It, however, rounds it up to the forms of pleasure that uphold the ethical values. This study is going to focus on the…. The concept of pleasure is, however, understood and approached in a variety of ways, and hedonism is classified accordingly. The three basic types of philosophical hedonism are psychological…. To expand, physical pleasure is a temporary thing. For an example: Eating key lime pie. Eating this specific pie for some people give them pleasure because it tastes good; however, when the consumption is complete, the taste eventually….
Benton Hedonism argumentative paper 1 February 27, So you believe in Hedonism? In my second argumentative paper, I will be talking about whether or not Hedonism is socially acceptable and I will be stating information I have researched and also my own thoughts and opinions on this subject.
Continue Reading. Hedonism Hedonism was early founded in the 4th century b. Read More. This semantic peculiarity does not add much to the theory of Mill in contrast to Bentham but rather seems to intuitively highlight the significant differences between them.
There also seems to be a distinction between Bentham and Mill as to what constitutes well-being in relation to pleasure. Empirical evidence on this choice shows that most people would choose to stay in the experience machine. The bias thought to be responsible for this difference is the status quo bias — an irrational preference for the familiar or for things to stay as they are.
That our actions have real consequences, that our friends are real, and that our experiences are genuine seem to matter for most of us regardless of considerations of pleasure. Unfortunately, we lack a trusted methodology for discerning if these things should matter to us. Perhaps the best method for identifying intrinsically valuable aspects of lives is to compare lives that are equal in pleasure and all other important ways, except that one aspect of one of the lives is increased.
Using this methodology, however, seems certain to lead to an artificial pluralist conclusion about what has value. This is because any increase in a potentially valuable aspect of our lives will be viewed as a free bonus. And, most people will choose the life with the free bonus just in case it has intrinsic value, not necessarily because they think it does have intrinsic value. The main traditional line of criticism against Prudential Hedonism is that not all pleasure is valuable for well-being, or at least that some pleasures are less valuable than others because of non-amount-related factors.
Some versions of this criticism are much easier for Prudential Hedonists to deal with than others depending on where the allegedly disvaluable aspect of the pleasure resides.
If the disvaluable aspect is experienced with the pleasure itself, then both Qualitative and Quantitative varieties of Prudential Hedonism have sufficient answers to these problems. If, however, the disvaluable aspect of the pleasure is never experienced, then all types of Prudential Hedonism struggle to explain why the allegedly disvaluable aspect is irrelevant. Examples of the easier criticisms to deal with are that Prudential Hedonism values, or at least overvalues, perverse and base pleasures.
These kinds of criticisms tend to have had more sway in the past and doubtless encouraged Mill to develop his Qualitative Hedonism. In response to the charge that Prudential Hedonism mistakenly values pleasure from sadistic torture, sating hunger, copulating, listening to opera, and philosophising all equally, Qualitative Hedonists can simply deny that it does. Since pleasure from sadistic torture will normally be experienced as containing the quality of sadism just as the pleasure from listening to good opera is experienced as containing the quality of acoustic excellence , the Qualitative Hedonist can plausibly claim to be aware of the difference in quality and allocate less value to perverse or base pleasures accordingly.
Prudential Hedonists need not relinquish the Quantitative aspect of their theory in order to deal with these criticisms, however. Quantitative Hedonists, can simply point out that moral or cultural values are not necessarily relevant to well-being because the investigation of well-being aims to understand what the good life for the one living it is and what intrinsically makes their life go better for them.
A Quantitative Hedonist can simply respond that a sadist that gets sadistic pleasure from torturing someone does improve their own well-being assuming that the sadist never feels any negative emotions or gets into any other trouble as a result.
Similarly, a Quantitative Hedonist can argue that if someone genuinely gets a lot of pleasure from porcine company and wallowing in the mud, but finds opera thoroughly dull, then we have good reason to think that having to live in a pig sty would be better for her well-being than forcing her to listen to opera.
Much more problematic for both Quantitative and Qualitative Hedonists, however, are the more modern versions of the criticism that not all pleasure is valuable. The modern versions of this criticism tend to use examples in which the disvaluable aspect of the pleasure is never experienced by the person whose well-being is being evaluated. The best example of these modern criticisms is a thought experiment devised by Shelly Kagan.
