In particular, positing a mysterious faculty of “direct acquaintance” with your phenomenal properties doesn’t help (even if such a faculty were otherwise legit), because phenomenal properties are natural properties. In that case, the argument fails to answer the basic epistemic objection to non-naturalism – namely, that it leaves us without the right type of epistemic access to the non-natural properties in question. 1 Call this argument “meta-ethical hedonism.” 2 So the value/disvalue of pleasure/pain are on solid meta-ethical footing in a way that other values are not.
In particular, they say, we have a certain type of direct epistemic access to the goodness of pleasure and the badness of pain – access that we don’t have to other candidate values. Sometimes, people try to use meta-ethics to argue that pleasure and pain are the only things that matter.
Podcast version here, or search “Joe Carlsmith Audio” on your podcast app.
