want merely to feel as
though we’re engaged in a fulfilling romantic relationship. We want there actually
to be another person whom we love and who loves us. While we may not be able to
tell the difference between the independent existence of these things and some
future computer simulation of them, that doesn’t mean we don’t think their
independent existence is important. We care not just about how we think the world
is, but about how the world is in itself.
Of course, a hedonistic utilitarian should also care about how the world is outside
of his experiences. A hedonistic utilitarian should care about the experiences of all
other experiencing beings. It is most definitely important to the hedonistic utilitarian
that his romantic partner be real and not a computer simulation. Something of value
is missing if one is engaged in a merely virtual relationship: the positive experiences
that would otherwise be given to one’s partner. However, if there are already as
many experiencing beings alive as the world’s resources will support, and they are
all guaranteed to be forever maintained in an optimal state of pleasure, then one’s
desire to be in an actually interactive relationship with another human being cannot
have a hedonistic justification. The world already contains the maximum possible
amount of pleasure, and thus carrying on an actually interactive relationship with
another person can’t increase this amount. Yet some people will nonetheless feel
that the addition of interactive relationships would make such a world better, and
they may conclude from this that hedonism is wrong in saying that only experiential
states are valuable.

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344 S. Hewitt

To respond to this objection, we need to draw a clear distinction between

something’s being valued by us26 and its having objective value. There are some
antirealist metaethical views according to which something’s ‘‘having objective
value’’ is dependent in some way on what we value. For those who hold this sort of
view, what we value is a very direct sort of evidence for what is ‘‘objectively’’
valuable. In this paper, however, I mean to be addressing the question whether
hedonism correctly identifies pleasure as the only thing objectively intrinsically
valuable in a realist sense—that is, intrinsically valuable independently of anyone’s
judgments, attitudes, desires, or dispositions with regard to it. For Nozick’s thought
experiment to be evidence against realist hedonism, it will have to be the case that
what we value—as shown, presumably, by our reaction to the experience machine
thought experiment—is a reliable indicator of what is valuable in this robustly
objective way.
Unfortunately, the distinction between something’s being valued by us and its
having objective value is generally ignored by philosophers who appeal to our
desires for things besides experiences to refute hedonism.27 Nozick himself ignores
the distinction in his original discussion of the experience machine. Matthew
Silverstein has pointed out the way in which Nozick’s discussion plays on an
ambiguity in the meaning of the word ‘matters’.28 Something can be said to
‘‘matter’’ in the sense of being objectively valuable, or it can be said to ‘‘matter to’’
an individual, in the sense of their desiring it or valuing it. (To make things even
more complicated, something can also ‘‘matter to’’ an individual in an objective
way: e.g., it might matter to a particular individual’s welfare that they quit using
drugs, regardless of whether they actually desire to quit.) These senses are not
clearly distinguished in Nozick’s discussion, leaving implicit his assumption that
what someone values is evidence for that thing’s being objectively valuable.29
In a later discussion of the experience machine, Nozick clarifies that he does
indeed mean to be taking our desires as indicative of objective value:
Notice that I am not saying simply that since we desire connection to actuality
the experience machine is defective because it does not give us whatever we
desire—though the example is useful to show we do desire some things in
addition to experiences—for that would make ‘‘getting whatever you desire’’
the primary standard. Rather, I am saying that the connection to actuality is
important whether or not we desire it—that is why we desire it—and the
experience machine is inadequate because it doesn’t give us that.30

26
Valuing I take to be an activity or disposition that involves desiring something and approving of that
desiring. It could be characterized, à la Frankfurtienne, as desiring ‘‘whole-heartedly.’’
27
See, for example, Griffin (1986, p. 7) and Kymlicka (1990, p. 14). This criticism of Griffin, Kymlicka,
and Nozick is made by Kawall (1999, pp. 384–385).
28
Silverstein (2000, p. 286).
29
Of course, this assumption is not restricted to opponents of hedonism. Mill famously employed the
premise that ‘‘the sole evidence it is possible to produce that any thing is desirable is that people do
actually desire it’’ in an argument for hedonism (Utilitarianism, Chap. 4).
30
Nozick (1989, pp. 106–107).

