Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

Pleasure fundamentalism is the view that moral value is the same thing as pleasure, and that their sameness explains all other moral facts. This talk presents two arguments for pleasure fundamentalism and discusses the form of naturalism they arise from. According to the Reliability Argument, all processes generating moral belief are unreliable, except for phenomenal introspection which tells us that pleasure is good. According to the Universality Argument, pleasure is universal moral value, because of its qualitative identity with the pleasure in the minds of all possible perceivers of moral value. Both arguments are available within an Einsteinian naturalism combining empiricism with a spacetime ontology, and avoiding behaviorism in favor of a more Humean psychology.