Pleasure

Pluralistic theories of well-being might appear unable to accommodate just how important pleasure and pain are to well-being. Intuitively, there is a finite limit to how well your life can go for you if it goes badly enough hedonically (e.g. because you never feel any pleasure and you spend two years in unrelenting agony). But if there is some basic good distinct from pleasure, as any pluralistic theory must claim, then it seems that you could be made arbitrarily well off (...) by being given enough of that good even if your life is hedonically terrible. My aim is to defend pluralistic theories against this objection. After replying to the simplest version of it, I will answer a more sophisticated version of it that has recently been leveled by Theron Pummer. (shrink)

(DRAFT: I'll update when the book is published.) This started as a book about desire. I was hoping to complement what I had said about belief in my (2022). To believe something, I argued, is to be positioned to do, think and feel things in light of a possibility whose obtaining would make one right. I argued that believing is not representational, that belief states are not causes or causal powers, and that the objects of belief are ways the world (...) might be and not representations of things. Believing is not so much a response to the world as a way of being positioned in it, a way of having an environment, as Frege put it. (Frege 1956, 306) I was trying to put the believer as a rational agent positioned in a world at the heart of my account. I hoped an account of desire could round out this picture of a rational agent’s psychology. But as I thought about desire, I came to see that two ideas about the nature of goodness, one negative and one positive, were really at the heart of my thinking. The negative idea is that there is no such thing as what philosophers have variously called intrinsic goodness or simple goodness or absolute value. I guess I am a nihilist about that. The positive idea is that our world is rich in what I will call sortal quality, what others have called goodness-of-a-kind or attributive goodness. I came to think that sortal quality is at the heart not just of desire but also of pleasure and moral worth. A picture of moral psychology had come into view. And so I re-organised the book. I still say a lot about the nature of desire, or ‘wanting’ as I prefer to call it, and I think my view does complement my externalist view of belief. Wanting, I will argue, is a matter of falling short relative to a standard one falls under, failing to be as good as one could be. If believing is about having an environment to respond to, then desire is about fitting into it well. And so my book offers a comprehensive picture of a moral agent in a world where nothing is simply or absolutely good but where many kinds of things, including people, can be very good and even splendid. (shrink)

In Plato’s Philebus, Socrates’ second account of ‘false’ pleasure (41d-42c) outlines a form of illusion: pleasures that appear greater than they are. I argue that these pleasures are perceptual misrepresentations. I then show that they are the grounds for a methodological critique of hedonism. Socrates identifies hedonism as a judgment about the value of pleasure based on a perceptual misrepresentation of size, witnessed paradigmatically in the ‘greatest pleasures’.

Were there interactions between the development of Kant's aesthetics and the development of his moral philosophy? How did Kant view pleasure and displeasure and what role did they play in the formation of his system of the faculties? In this book, Alexander Rueger situates Kant's account of pleasure and displeasure in its eighteenth-century context, with special attention to Leibniz, Wolff, Crusius, and Mendelssohn. He traces the development of Kant's views on pleasure from the 1770s to his Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (...) in 1790, and shows that throughout, Kant understood pleasure as the satisfaction of faculty interests. The significance of this theory for the completion of Kant's critical system in the third Critique is discussed in detail. Rueger's study illuminates both the role of pleasure and displeasure in Kant's thought, and their important connections to the power of judgment. (shrink)

One possible challenge for epiphenomenalism arises from the theory of evolution: if the mental has no causal powers, how might it have evolved? The aim of this paper is to argue that, contrary to some arguments advanced by other philosophers, most particularly William Robinson and Joseph Corabi, considerations from the theory of evolution do pose a genuine difficulty for epiphenomenalism.

For Pleasure argues that aesthetic pleasure and formal experimentalism hold the twinned capacity to maintain a global racial order and also to undo it.

This article presents a new understanding of how Anglican clergymen and writers remoulded common notions of the moral status of pleasure during the latter half of the seventeenth century. It addresses the current historiographical neglect of the philosophical content of ethical thought within the Church of England. For Anglican thinkers developed innovative moral arguments about the rational order of human satisfactions in order to direct the disruptive appetites towards good ends. This article illustrates the conceptual trajectory of this ethical discourse (...) by comparing John Locke’s developing moral ideas with those of Robert South, Public Orator at Oxford after 1660, and Samuel Parker, Bishop of Oxford after 1686. For the course of Locke’s shifting ethical thought reflected a philosophical movement within an Anglican language of pleasure, from South’s moderate position – that pleasure was a significant good among other ends – to Parker’s radical stance – that goodness was reducible to that which was delightful. (shrink)

The emphasis Malabou places on both the erasure and possible reappropriation of the clitoris, which she requalifies as an “organ of thought” (13), warrants considering broader questions concerning negativity, relationality, and power. We raise two related questions, which we further explore at the end of this review. First, what does Malabou's analysis of the negative and its relationship to thought and femininity imply about the ontological category of relationality in toto? If the relation between negativity and the feminine is central (...) to thought, as Malabou seems to suggest, then this implies that negativity also has a prominent role in structuring relations in general. Second, how can the clitoris be disassociated from the negative without being turned into a new “positive,” or into a symbol grounded on a too familiar logic of othering? Arguably, this is the most pressing question for feminist philosophy in an age when gender and sexuality are under constant scrutiny inside and outside of the academe. (shrink)

