Philosophy Puzzles → Ethics → The Experience Machine

The Experience Machine

Try to list off a few things that would make someone have a good life. A few examples might include good health, money, and friends. But why are these valuable in the first place? Money, for example, is good because it can get you other things. Things which are good because they’re good for something else are called instrumental goods.

But other things might be good, not just because they’re good for other things but because they’re good just on their own. Perhaps it’s good on its own to have knowledge, even if knowledge might get you something else. Those are intrinsic goods.

One common answer is that these things make you have a good life just because they lead you, in one way or another, to having more pleasure. This view is called hedonism: the only thing that’s intrinsically good for people is pleasure. According to hedonism, stuff like health, money, friendship, knowledge, etc. is in fact good for you. But they’re only instrumentally good for you, meaning that they’re good only because they get you something else that’s good for you. Pleasure, on the other hand, is intrinsically good for you, meaning that it’s good for you no matter what, and it doesn’t get you anything else that’s good – it’s just simply good. Hedonism seems like an intuitive view. After all, it seems plausible that I want friends because they’ll hang out with me, and I want them to hang out with me because I’ll get pleasure from spending time with them.

Robert Nozick (1938-2002)

Robert Nozick was an American philosopher working in political philosophy, ethics, and epistemology. He served as the Joseph Pellegrino University Professor at Harvard University.

Keywords: Morality, Ethics, Robert Nozick, Well-Being, Hedonism, Pleasure, 20th Century

American philosopher Robert Nozick famously challenged hedonism with the following thought experiment. Suppose that scientists have made a machine, called the Experience Machine. The Experience Machine can induce any pleasurable experience you like. They feel perfectly real, and once they plug you in, you forget that you were ever plugged in. Once you’re plugged in, the scientists will pump your mind with these pleasurable experiences such that you would experience much more pleasure in the Experience Machine than if you had lived out your life normally. You could climb Mount Everest, meet the love of your life, go on lavish vacations, and more! The only thing is, you aren’t actually doing those things. You’re just experiencing the feeling of doing those things. Would you plug into the Experience Machine? Does it make your life go better to plug into the Experience Machine?

Nozick’s answer is no! He thinks that there’s more to a good life than just getting pleasure. What makes a good life isn’t just feeling good things but actually doing those good things! But notice that if hedonism were true, then plugging into the Experience Machine would make your life go better than it ever could. Thus, Nozick thought that the Experience Machine thought experiment gave us good reason to think that hedonism is false. What do you think makes a good life?

This leaves us with a lingering question: if hedonism is false, then what makes one’s life go well?

Original source from Nozick, Robert, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974), 43.

The Experience Machine

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