This idea is central to many religions, particularly Buddhism. During the Greek and Roman periods, hedonism was popular but controversial; many Greeks worshipped a god called Dionysus, the god of wine and pleasure. His festivals were crazy hedonistic parties with plenty of drinking, overeating, and reckless behavior.
The traditional religious authorities permitted and in some cases encouraged this sort of hedonism. Philosophy in the later Roman Empire was dominated by Stoicism , a philosophy with a complex relationship to hedonism. The Stoics are usually thought of as opposite to hedonists. They argued for rigorous discipline and control of the emotions; they were somewhat ascetics. But they also believed in training their minds to get pleasure out of behaving in a healthy and moral way. This strongly resembles Buddhism and many historians believe that Stoicism was influenced by the Greek contact with Buddhists in what is now Pakistan, where Buddhism ruled at that time.
Christianity changed attitudes towards hedonism, since Christians have, historically, been extremely critical of pleasure-seeking. Christians believe that Adam and Eve lived pleasurable lives in Eden, but because of their Original Sin, we all must suffer; and therefore, it is blasphemous to seek pleasure at the expense of our responsibility to God. Christian asceticism dominated philosophy for much of European history The Dark Ages , but less and less so following the Enlightenment.
Around the early s, several philosophers in Britain invented Utilitarianism , which recommends creating the greatest possible amount of happiness for the largest possible number of people. Today, some say more than ever before, there is a lot of conflict between those who believe strongly in one religion or another, or none at all, and hedonism has a lot to do with it. Those who speak for various religions, including Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism argue that our modern lives are much too pleasure-oriented: we shop for expensive clothes, eat pricey food, and spend our time in nightclubs and watching TV, neglecting our spiritual life.
Buddhists, and others, point out that in spite of all our shopping, eating, and drinking, we are not happy! Suicide rates are rising all over the world, and problems like depression and alcoholism are rampant.
They argue that we will be happier if we live simpler, less materialistic, lives. The character is always reclining on a couch, being fed grapes or having warm chocolate drizzled over his solid-gold body. The show also has Bender, an incredibly hedonistic robot who loves cigars, liquor, cruel pranks, and all kinds of unseemly behavior. Unlike the hedonism of Yang Zhu and Epicurus, which claimed that pleasure should be the ultimate goal since there was no afterlife or god s anyway, Christian hedonism proposes pursuing pleasure because there is a God and an afterlife, and dwelling with said God is the greatest pleasure to be pursued.
Christian hedonism also does not support pursuing God as a means to obtain pleasure, but because He is the greatest pleasure. Thus, support for and against Christian hedonism can only be inducted from various passages.
The idea of enjoying the Lord seems to be thoroughly biblical. Seeking the glory of God is also a biblical pursuit see, for example, Matthew , John , 1 Corinthians Pleasure also does not seem to be condemned by the Bible, but rather is portrayed in a positive manner when that pleasure comes from God e.
Psalm Matthew , Colossians , James , Philippians The question then seems to be whether or not God is glorified by His people finding pleasure in Him. Many passages seem to suggest that this does indeed glorify God, since the Bible frequently records shouting, dancing, or other joyful activities performed with the intent to glorify God. For example, Isaiah reads,. Therefore in the east give glory to the Lord ; exalt the name of the Lord, the God of Israel, in the islands of the sea.
Thus, there does not seem to be anything distinctly unbiblical about Christian hedonism as proposed by John Piper. However, hedonism itself is thoroughly condemned in the Bible, as clearly stated in 1 John :. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them. For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever.
I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it.
Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body. Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body. And what does pleasure accomplish? I wanted to see what was good for people to do under the heavens during the few days of their lives.
I undertook great projects: I built houses for myself and planted vineyards. I made gardens and parks and planted all kinds of fruit trees in them. The fact that what a person wants is the main criterion for something having intrinsic value, makes this kind of theory more in line with preference satisfaction theories of well-being.
Another method of fleshing out the definition of pleasure as intrinsically valuable experience is to describe how intrinsically valuable experiences feel. This method remains a hedonistic one, but seems to fall back into defining pleasure as a sensation.
It has also been argued that what makes an experience intrinsically valuable is that you like or enjoy it for its own sake. Hedonists arguing for this definition of pleasure usually take pains to position their definition in between the realms of sensation and preference satisfaction.
They argue that since we can like or enjoy some experiences without concurrently wanting them or feeling any particular sensation, then liking is distinct from both sensation and preference satisfaction.
Merely defining pleasure as intrinsically valuable experience and intrinsically valuable experiences as those that we like or enjoy still lacks enough detail to be very useful for contemplating well-being. A potential method for making this theory more useful would be to draw on the cognitive sciences to investigate if there is a specific neurological function for liking or enjoying.
