Pleasure

In plain terms

Pleasure is the obvious candidate for what is good. It is wanted for itself, everyone recognises it, and it needs no justification beyond itself.

The classical case against it is not that it is bad but that it is a poor guide. Pleasures conflict, they diminish with repetition, and pursuing them directly frequently fails - the state is a by-product of doing something else, and aiming at it tends to miss.

Which is why the most famous defence of pleasure in antiquity recommends bread, water and friendship rather than luxury. Epicurus's argument is that most desires are unnecessary, that unnecessary desires produce anxiety, and that the reliable route to a pleasant life is to want less. The popular sense of his name reverses his position completely.

As a philosopher would put it

Hedonism holds that pleasure is the only intrinsic good and pain the only intrinsic evil. Its ancient forms divide: the Cyrenaics take bodily pleasure in the present moment as the aim, while Epicurus distinguishes kinetic from katastematic pleasure and identifies the goal with the latter - ataraxia and aponia, the absence of disturbance and of bodily pain.

The nature of pleasure is separately disputed. Distinctive-feeling theories treat it as a single sensation, which fits badly with how different the pleasures of eating, reading and winning are. Attitudinal theories, following Sidgwick, make it a matter of a favourable attitude toward an experience, which handles the variety and loosens the connection to feeling.

Mill's higher and lower distinction is the classic internal difficulty: introducing a quality that outranks quantity appears to appeal to a standard other than pleasure, which is precisely what hedonism denies exists. And Nozick's experience machine is the standard external objection - if pleasure were all that mattered, there would be no reason to refuse.

What is actually disputed

Whether pleasure is the only intrinsic good.

Hedonism's strength is simplicity: one currency, no unexplained plurality, and a clear account of why anything matters. Its problem is that people reliably prefer things to the experience of things - they want to actually have friends rather than to feel that they do, and to actually achieve rather than to feel achievement. If that preference is rational, pleasure is not the only good.

Hedonists reply that the intuition is unreliable, shaped by evolution to track fitness rather than value, and that a life of guaranteed satisfaction with no deception would in fact be choiceworthy.

A separate dispute is whether pleasure is one thing at all. If it is a family of attitudes rather than a sensation, the theory becomes harder to state and harder to refute, since almost any positive experience can be described as pleasure under a sufficiently broad account.