Imagine hedonic, preference, and eudaimoniac utilitarians as three players of an MMO who all decide that they want to improve the game for everyone playing.
A hedonic MMO utilitarian would decide that the best way to improve the game experience is to get everyone to the highest level, with all the best equipment and maxed out skills and attributes.
A preference MMO utilitarian would decide that the best way to improve the game experience is to satisfy all of the players’ preferences about the game, from graphics to metaplot, paying more attention to strong desires and desires that are about desires.
A eudaimoniac MMO utilitarian would decide that the best way to improve the game is to make it the most fun for everyone.
All three of the MMO utilitarians would agree on a lot (particularly if they can’t reprogram the game and are stuck acting as characters, which is similar to the position humans are actually in). Most of the time, if you want to make the game more fun for players, you should do what the players want, and if you want to do what the players want, you should make the game more fun. And even the actions that make someone higher level are often correlated with the actions that make the game more enjoyable or that satisfy player preferences.
However, the MMO utilitarians would also disagree on a lot. The hedonic MMO utilitarian, for instance, would unleash a virus which makes all the numbers as high as possible, while the other two would not. Unfortunately, having very high numbers actually isn’t a whole lot of fun, and most people would rather play the game than be given high numbers by fiat. Indeed, the hedonic MMO utilitarian’s desired end state would be viewed as a terrible game by the vast majority of players.
On the other hand, the eudaimoniac and preference MMO utilitarians don’t necessarily agree about everything. For instance, the preference MMO utilitarian might notice that players seem to care about graphics a lot and not really care about load times. On teh other hand, the eudaimoniac MMO utilitarian might notice that realistic graphics don’t really affect how much people enjoy the game, but long load times increase the amount of time they spend staring bored at the screen, which is not fun at all. In that case, the preference MMO utilitarian would support hyperrealistic graphics that take forever to load, while the eudaimoniac utilitarian would support minimalistic graphics that take far less time. While the eudaimoniac utilitarian is willing to listen to players’ preferences– after all, players are experts on their own happiness– she is willing to override them when she has evidence that they are simply mistaken about what makes good game design.
(Long load times here are a metaphor for commutes. Commutes are evil.)
Thing of Things 
Don’t forget the negative utilitarian who only looks at reducing the negatives like people getting carpel tunnel from grinding or bored while watching loading screens or dying from blood clots after sitting still for too long during 72 hour raids and recommends shutting down the game entirely in order to eliminate these things.
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I think that’s the negative eudaimonic utilitarian in this metaphor.
The negative hedonic utilitarian tries either a), to shut down the game, b), to make everyone invincible, c), to remove all enemies and hazards and PVP, or d) to prevent players from getting into areas with enemies or PVP, to minimize the amount of damage and debuffs, whichever is easier.
The negative preference utilitarian keeps the game open but prevents new players from joining if it can’t satisfy their preferences completely or their preference would conflict with those of an existing player – so ultimately no new payers would be allowed. Otherwise they act like the normal preference utilitarian.
(I probably missed something here, I tend to do that)
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I’m not sure I agree with your characterization of hedonic and eudaimoniac utilitarians. I would think that the hedonic utilitarian would be trying to make the game as fun as possible, while the eudaimoniac utilitarian would be trying to make it rewarding in some larger sense. The hedonic likes the tiny in-browser games that are intensely fun but forgettable and the eudaimoniac likes games that have a more lasting impact.
I’m not totally sure that I’m capturing the essence of the eudaimoniac, but I think the key to hedonic utilitarianism is that it does in fact make people happy. It may involve something that they don’t like in terms of meta preference (a la wireheading) but it will certainly make them happy if it advertising occurs.
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Last sentence should read “if it actually occurs”. That’s what I get for writing this on a tiny phone screen.
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It’s a metaphor, happiness in the game does not stand for happiness in real life. I think that in the metaphor:
Happiness= High stats
Eudaemonia= Having a fun time playing the game.
Preference satisfaction= Succeeding in all explicitly stated game goals.
How this is analogous to utilitarianism is that hedonic utilitarianism mistakes something highly correlated with a good life (happiness) for living a good life; in the same way “high stats” mistakes something highly correlated with playing a fun game (leveling up) for playing a fun game.
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You’re right, but I don’t think the metaphorical hedonic utilitarianism lines up with real hedonic utilitarianism that well. Almost tautologically, the end state of hedonic utilitarianism isn’t something that the participants are going to view as ‘terrible’. The metaphor makes more sense if you think that people have some kind of external soul that could look down on a wireheader and think about how they’re displeased by this state of affairs. The actual wireheader certainly isn’t going to ever think that.
Also, I think the following could be construed as backwards by a hedonic utilitarian:
“How this is analogous to utilitarianism is that hedonic utilitarianism mistakes something highly correlated with a good life (happiness) for living a good life; in the same way “high stats” mistakes something highly correlated with playing a fun game (leveling up) for playing a fun game.”