Dans son Commentaire sur le Philèbe de Platon, § 167-168, Damascius rapporte une série d’objections à la thèse fameuse de Socrate dans le Philèbe selon laquelle il existe des « plaisirs faux ». Ces objections furent formulées par Théophraste, l’élève d’Aristote, peut-être dans son livre en un volume Sur les plaisirs faux (DL 5.56). Dans cet article, je montre d’abord comment les critiques de Théophraste recourent aux ouvrages d’Aristote, et notamment à son analyse des différents types de fausseté en Métaphysique (...) Δ 29. Je montre ensuite comment Damascius défend Platon contre ces critiques en retournant les arguments d’Aristote, l’autorité sur laquelle Théophraste se fonde, contre Théophraste lui-même. Ce faisant, Damascius atteste sa grande familiarité avec le corpus aristotélicien et montre que certains des textes que Théophraste convoque à l’appui de ses critiques peuvent être mobilisés pour défendre la position platonicienne. (shrink)

This paper shows the ways in which Kant’s notions of the feeling of life and the feeling of the promotion of life may be influenced by Epicurus’ theory of pleasure and the Stoic notion of oikeiôsis, respectively. Accordingly, getting a clear picture of Epicurus’ theory of pleasure and the Stoic notion of oikeiôsis will help us (i) understand why Kant introduces these notions in the third Critique and (ii) why he identifies aesthetic pleasure with the feeling of the promotion of (...) life. As I will demonstrate, the feeling of life allows us to be conscious of the harmonious interaction of our faculties with each other while the feeling of the promotion of life allows us to be aware of the harmonious relationship between our faculties and nature. Hence, the feeling of the promotion of life indicates the well-being of the subject in its relation to its environment. (shrink)

In ancient Greek thought, the final destination of humans’ life journey is eudaimonia, “happiness.” Aristotle follows this tradition in taking eudaimonia as the “goal” (telos) of human life. Eudaimonia, however, is not a momentary achievement or a means for attaining something else, nor is it identified with the chance “goods” of aristocracy, wealth, beauty, or political power. It is tied rather to the specific nature of human beings and depends on their particular function or “work” (ergon) as their proper condition (...) throughout an entire lifetime. There is also a pleasure (hêdonê) which corresponds to this activity as the most essential and highest possible pleasure for human beings according to their nature. What is the proper activity for the human species and its proper pleasure? Which pleasure corresponds to a human being’s true nature? This paper explores the paramount importance of pleasure within the ethical/political framework of Aristotle’s philosophy and its association with the ultimate destination of human life – which is to fully realise our human potential and function according to our nature. As such, Aristotle’s view of pleasure and happiness may provide some key insights for understanding – and perhaps redirecting – the pursuits of the tourist. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is twofold. In the first instance it is an attempt to offer a new perspective from which to reflect on the meaning and philosophical presuppositions of Friedrich Schlegel’s defence and use of (romantic) irony, as well other related notions: humour, wit, and other comic devices. I propose to situate this perspective within a revaluation of pleasure and joy. To do this in a new way (although not in opposition to authors such as Manfred Frank, Elizabeth (...) Millan-Zaibert, or Gary Handwerk), I refer to one of Schlegel’s earliest texts devoted to The Aesthetic Value of Greek Comedy from 1794. In addition, this paper questions the extent to which Schlegel’s position is tenable in the aftermath of the ‘death of God’. For this, I reflect briefly on the ways in which Nietzsche’s writings and notion of life-affirmation respond to Schlegel’s vindication of romantic irony. (shrink)

Abstractabstract:Thomas More’s Utopia represents not a pleasurable alternative world, but rather a debate on how to make life more pleasurable in the actual world. It involves a tussling with questions of truth in an age in which unifying transcendental answers were giving way to more instrumental solutions as demanded by the growth of mercantile city-states. This article traces the function of pleasure in Utopia as a dialectically mediating agent on the recognition that pleasure is available only in compromised form. For (...) More, solutions must be sought through the mind’s capacity to form agreeable relations out of contradictions. It implies assembling meaning from the perspectives Utopia provides, and a constant balancing and rebalancing process in search of an overall point of view that may give pleasure. (shrink)

This paper proposes a unified reading of pleasure's nature and value in Plato's _Philebus_. It also explains how the proposed reading illuminates certain claims about pleasure across the corpus that initially seem to be in some tension: (i) that pleasure is not the good; (ii) that pleasure is choiceworthy and an aspect of the best human life; and (iii) that pleasure is dangerous and tends to make us into bad people who live badly.

Explores C. S. Lewis's views of the purpose of higher education and his distinctive answer: to experience pleasure.

