A Question about Gift Giving

Eric Schwitzgebel is a philosopher that I like a lot. This year, on his blog he wrote a Christmas post called The Splintered Mind: How Much Should We Give a Joymachine?. You should check it out. I had never thought about gift giving from this perspective, so I thought I’d try to get my thoughts about it in order in this space.

For starters, Schwitzgebel posits a joymachine. This is something that “can experience a million times more positive emotion per second than an ordinary human.” He actually posits two machines, one human-like and the other dog-like, but that doesn’t affect my thoughts on the subject. At least not yet. Then, the question is, if this joymachine receives millions of times more pleasure from receiving a gift than an ordinary human, should we gift the joymachine more or less than we gift others?

Schwitzgebel says there are five possibilities. First, we give the joymachine what we would give anyone else. Fairness is the key here. Second, we give the joymachine a little more than we give others. Third, we give the joymachine a lot more than we give others. Fourth, we drain our life savings and give everything to the joymachine. Two through four rely on consequentialist thinking. And fifth, we give the joymachine less than others. This relies on prioritarianism, essentially the joymachine is already better off, so give the gifts to someone who needs them more.

Now, a few years ago, I wrote a piece about how capacities are not a sound basis for moral thinking. (Capacities, Rights, and Essences: Part 1 – Capacities – Nutmegger Daily) I still stand by that. A joymachine is just an entity with different capacities than normal humans. Basically, I think that using capacities like this is a way to disguise an appeal to intuition. It seems to me that different people’s intuitions will land on choices one, two, three, or five. I can’t imagine anyone intuitively deciding to become destitute to make a joymachine happier. But eliminating one possibility doesn’t make intuition particularly helpful in answering the question.

So, how would I answer the question? In real life I’m a selfish gift giver. I give more gifts to the people that will make me happy to see get gifts. (I know that’s awkwardly worded. I can’t come up with a better way of saying it, though.) That being the case, I think number two is the right answer. I’d give the joymachine a little more than I give to others. It seems like it would be fun to see something that deliriously happy with my gift.

The problem is that I don’t know why I think this way. It’s something I’ll have to ponder. What do you think? Which number seems correct?