Pleasure Fundamentalism

Neil Sinhababu (National University of Singapore)

Pleasure fundamentalism is the view that moral value is pleasure, and this explains all other moral facts. Two arguments favor pleasure fundamentalism. The Reliability Argument examines how frequently the processes generating moral belief generate truth, and finds the only reliable processes suggesting pleasure’s moral value. The Universality Argument shows that all possible moral perceivers should have positive moral feelings about any instance of pleasure, making pleasure’s moral value universal. Both arguments have foundations in an Einsteinian naturalism that combines empiricism with an ontology of spatiotemporal entities. This ontology includes causally robust intentional states as well as conscious experiences like pleasure.