Hedonism and the Experience Machine

What makes our life go best? Is being happy all that matters? Is a life of blissful ignorance a good life? Or is there more to a good life than this? Richard Rowland (University of Oxford) discusses whether we should take the blue pill in ‘hedonism and the experience machine’.

Senior Research Fellow at Australian Catholic University

Richard Rowland works on meatethics, normativity, and moral epistemology. His book, The Normative and the EvaluativeThe Buck-Passing Account of Value (OUP, 2019) is the first book-length defence of the buck-passing account of value. According to this account, for something to be good is for there to be reasons for everyone to have pro-attitudes towards it. The book shows why this account is important, why we should accept it, and how it can be extended to provide an account of wrongness and other normative properties. He has also worked on the relationship between epistemic and practical normativity.

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