One might say that people think ‘living a good life’ is actually their goal, because it’s highly correlated with happiness. However, once they can experience happiness that’s untethered from ‘living a good life’, it becomes obvious that the good life was just a proxy for their real goal of total happiness.
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@shemtealeaf
>The metaphor makes more sense if you think that people have some kind of external soul that could look down on a wireheader and think about how they’re displeased by this state of affairs. The actual wireheader certainly isn’t going to ever think that.
Why wouldn’t the wirehead be displeased? People don’t stop having preferences just because they are feeling happiness. People do have preferences and desires that are separate from feeling pleasure, so if the wireheading didn’t actively erase those preferences the person would be very displeased at themselves for sitting around feeling pleasure all day.
Science has pretty effectively demonstrated at this point that preferring something and feeling pleasure from doing something are separate things. There are separate nerve signals for them and everything.
And even if the wirehead was modified to not have any preferences, the fact that he no longer felt them would not be relevant. If you were made into an “anti-wirehead” who was in constant agony, and wanted to do everything you could to stay in agony, your anti-wirehead self wouldn’t want to become a wirehead, or even become normal again. But I doubt you’d accept if Omega offered to turn you into an anti-wirehead. [See Kaj Sotala’s Less Wrong post “You Cannot Be Mistaken About (Not) Wanting to Wirehead” to see this expounded in greater detail]
>However, once they can experience happiness that’s untethered from ‘living a good life’, it becomes obvious that the good life was just a proxy for their real goal of total happiness.
I have experienced the opposite, “living a good life” that is untethered from happiness. I once went through a depressive episode where I couldn’t feel happiness, but I still tried to live a good life. And I don’t mean that I did prudent stuff so that I’d survive long enough for the episode to pass and I could start feeling pleasure again. I mean I still did things that I valued experiencing for their own sake. I read a couple novels and still appreciated them even though the act of doing so gave me no pleasure. It was an eye-opening experience, I’d read studies about and philosophical arguments about how humans must value more than happiness, but I’d never felt it on a visceral level until then.
I have also experienced happiness untethered from living a good life, in the form of various euphoric experiences brought on by lack of sleep, anesthesia, etc. It sucks. I don’t want to do it again.
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Huh. I’ve never thought of preferences as what people claim to care about. Rather as correlations between the worlds that we would pick if given a fully informed choice. Which in this context looks (to me) like eudaemonia.
And I’m having trouble coming up with an instance where I would choose the world with less fun, but I suspect I’m just not being creative enough.
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It seems plausible to me that, even in possession of all the information, people would choose the long commute, and that this is still a bad decision. I can see a very CEV-ish sense in which their real preference is a short commute, but I have an aesthetic objection to calling something a “preference” if they wouldn’t (even in theory) articulate it as their preference.
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If “all the information” includes a good understanding of how commutes and other factors affect happiness, then I don’t think it’s plausible that people would wrongly choose a long commute. I think when people choose the wrong thing, it’s usually because they don’t have, or haven’t internalized, or don’t believe the information about how the various choices will actually affect them.
Also, many people choose long commutes despite knowing that they suck, because other factors *can* outweigh this. (That’s my situation, because my nice (and not very fungible) job is in a boring place without transit, and living in a non-boring place with transit is very important to me. Though to be fair my commute is relatively luxurious and I can even work during it, which makes it less commute-like, though that used to not be the case and I still think this was a good decision even then.)
Which is all to say, I guess I’d be fine with someone maximizing my eudaimonia and ignoring my preferences if my preferences are wrong, but they had better not be relying on general rules like “long commutes always suck” instead of actually looking at how I am affected by various things. (I would totally support making the world such that fewer people have to have long commutes, though.)
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This seems like cheating because you get to separate positive reinforcement for the player from positive reinforcement for the character.
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The traditional definition of hedonic utilitarianism is that it measures utility in terms of pleasure. Giving everyone the best gear would only count if it actually and factually resulted in increased pleasure. Eudaimonic utilitarianism is usually conceptualized as focusing on human flourishing or some such.
A better scenario might be that the hedonic utilitarian might not object to Skinner box game mechanics.
The eudaimonic utilitarian might object because in their view the pleasure derived from this isn’t sufficiently meaningful. And the hedonic utilitarian might reply that human flourishing, so far as they can tell, looks like a pseudo objective gloss on the eudaimonic guys personal preferences.
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The metaphor here is that high stats are an outcome people are optimizing for in-game, just as increased pleasure is an outcome people are optimizing for out-of-game, but wireheading/just giving everyone high stats is unsatisfying.
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I feel like score would be a better metaphor here, rather than gear; hedonic utilitarians aren’t known for trying to give people money, training or fast cars.
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Ironically, this makes the eudamonaical view look like GamerGate in terms of narrow views of “fun”.
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In this metaphor, I get the impression that the entity who makes you choose between torturing a child to death and the 3^3^3^3^3^3 dust specs just plays Dwarf Fortress on their downtime.
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Commutes aren’t so bad. I catch up on Thing of Things on the train 🙂
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