On my evaluation, the thought experiment does not succeed as a reductio ad absurdum. If we accepted it as a successful refutation, then it would follow that all ethical theories could be refuted by similar arguments; that is, by showing that in some hypothetical situations they can lead to intuitively disturbing consequences. With enough creativity, this can be shown for any ethical theory. But this would be problematic because we must retain some form of ethical theory--we can't allow them all to be refuted, because we must make moral decisions. So we must instead accept that the possibility of an ethical theory's consequences clashing with intuition is an insufficient criterion on which to reject that theory. Therefore, the fact that the consequentialist theory you've proposed would urge us to use the pleasure device, defying many people's intuitions about the "right" decision, is not sufficient to discredit the theory.
(And although it is not really relevant for the present argument, it may be worth mentioning that, personally, I probably would choose to use the device. Hypothetically of course )
I think that a potentially more compelling way that we can question this theory is by analyzing the feasibility, or even the coherence, of quantifying and ranking all pleasurable/unpleasurable experiences. One issue is that the theory assumes that all alternatives can be reduced to a single common quantity which we might call 'pleasure.' But is this really a tenable assumption? Let's say you're a school administrator who is forced to reduce the budget and must choose which programs to withhold funding from. Is it really possible to choose between allocating funds to, say, the music program vs. the sports program by reducing each alternative to how much total pleasure they will bring about if they maintain full funding? Perhaps, but this is far from clear. Or let's say that you're an instructor in the music department and must choose between teaching the kids to play classical music or the pop singles that most of them would probably prefer to listen to. Is it really possible, or even desirable, to reduce Schubert vs. Brittany Spears to the total quantity of pleasure each alternative would lead to? Perhaps there are different varieties of pleasure? Another issue is that the theory assumes that people's preferences with respect to all possible alternatives form what economists would call a stable and complete set (economists are utilitarians ). But there is a wealth of psychological evidence showing that people's preferences are sensitive to a host of framing and context effects (e.g., whether I prefer A over B or vice versa can depend on normatively irrelevant details such as whether I evaluate the two alternatives separately or jointly), and even that they violate transitivity (i.e., I can prefer A over B and B over C, but also prefer C over A). These preference anomalies suggest that the strict arrangement of alternatives on the basis of quantities of pleasure is not psychologically plausible even in principle, which casts doubt on the adequacy of hedonic consequentialism as a satisfactory ethical theory.
For the record, I don't think that these latter arguments fully discredit all varieties of consequentialism either, but I think they go a longer way than arguments which demonstrate that consequentialist decisions sometimes seem intuitively wrong.
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