Well-being/Pleasure, Subjectivity, and Our Experience

I believe well-being/pleasure is the most defensible intrinsic Good, though I believe there must be room for subjective beliefs to affect how we experience this pleasure. The Experience Machine and Deceived Businessman examples represent very important objections that show the limits of well-being on its own. I want to show that well-being is the most important intrinsic good, but it is merely the bottom line or "basic needs met" version of intrinsic goods. It is worth noting that I believe our collective agreement to enter in society and the rules and restrictions have a role in my addendum that subjectivity must be considered as society has changed our experience of pleasure, but for the sake of brevity I will not expand on this idea any further.

I agree to an extent with Hale's post on this blog about the importance of the phaneron to every human. Our experience of this world comes down to our experiences of pain and pleasure. At the very simplest level, we are just sentient brain mush in control of a body that can move around. At the very least, we should be able to enjoy our experiences in our surrounding. It is impossible for us to get some sort of objective experience of this world; indeed, it even seems impossible for us to imagine what such an experience would look or feel like. If there is no other way to experience our environment, it seems that the pleasure-pain spectrum is the only real and consistent way to get to the Good of existence. (I mean consistent in that we can always expect to feel some form of pleasure or pain through every experience we have.)

While it seems good enough for well-being, there is something that the Experience Machine shows us that points to pleasure not being the only thing worth desiring. The rejoinder that "ignorance is bliss" is not a good enough response to the Experience Machine for me. I agree that the person in the Experience Machine lives a more pleasurable life, and that life is good, but at least some of us place importance on the genuineness of our experiences (especially if we have the choice). The problem for those like me with the "ignorance is bliss" rejoinder is that even if we do not know that we are experiencing a disingenuous pleasure, that does not change the fact that we are. In other words, the genuineness of our experience of pleasure is important enough that the Experience Machine does not create a life that is as personally Good as the genuine experience of life is. While this may seem at odds with the previous paragraph, let me make clear that it is not. The Experience Machine still creates a life full of Goodness, regardless of one's subjective belief in the importance of genuine experience. The Experience Machine creates a life that meets the basic needs of living a Good life, and having this basic need met is completely good enough for some people. However, other people's subjective belief create an existence where genuine experience (or as genuine an experience as we can get) of our experiences can override the importance of maximizing pleasure.