Kagan asks us to imagine the life of a very successful businessman who takes great pleasure in being respected by his colleagues, well-liked by his friends, and loved by his wife and children until the day he died. Then Kagan asks us to compare this life with one of equal length and the same amount of pleasure experienced as coming from exactly the same sources , except that in each case the businessman is mistaken about how those around him really feel.
This second deceived businessman experiences just as much pleasure from the respect of his colleagues and the love of his family as the first businessman. The only difference is that the second businessman has many false beliefs.
Given that the deceived businessman never knew of any of these deceptions and his experiences were never negatively impacted by the deceptions indirectly, which life do you think is better? Nearly everyone thinks that the deceived businessman has a worse life. This is a problem for Prudential Hedonists because the pleasure is quantitatively equal in each life, so they should be equally good for the one living it.
Qualitative Hedonism does not seem to be able to avoid this criticism either because the falsity of the pleasures experienced by the deceived businessman is a dimension of the pleasure that he never becomes aware of.
Theoretically, an externalist and qualitative version of Attitudinal Hedonism could include the falsity dimension of an instance of pleasure even if the falsity dimension never impacts the consciousness of the person. However, the resulting definition of pleasure bears little resemblance to what we commonly understand pleasure to be and also seems to be ad hoc in its inclusion of the truth dimension but not others. A dedicated Prudential Hedonist of any variety can always stubbornly stick to the claim that the lives of the two businessmen are of equal value, but that will do little to convince the vast majority to take Prudential Hedonism more seriously.
Another major line of criticism used against Prudential Hedonists is that they have yet to come up with a meaningful definition of pleasure that unifies the seemingly disparate array of pleasures while remaining recognisable as pleasure.
Some definitions lack sufficient detail to be informative about what pleasure actually is, or why it is valuable, and those that do offer enough detail to be meaningful are faced with two difficult tasks. The first obstacle for a useful definition of pleasure for hedonism is to unify all of the diverse pleasures in a reasonable way.
Phenomenologically, the pleasure from reading a good book is very different to the pleasure from bungee jumping, and both of these pleasures are very different to the pleasure of having sex.
This obstacle is unsurpassable for most versions of Quantitative Hedonism because it makes the value gained from different pleasures impossible to compare. Not being able to compare different types of pleasure results in being unable to say if a life is better than another in most even vaguely realistic cases. Furthermore, not being able to compare lives means that Quantitative Hedonism could not be usefully used to guide behavior since it cannot instruct us on which life to aim for.
Attempts to resolve the problem of unifying the different pleasures while remaining within a framework of Quantitative Hedonism, usually involve pointing out something that is constant in all of the disparate pleasures and defining that particular thing as pleasure. When pleasure is defined as a strict sensation, this strategy fails because introspection reveals that no such sensation exists.
Pleasure defined as the experience of liking or as a pro-attitude does much better at unifying all of the diverse pleasures. However, defining pleasure in these ways makes the task of filling in the details of the theory a fine balancing act.
Liking or pro-attitudes must be described in such a way that they are not solely a sensation or best described as a preference satisfaction theory. And they must perform this balancing act while still describing a scientifically plausible and conceptually coherent account of pleasure. Most attempts to define pleasure as liking or pro-attitudes seem to disagree with either the folk conception of what pleasure is or any of the plausible scientific conceptions of how pleasure functions.
Most varieties of Qualitative Hedonism do better at dealing with the problem of diverse pleasures because they can evaluate different pleasures according to their distinct qualities. Qualitative Hedonists still need a coherent method for comparing the different pleasures with each other in order to be more than just an abstract theory of well-being, however. And, it is difficult to construct such a methodology in a way that avoids counter examples, while still describing a scientifically plausible and conceptually coherent account of pleasure.
As mentioned, many of the potential adjustments to the main definitions of pleasure are useful for avoiding one or more of the many objections against Prudential Hedonism. The problem with this strategy is that the more adjustments that are made, the more apparent it becomes that the definition of pleasure is not recognisable as the pleasure that gave Hedonism its distinctive intuitive plausibility in the first place.