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Intuitions about the experience machine 345

But even though Nozick clarifies his position in this way, he doesn’t offer an
argument for his claim that our desire for a connection to actuality reflects its
objective importance.
There are plenty of cases where it’s clear that what we value doesn’t reflect the
objective importance of things, and where we recognize this even in the grip of
those values. For instance, we value our own well-being and that of those we love
more than we value that of strangers,31 but we take this as an indication of our
personal attachment to ourselves and our loved ones, not as an indication of the
objective superior importance of some people’s well-being over others’. So,
presumably, Nozick is not just appealing to desire—even whole-hearted desire—in
the experience machine case. He likely means to be appealing to our desire for
connection to actuality combined with the fact that such a connection seems
objectively valuable to us.
That is, Nozick probably means to rely on something’s seeming valuable (and
thus provoking desire) as prima facie evidence for its actually being valuable. But
there are major problems with trusting such seemings, both in general and in this
particular case. The general problem is that we know that our perceptions, desires,
feelings, and even our reflective evaluations of moral worth are shaped by many
factors that are not related to things’ objective value. As Sharon Street argues in a
recent paper, natural selection has had a very strong effect on the content of the
evaluative judgments we make.32 Tendencies to make those judgments that have
promoted reproductive success have been disproportionately passed on, regardless
of whether those judgments reflect the objective value of things. We shouldn’t
underestimate, either, the extent to which our moral intuitions are shaped by a
preference for the familiar, as well as for what those around us are doing and/or
approving. It seems quite possible that things’ seeming valuable to us is much more
often a function of our pre-existing personal and cultural habits, which lead us to
create post hoc rationales for our attitudes, than it is an accurate perception of
objective moral value. All of these are reasons to suspect that, even if hooking up to
the experience machine in a particular case were the objectively best thing to do, we
would not like the idea. Neither our evolutionary nor our social history has been
such as to reward giving a positive evaluation of living completely disconnected
from reality.
Furthermore, there are particular reasons not to trust our feelings about the
intrinsic value of relationships. The first is the fact that relationships are absolutely
essential to promoting the flourishing of a species such as ours. As children, we are
entirely dependent on the care of others, and even as adults we have evolved to be
highly dependent on social cooperation in meeting our basic needs. Because
relationships were so important to ensuring the survival and reproduction of our
ancestors, we should expect to have a very strong desire for human interaction and
to find ourselves taking it to be extremely valuable, even to the point of seeing it as
an end in itself, even if it has no objective intrinsic value at all. What is more,
psychologists have found that one of the activities most consistently productive of

31
This example was suggested to me by Eli Hirsch.
32
Street (2006). See especially pp. 113–121.

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346 S. Hewitt

positive feeling is social interaction.33 It shouldn’t surprise us that our brains reward
us for doing something so essential to our species’ survival, but we should realize
that the pleasure consistently produced by social interaction (and even by the mere
thought of social interaction) could easily lead us to perceive it as intrinsically good,
just because it is so consistently and immediately associated with good feelings.
All of these reasons make it doubtful that our feelings about living our lives
hooked up to the experience machine can be trusted to tell us what is objectively
intrinsically valuable.34

4 A hedonistic justification for anti-hedonistic intuitions

Yet not only are there evolutionary and psychological explanations for why we see
relationships and other things as intrinsically valuable even if they are not, there is
also a hedonistic justification for seeing certain things besides pleasure in this way.
Consider first that many of the things that we take to be intrinsically valuable
besides pleasure have instrumental hedonistic value, but an instrumental value that
is optimally promoted if we think of them as intrinsically valuable. This is likely
true of relationships, knowledge about the material world, and beautiful objects or
works of art. None of these things is objectively intrinsically valuable according to
hedonism, but they are all so instrumentally valuable that thinking of them as
intrinsically valuable rarely leads us astray. Thinking of them as intrinsically
valuable can actually be a way of saving ourselves the time of thinking about all of
the various ways in which they are instrumentally valuable, on every occasion when
we have to make a choice involving them. Over time, this efficiency can outweigh
whatever negative consequences result on the isolated occasion on which the object
happens not to be instrumentally beneficial.
But this is not the only hedonistic reason we have to think of relationships,
knowledge, and art as intrinsically valuable. Because of certain facts about the way
relationships, knowledge, and art are produced, thinking of them as valuable in
themselves may be more conducive to their production than thinking of them as
mere means. This is one aspect of what is often referred to as the ‘‘paradox of
hedonism’’: the fact that we often maximize pleasure only if we take something else
as our goal.
Take the development of a relationship. If one is constantly preoccupied with
calculating just how much future pleasure a young relationship promises, one will
not be capable of the sort of self-abandonment that the creation of a strong
emotional tie requires. The greatest pleasures of a close personal relationship
depend on one’s abandoning the project of comparing the relationship to others on
instrumental grounds and embracing the present relationship as in itself worthy of
nurturing. This is not to say that we should never take into account whether a

33
See Diener and Seligman (2002), Kahneman et al. (2004), and Fleeson et al. (2002).
34
One might wonder how I expect to justify my belief in the intrinsic goodness of pleasure and the
intrinsic badness of pain without myself appealing to doubtful intuitions. I sketch an answer to this
question in note 7.

