Would You Plug Into a Machine That Gives You a Perfect Life?
Would You Plug In?
In 1974 the philosopher Robert Nozick (1938–2002) asked people to imagine a strange machine. Plug yourself in, and you will experience anything you find most valuable—writing a brilliant novel, bringing about world peace, watching your favorite band at their first concert. The experiences feel completely real, and you will never know you are in a simulation. So, would you plug in? Would a life on the machine be a good life for you?
That last phrase—good for you—is the key. When philosophers ask about well-being or prudential value, they want to know what makes a person’s life go well for the person who is living it. It is not the same as moral goodness or beauty, although those might be pieces of the puzzle. A painting can be beautiful, but the painting is not “good for” the canvas. Well-being is the special kind of value that belongs to a life.
Nozick’s experience machine makes the question sharp. If you hesitate to plug in, you are probably thinking that a genuinely good life needs more than pleasant feelings inside your head. Maybe you want to actually do things, not just dream them. This hunch has split philosophers into three big camps.
The Biggest Amount of Pleasure: Hedonism
The simplest answer is that well-being is pleasure, and the less pain the better. This view is called hedonism (from the ancient Greek word for pleasure). As the English thinker Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) put it, nature has placed us under two masters—pleasure and pain—and they alone point out what we ought to do. For Bentham, the value of a pleasure comes down to how long it lasts and how intense it feels.
Hedonism seems obvious at first. Nothing benefits me, you might think, unless I feel it as good. Yet a famous thought experiment puts pressure on this idea. Imagine you are offered two lives: a full, rich human life that lasts eighty years, or the life of a barely-conscious oyster that can live forever, feeling only the dimmest flicker of satisfaction. If pleasure is all that matters, a long enough oyster life must eventually be better than any human life. Many people find that hard to swallow.
John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) tried to fix this by introducing a third ingredient: quality. Some pleasures, he argued, are simply higher than others. The pleasure of reading Shakespeare is worth more than any amount of basic animal enjoyment, because people who have experienced both—competent judges—choose the higher. But this move raises a tough question: if higher pleasures are better because of something like “nobility” rather than more pleasantness, is Mill still a real hedonist? Some say he is stretching the idea so far that it begins to look like a different theory altogether.
Getting What You Want: Desire Theories
The experience machine pushes many people toward a different view: what matters is not just pleasant feelings, but getting what you really want. You want to write a great novel, not merely to feel as if you did. The simplest desire theory says your life goes well to the extent your current desires are satisfied.
But straightforward desire theories run into trouble fast. Picture an angry teenager who, furious at his mother, holds a gun to his own head and desperately wants to pull the trigger. If his present desire were all that counted, that act would make his life go best. That seems clearly wrong. So philosophers look at desires over a whole life.
A comprehensive desire theory counts the total desire-satisfaction across your existence. Yet this too slips on a famous case from Derek Parfit (1942–2017). Imagine you can start taking a drug every morning that creates a powerful craving for itself. Taking it brings no pleasure, and not taking it causes real suffering. Your life would then contain lots of satisfied desires, but would it really be a better life? Most people answer no.
Other versions try to fix things by focusing on the desires you would have if you were fully informed and thinking clearly. But then we meet the grass-counter: a brilliant mathematician who, after learning every relevant fact, develops an overwhelming desire to count each blade of grass on the university lawns. If you think a fully informed person can still want something that makes her life go badly, you may doubt that desire is the final word.
These puzzles all point to a deeper worry noted by Aristotle (384–322 BCE): we desire things because we think they are good, not the other way around. We want to write a novel because we see something valuable in it, not because satisfying a desire is what makes it valuable. That thought pushes toward a third theory.
A List of Things That Are Just Good
An objective list theory says that some things are good for you whether or not they bring pleasure or satisfy your present desires. The list might include friendship, knowledge, achievement, beauty, or autonomy. According to this picture, a life that contains those things really does go better for the person living it.
One ancient version, developed by Aristotle and revived recently by philosophers like Thomas Hurka, is called perfectionism. It claims that what is good for a human being comes from perfecting our nature—exercising reason, building character, and acting with virtue. If it is part of human nature to know things or form deep bonds, then those goods belong on the list.
Critics object that objective list theories can sound arrogant: who is to say what is good for you if you do not want it or enjoy it? One response is to build a “hybrid” account, where the listed goods count only when they actually bring some pleasure or satisfy a relevant desire. Another response bites the bullet: a true theory does not become elitist simply by being true. Besides, holding a list theory does not force anyone to boss others around. You could believe that knowledge is a genuine human good while still thinking that people must be free to choose their own path.
Does “Good for Me” Even Make Sense?
So far we have been assuming the idea of “good for” a person is solid. But some philosophers have challenged it directly. Early in the twentieth century, G. E. Moore (1873–1958) argued that the notion of something being good for me is unnecessary. When I say “pleasure is good for me,” Moore thought, I can only mean either “pleasure is good” or “my getting pleasure is good.” He denied that there is a special prudential value that belongs to individuals.
Picture a world containing nothing but a single beautiful Vermeer painting. Most people would say that world has aesthetic value. Now picture a world containing a single person living a happy life. We want to say that world is better, and the happiness is good for that person. Moore suspected that the “good for” talk could be reduced to plain “good,” but many philosophers today insist the two are different. The painting’s beauty is not good for the painting; a person’s well-being is.
Later, T. M. Scanlon (born 1940) argued that we do not really need a concept of well-being at all. If someone asks why I listen to music, I can just answer “because I enjoy it.” I do not have to add “…and enjoyment increases my well-being.” Scanlon also doubted that we ever truly weigh different parts of a life against each other—giving up comfort now to protect future health feels, he said, like a pure sacrifice. Yet in daily life, people do measure pains against gains, and friends against a high salary, using some rough sense of what makes their life go best. So while the concept is puzzling, it may be hard to live without.
Why It Matters: Your Life and Others
Well-being is not just an abstract puzzle. Many moral philosophers think all of morality ultimately rests on it. This view is called welfarism. The idea is that an action’s rightness or wrongness comes down, in the end, to how it affects the well-being of everyone involved. Even theories that defend rights or fairness usually connect them back to people’s lives going badly or well.
Ancient Greek thinkers, especially Aristotle, went even further: they believed that being virtuous—brave, honest, wise—is itself the largest piece of your own well-being. Aristotle’s famous “function argument” claims that just as a knife’s good is to cut well, a human’s good is to exercise reason well in a complete life. For him, the virtuous person is both morally admirable and better off. That picture might sound optimistic, but it challenges you to ask: is there a deep link between being a good person and having a life that is genuinely good for you?
Now return to that machine. Would you plug in? If you would, you might be a hedonist at heart. If you refuse because you want to actually accomplish real things, you lean toward a desire theory. If you refuse because you think some things—like truth or genuine friendship—are valuable regardless of what happens inside your skull, you are moving toward an objective list. Each answer grabs one piece of the truth, and philosophers have not yet stitched them all together.
Think about it
- Would you plug into the experience machine for your whole life? Why or why not? What does your answer suggest about what you think well-being is?
- Could something be good for you even if you never enjoy it and never wanted it? Give an example from real life and explain your reasoning.
- Imagine a friend who wants to spend every waking hour playing video games and nothing else. Would their life be going well? If not, what is missing?