When an instance of pleasure is defined simply as when someone feels good, its intrinsic value for well-being is intuitively obvious. However, when the definition of pleasure is stretched, so as to more effectively argue that all valuable experiences are pleasurable, it becomes much less recognisable as the concept of pleasure we use in day-to-day life and its intrinsic value becomes much less intuitive. The future of hedonism seems bleak. Hedonists have been creative in their definitions of pleasure so as to avoid these objections, but more often than not find themselves defending a theory that is not particularly hedonistic, realistic or both.
Perhaps the only hope that Hedonists of all types can have for the future is that advances in cognitive science will lead to a better understanding of how pleasure works in the brain and how biases affect our judgements about thought experiments. If our improved understanding in these areas confirms a particular theory about what pleasure is and also provides reasons to doubt some of the widespread judgements about the thought experiments that make the vast majority of philosophers reject hedonism, then hedonism might experience at least a partial revival.
The good news for Hedonists is that at least some emerging theories and results from cognitive science do appear to support some aspects of hedonism. Dan Weijers Email: danweijers gmail. Types of Hedonism a. Value Hedonism and Prudential Hedonism When philosophers discuss hedonism, they are most likely to be referring to hedonism about value, and especially the slightly more specific theory, hedonism about well-being.
Normative Hedonism Value Hedonism, occasionally with assistance from Motivational Hedonism, has been used to argue for specific theories of right action theories that explain which actions are morally permissible or impermissible and why. Hedonistic Egoism Hedonistic Egoism is a hedonistic version of egoism, the theory that we should, morally speaking, do whatever is most in our own interests.
Hedonistic Utilitarianism Hedonistic Utilitarianism is the theory that the right action is the one that produces or is most likely to produce the greatest net happiness for all concerned. The Origins of Hedonism a. Aritippus and the Cyrenaics The Cyrenaics , founded by Aristippus c. Epicurus Epicurus c. The Oyster Example With the exception of a brief period discussed below, Hedonism has been generally unpopular ever since its ancient beginnings.
The Development of Hedonism a. Bentham Normative and Motivational Hedonism were both at their most popular during the heyday of Empiricism in the 18 th and 19 th Centuries. Contemporary Varieties of Hedonism a. The Main Divisions Several contemporary varieties of hedonism have been defended, although usually by just a handful of philosophers or less at any one time.
Pleasure as Sensation The most common definition of pleasure is that it is a sensation, something that we identify through our senses or that we feel.
Pleasure as Intrinsically Valuable Experience Hedonists have also defined pleasure as intrinsically valuable experience, that is to say any experiences that we find intrinsically valuable either are, or include, instances of pleasure. Pleasure as Pro-Attitude One of the most recent developments in modern hedonism is the rise of defining pleasure as a pro-attitude — a positive psychological stance toward some object. Contemporary Objections a. Pleasure is Not the Only Source of Intrinsic Value The most common argument against Prudential Hedonism is that pleasure is not the only thing that intrinsically contributes to well-being.
Some Pleasure is Not Valuable The main traditional line of criticism against Prudential Hedonism is that not all pleasure is valuable for well-being, or at least that some pleasures are less valuable than others because of non-amount-related factors. There is No Coherent and Unifying Definition of Pleasure Another major line of criticism used against Prudential Hedonists is that they have yet to come up with a meaningful definition of pleasure that unifies the seemingly disparate array of pleasures while remaining recognisable as pleasure.
The Future of Hedonism The future of hedonism seems bleak. References and Further Reading a. Primary Sources Bentham, Jeremy An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation , First printed in and first published in A corrected edition with extra footnotes and paragraphs at the end was published in Recent edition: Adamant Media Corporation, Blake, R. Why Not Hedonism? A Protest, International Journal of Ethics , 37 1 : An excellent refutation of G.
Crisp gives a slightly different account of this distinction between Bentham and Mill arguing that it is not the case that Mill values anything other than pleasure in order to establish a level of well-being. Indeed, according to Crisp, if he had done, he could not be considered a full hedonist. Instead, Mill makes a distinction is the nature of different kinds of pleasures some of which have more intrinsic value than others for well-being.
0コメント