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Intuitions about the experience machine 347

relationship is actually making us happy. It’s just to say that such concerns cannot
be our focus if the relationship is to develop to its full potential.35
The situation may be similar with respect to the pursuit of knowledge. While
knowledge is ultimately objectively valuable because of the way it contributes to
increasing the balance of pleasure over pain, it may be that single-minded pursuit of
truth about the world, with no concern for what technological value it may have,
will in the end be most fruitful technologically. This may be simply because, when
we don’t know certain things about the world, we also don’t know whether knowing
those things would be useful or not. It also seems to be the case that a love for the
search for truth can sustain long years of pains-taking research that someone more
directly interested in technological (and monetary) pay-offs would never have
endured. And yet those long, seemingly fruitless years can ultimately produce a
discovery of immense technological import. Sometimes, in order to achieve a far-off
goal, it’s necessary that we be presently motivated by the belief that what we are
doing here and now is itself intrinsically valuable.
Artists, too, it seems, are often hindered if they consider what function—aesthetic
or otherwise—their work will ultimately serve, or what fame it will bring them. We
may get more creative and interesting pieces if the artist pursues art for its own sake
and the results are only judged afterward.36
This doesn’t mean that thinking of relationships, knowledge, and works of art as
intrinsically valuable will always, in every situation produce the greatest balance of
pleasure over pain. There may be situations, especially in worlds very different from
the actual one, in which these things are much less instrumentally valuable (or other
things are much more valuable), and taking them to be intrinsically valuable will
cause us to make a less-than-optimal decision. But as long as their instrumental
value is sufficiently high in the actual world, these situations will be rare here. And
if we can’t stop treating these things as intrinsically valuable in those rare situations
without greatly diminishing our ability to promote their instrumental value in all the
rest (and this is an important empirical question, one that has to be answered for
each thing individually), then treating them as intrinsic goods in all of these
situations will be the pleasure-maximizing thing to do.
But if hedonists ought to approve of thinking of things like relationships,
knowledge, and works of art as having intrinsic value, then hedonism is not at odds
with these common values. Granted, it doesn’t take them at ‘‘face value’’—i.e., as
indicative of these things’ actually being intrinsically valuable—but it nevertheless
tells us to adopt exactly these attitudes to these things, and so the fact that we have
these attitudes can hardly be a decisive strike against hedonism.37

35
On this topic, see also Railton (1984, p. 142).
36
Sidgwick (1913) also discusses the hedonistic benefits of focusing on knowledge or art for its own
sake, although he tends to focus on increases in the pleasure immediately enjoyed in learning or creating
art and not on its further instrumental effects. See p. 49. For further discussion of the paradox of hedonism
by Sidgwick, see the rest of Book I, Chap. IV, as well as pp. 403, 405–406, in Book III.
37
The fact that hedonism tells us to adopt non-hedonistic attitudes might be thought to make hedonism
incoherent in some way. There is no incoherence, however, since the fact that the only things intrinsically
good and bad are pleasure and pain doesn’t entail that we ought to take the promotion of pleasure and the
avoidance of pain as our only—or even our primary—conscious goals. If hedonism is true, we ought to

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348 S. Hewitt

5 Conclusion

One of the things I’ve done in this paper is to point out ways in which our intuitions
are not as contrary to the demands of hedonism as is often thought. I’ve shown that
hedonism justifies our negative feelings about living hooked up to the experience
machine, first of all because of the need we have to interact with the world on a
regular basis in order to maximize our future pleasure and that of others, and second
of all because many of the things that advocates of the experience machine
objection claim it shows are intrinsically valuable—things like relationships and
knowledge—are things that there are hedonistic reasons for us to think of as
intrinsically valuable, just because that’s the best way of promoting their
instrumental value.
On the other hand, I’ve also argued that there are reasons not to place too much
weight on our pre-reflective intuitions about value, especially when it comes to
distinguishing intrinsic from instrumental value. The reasons for our intuitions are
not always as clear to us as we might like them to be, and it takes carefully
constructed thought experiments—ones that provide concrete detail rather than
relying on stipulation—to help us get at the real causes of our intuitions. But even if
our intuitions are directly responsive to the existence of real relationships or to other
experience-independent things, this should not immediately lead us to conclude that
these things are objectively intrinsically valuable. Because we can see why we
would be likely to come to take them as intrinsically valuable even if they aren’t, we
need to look for some other way of judging the accuracy of these intuitions. I
suggest that we turn our attention to the larger metaphysical and epistemological
questions regarding how it is that we could know anything about normative
properties that are entirely independent of our judgments, attitudes, desires, and
dispositions. I hope that this paper will help clear the way for considering what
advantages hedonism might have in answering these larger questions.38

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