Hedonism

 Hedonism

Hedonistic Value Theory

  • I assert both Axiological Hedonism and Psychological Hedonism.
    • By Axiological Hedonism, I mean that I believe that pleasure and pain are the basis of all value.
    • By Psychological Hedonism, I mean that I believe that people's behaviour is consistent with their treating pleasure & pain in this way.

The Value Theory

  • Pleasure and Pain form the basis of all value. Pleasure constitutes value, and pain constitutes disvalue. 
    • Pleasure includes any pleasant feeling. It may go by several other names; contentment, delight, ecstasy, elation, enjoyment, euphoria, exhilaration, exultation, gladness, gratification, gratitude, joy, liking, love, relief, satisfaction, Schadenfreude, tranquillity.
    • Pain includes any unpleasant feeling. It may go by several other names; ache, agitation, agony, angst, anguish, annoyance, anxiety, apprehensiveness, boredom, chagrin, dejection, depression, desolation, despair, desperation, despondency, discomfort, discombobulation, discontentment, disgruntlement, disgust, dislike, dismay, disorientation, dissatisfaction, distress, dread, enmity, ennui, fear, gloominess, grief, guilt, hatred, horror, hurting, irritation, loathing, melancholia, nausea, queasiness, remorse, resentment, sadness, shame, sorrow, suffering, sullenness, throb, terror, unease, vexation
    • Pleasure and pain are phenomena, which is to say that they are a raw experience. They are not a composite experience like the experience of a person or a table; they cannot be broken down or reduced into anything else.
  • When I say 'value' I mean intrinsic value, in that they are valuable in themselves, and not by reference to any other thing or phenomenon or event. However, this does not mean that pleasure and pain may not additionally have some extrinsic value - this extrinsic value will simply ultimately lead back to pleasure and pain.
  • Pleasure motivates action for its increase, and pain motivates action for its decrease. In other terms, pleasure motivates action toward its presence, and pain towards its absence. In the latter case, this is why we call painful experiences negative - they motivate us to negate them, to make them non-existent.

  • Life is not quite so simple as simply seeking pleasure and avoiding or destroying pain, however. At times we will encounter situations where there are two or more choices that both invoke pleasure and pain in different ways, and between which we must choose. In this case, we are forced to make a trade-off, where we must take note of the amount or quantity of pleasure and pain involved in each case, and aggregate them in each decision, and see which one has more value/less disvalue.
    • Quantity or Amount of pleasure/pain consists of two factors, which I name Intensity and Extensity.
    • Intensity refers to the same thing as colloquial language. It's how intense the pleasure or pain is in a given time and place. To give an example, stubbing your toe is a less intense pain than having your toe stabbed through with a knife. The higher the intensity, the higher the amount of pleasure/pain.
    • Extensity on the other hand refers to how much the pleasure or pain extends - either through time or through space. The higher the extensity, the higher the amount of pleasure/pain.
      • Extensity in time is how the pleasure/pain spreads through time, and can be rephrased as duration. The longer the pleasure/pain lasts, the higher duration it has, the more the amount of it.
      • Extensity in space is how the pleasure/pain spreads through space - there is no particular word to describe this, and it seems to have been neglected by other hedonists I have seen. The more space the pleasure/pain takes up, the more the amount of it.
      • It should be noted that on each dimension, the occurrence(s) of pleasure/pain need not be continuous. So, for instance, we experience the same amount of pleasure/pain whether it lasts for 2 seconds, or for two instances of 1 second with a pause between, all else being equal. And likewise, we experience the same amount of pleasure/pain whether it spreads over, say, our whole foot, as we would if it spread over half of both of our feet, all else being equal. In either case it takes up the same amount of space.
    • Thus, it is better to have;
      • A more intense pleasure, and a less intense pain;
      • A longer period of time with pleasure, and shorter period of time with pain;
      • A pleasure spread over more of oneself, and a pain spread over less
      • And correspondingly worse to have the opposite of these
    • When aggregated, pleasure counts as positive, and pain as negative, and they add up to value. If there is more pleasure than pain overall, the aggregate value is positive, and so we simply say that it has such and such an amount of value. If the pain is greater than pleasure overall in some calculation, the aggregate value is negative, and so we may say instead that it has such and such an amount of disvalue. Naturally, we choose the option with the highest aggregate value, or lowest aggregate disvalue.


The Nature of Pleasure & Pain

  • The Nature of Pleasure & Pain straddles the line between simple qualia, and having intentionality, although perhaps not in the conventional sense.
    • They are qualia in that they have an irreducible quality to them that does not arise out of thought or understanding of any kind; one can completely cease thought and pleasure & pain will remain regardless. This is much like other qualia, those of the senses. 
    • However they have an intentionality to them as well. Intentionality is defined typically as 'aboutness', the way one thing is 'about' another thing. So for instance, how a spoken sentence is 'about' some topic; the sentence (the noises) and the topic are not the same, but one is 'about' the other, directed at it in some way (or perhaps, they are about each other, but that's for another day). This intentionality however, I define in a perhaps unique way - I believe that pleasure and pain can be likened to forces, or to change itself. Change can be said, I believe, to possess an 'intentionality', in that any given point at which one can point to a state in the process of change, one can say that it is 'about' the next one (and perhaps all that follow it), and this 'aboutness'/intentionality is one thing that distinguishes it from two or more states or things that are simply at different points in time or space.
    • Pleasure & Pain, and indeed perhaps the very notion of change, are a kind of 'intentional quality'. This information may not seem relevant, but will be in a treatment of how pleasure & pain relate to desire & aversion.
  • While pleasure/pain change in their quantity in their extensity in time and space, they do not change in their quantity in their location in time and space.
    • In the case of time, it does not matter whether the pleasure or pain is in the present, soon, or far in the future; the intrinsic amount of (dis)value of that pleasure or pain does not change by virtue of its distance from any point in time.
    • In the case of space, it does not matter whether the pleasure or pain is one's own, of another that one knows or perceives, or of someone far away and unknown; or in more clearly spatial terms - here, near, or far away - the intrinsic amount of (dis)value of that pleasure or pain does not change by virtue of its distance from any point in space.
    • This point is worth making due to the phenomenon of hyperbolic discounting. While this concept is used to describe people's tendency to treat temporally distant pleasure/pain as less (dis)valuable as temporally proximal pleasure/pain, it applies just as much along the spatial dimension as well. We weight the simply apparent and present (here and now!) more than the unapparent and distant intrinsically at times, and this is a mistake.
    • However, there are times when we ought to act in a way that happens to be consistent with valuing pleasure and pain differently based on their distance. If we are trying to exert power on things that are temporally or spatially distant, we will tend to go with what is nearer. This is, though, not because the distant is less important than the near inherently, but because it is more certain that we will get the intended outcome from our actions in the short term, owing to our greater ability to predict and understand that which is closer more easily. Controlling distant events becomes ever more complex the greater that distance becomes.


References

  • https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hedonism/

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