Cognitive science has not reached the point where anything definitive can be said about this, but a few neuroscientists have experimental evidence that liking and wanting at least in regards to food are neurologically distinct processes in rats and have argued that it should be the same for humans. The same scientists have wondered if the same processes govern all of our liking and wanting, but this question remains unresolved.
Most Hedonists who describe pleasure as intrinsically valuable experience believe that pleasure is internal and conscious. Hedonists who define pleasure in this way may be either Quantitative or Qualitative Hedonists, depending on whether they think that quality is a relevant dimension of how intrinsically valuable we find certain experiences. 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.
Positive psychological stances include approving of something, thinking it is good, and being pleased about it. An example of a pro-attitude towards a sensation could be being pleased about the fact that an ice cream tastes so delicious. Fred Feldman, the leading proponent of Attitudinal Hedonism, argues that the sensation of pleasure only has instrumental value — it only brings about value if you also have a positive psychological stance toward that sensation.
In addition to his basic Intrinsic Attitudinal Hedonism, which is a form of Quantitative Hedonism, Feldman has also developed many variants that are types of Qualitative Hedonism. For example, Desert-Adjusted Intrinsic Attitudinal Hedonism, which reduces the intrinsic value a pro-attitude has for our well-being based on the quality of deservedness that is, on the extent to which the particular object deserves a pro-attitude or not. For example, Desert-Adjusted Intrinsic Attitudinal Hedonism might stipulate that sensations of pleasure arising from adulterous behavior do not deserve approval, and so assign them no value.
Defining pleasure as a pro-attitude, while maintaining that all sensations of pleasure have no intrinsic value, makes Attitudinal Hedonism less obviously hedonistic as the versions that define pleasure as a sensation. Indeed, defining pleasure as a pro-attitude runs the risk of creating a preference satisfaction account of well-being because being pleased about something without feeling any pleasure seems hard to distinguish from having a preference for that thing.
The most common argument against Prudential Hedonism is that pleasure is not the only thing that intrinsically contributes to well-being. Living in reality, finding meaning in life, producing noteworthy achievements, building and maintaining friendships, achieving perfection in certain domains, and living in accordance with religious or moral laws are just some of the other things thought to intrinsically add value to our lives.
When presented with these apparently valuable aspects of life, Hedonists usually attempt to explain their apparent value in terms of pleasure.
A Hedonist would argue, for example, that friendship is not valuable in and of itself, rather it is valuable to the extent that it brings us pleasure. Furthermore, to answer why we might help a friend even when it harms us, a Hedonist will argue that the prospect of future pleasure from receiving reciprocal favors from our friend, rather than the value of friendship itself, should motivate us to help in this way. Those who object to Prudential Hedonism on the grounds that pleasure is not the only source of intrinsic value use two main strategies.
In the first strategy, objectors make arguments that some specific value cannot be reduced to pleasure. In the second strategy, objectors cite very long lists of apparently intrinsically valuable aspects of life and then challenge hedonists with the prolonged and arduous task of trying to explain how the value of all of them can be explained solely by reference to pleasure and the avoidance of pain. This second strategy gives good reason to be a pluralist about value because the odds seem to be against any monistic theory of value, such as Prudential Hedonism.
The first strategy, however, has the ability to show that Prudential Hedonism is false, rather than being just unlikely to be the best theory of well-being. This argument has proven to be so convincing that nearly every single book on ethics that discusses hedonism rejects it using only this argument or this one and one other. In the thought experiment, Nozick asks us to imagine that we have the choice of plugging in to a fantastic machine that flawlessly provides an amazing mix of experiences.
Importantly, this machine can provide these experiences in a way that, once plugged in to the machine, no one can tell that their experiences are not real. Disregarding considerations about responsibilities to others and the problems that would arise if everyone plugged in, would you plug in to the machine for life?
The vast majority of people reject the choice to live a much more pleasurable life in the machine, mostly because they agree with Nozick that living in reality seems to be important for our well-being. Opinions differ on what exactly about living in reality is so much better for us than the additional pleasure of living in the experience machine, but the most common response is that a life that is not lived in reality is pointless or meaningless.
Most commonly, Hedonists argue that living an experience machine life would be better than living a real life and that most people are simply mistaken to not want to plug in. Some go further and try to explain why so many people choose not to plug in.
Such explanations often point out that the most obvious reasons for not wanting to plug in can be explained in terms of expected pleasure and avoidance of pain.
For example, it might be argued that we expect to get pleasure from spending time with our real friends and family, but we do not expect to get as much pleasure from the fake friends or family we might have in the experience machine.
These kinds of attempts to refute the experience machine objection do little to persuade non-Hedonists that they have made the wrong choice. Imagine that a credible source tells you that you are actually in an experience machine right now.
You have no idea what reality would be like. Given the choice between having your memory of this conversation wiped and going to reality, what would be best for you to choose?
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.
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