RE: Emotions are intrinsically good and bad
September 25, 2017 at 7:44 pm
(This post was last modified: September 25, 2017 at 7:46 pm by bennyboy.)
Sometimes you have objective metrics, but choosing what even to measure as a physical correlate of the abstract concept "good" is always arbitrary.
You can measure someone's hedonic state (maybe). But to say that pleasure is always "good" is just something you have to pull out of a hat.
You can see statistically what foods maximize health and life. But to then force everyone to eat those foods, while "good" for you, conflicts with the next guy's metric, who has decided that the greatest "good" is freedom.
You might even discover that a giant space rock, if left alone, has a 99% chance of colliding with Earth and killing all humans. Is this good or bad?
You can measure someone's hedonic state (maybe). But to say that pleasure is always "good" is just something you have to pull out of a hat.
You can see statistically what foods maximize health and life. But to then force everyone to eat those foods, while "good" for you, conflicts with the next guy's metric, who has decided that the greatest "good" is freedom.
You might even discover that a giant space rock, if left alone, has a 99% chance of colliding with Earth and killing all humans. Is this good or bad?