Experientialism about the sense of bodily ownership is the view that there is something it is like to feel a body as one’s own. In this paper I argue for a particular experientialist thesis. I first present a puzzle about the relation between bodily awareness and self-consciousness, and introduce a somewhat underappreciated view on the sense of bodily ownership, Implicit Reflexivity, that points us in the right direction as to how to address this puzzle. I argue that Implicit Reflexivity, however, (...) does not provide a full solution to the puzzle. I then introduce a novel view on the sense of bodily ownership that inherits a central tenet, Reflexivity, from the above view, without having its flaws. According to Reflexivity, the sense of bodily ownership consists in the reflexive character of bodily sensations, namely in the fact that bodily sensations have experience-dependent properties as part of their content. Cashed out this way, Reflexivity is an attractive way of explicating the notion that bodily sensations are experiences of the body as subject. Reflexivity also highlights a central, but so far neglected, connection between the sense of bodily ownership and the sense of experience ownership. (shrink)

First, I argue that some phenomenological theory of pleasure and displeasure must be true because purely attitudinal theories cannot explain cases of hedonic change. Specifically, when we introspect a pleasant sensation becoming unpleasant, there is a radical change in what it is like to be us. Since this change cannot be explained in terms of changes in any nonhedonic phenomenal character, (dis)pleasures have a particular phenomenal character. I then argue for a version of the distinctive feeling theory I call the (...) evaluative qualia view. It says (dis)pleasures are experiences that instantiate evaluative phenomenal properties. I support this view in two ways. First, I argue on the basis of introspective considerations that (dis)pleasures are unified in that they have an evaluative phenomenal character; they feel good or bad. Then, I argue this evaluative character should be understood in terms of determinate phenomenal properties rather than “aspects” of such properties or determinables. Finally, I answer some objections against the view, including the heterogeneity objection and the implausibility of having (dis)pleasure while being indifferent to them. (shrink)

Perceptual-control theory offers a physically reductive way to account for teleology or goal-directedness, ranging from the initial emergence of life, to creatures capable of regulating their own consciousness. This broad framework motivates key aspects of the perceptual-control model including the flexibility of behaviour, the hierarchy of aims or values, and the links between control and affective states. In this way, perceptual control theory integrates the psychological constants of representation, evaluation, and action.

In this paper, I present three claims belonging to Cavendish’s theory of the passions. First, positive and negative passions are species of love and hate. Second, love and hate involve pleasure and pain. Third, pleasure and pain are regular and irregular, where these notions are to be understood in teleological terms. From these commitments, it follows that hate is irregular. I argue that this consequence is a problematic one for Cavendish. After defending my reading through a consideration of Cavendish’s reflections (...) on mental health and disorder, I explore ways in which she might revise her commitments to avoid the problem. Throughout the paper, I demonstrate the extent to which Cavendish’s theory of the passions draws on Aristotelian and Augustinian ideas that loomed large in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century writings on the topic. (shrink)

The higher-order desire theory of pain states that pain’s unpleasantness is constituted by the subject’s desire not to feel pain. The theory faces the Euthyphro problem: it fails to accommodate the intuitive datum that pain’s unpleasantness explains and justifies the desire not to feel pain. To avoid this problem, the first-order desire theory proposes that pain’s unpleasantness is constituted by the subject’s desire not to be in the bodily condition represented by the feeling of pain. This paper aims to show (...) that the Euthyphro problem, originally leveled against the higher-order theory, arises equally for the first-order theory. In particular, it either leaves the first-order desire rationally ungrounded or collapses into one of its rival theories — namely, evaluativism. I conclude that desire theories of pain misconstrue the justificatory relationship between desire and pain’s unpleasantness. (shrink)

[COMMENTARY on Walter Veit's "A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness"] The framework Veit introduces for animal consciousness turns on finding and articulating its evolutionary origins. Veit argues that consciousness first evolved as affective experience in the Cambrian period. His argument centers around the plausible need of organisms in the Cambrian for a common currency of subjective valuation. I argue that such an adaptive pressure is unlikely to result in affective experience. I review other processes that instantiate common currencies (...) of subjective valuation: unconscious (non-experiential) affect and the reward learning system and argue that each is likely to have evolved prior to affective experience. (shrink)

A good deal of recent debate over the nature of pleasure and pain has surrounded the alleged phenomenon of unconscious sensory pleasure and pain, or pleasures and pains whose subjects are entirely unaware of them while experiencing them. According to Ben Bramble, these putative pleasures and pains present a problem for attitudinal theories of pleasure and pain, since these theories claim that what makes something a sensory pleasure or pain is that one has a special sort of pro- or con-attitude (...) toward it at the time one experiences it. In this paper, I look at the two existing defenses of attitudinal theories against this worry and explain (following Bramble) that each is inadequate. I show that this inadequacy is in part a result of existing attitudinal theories failing to recognize an important distinction in pro- and con-attitudes, and I propose and defend an amended attitudinal view that does recognize this distinction. I then offer a more promising response to the objection from unconscious sensory pleasures and pains: that experiences of apparently unconscious pleasure or pain only seem pleasant or unpleasant because their subjects are disposed to experience pleasantness or unpleasantness. In this sense, unconscious pleasures and pains are not really pleasures or pains at all. (shrink)

Is suffering really bad? The late Derek Parfit argued that we all have reasons to want to avoid future agony and that suffering is in itself bad both for the one who suffers and impersonally. Nietzsche denied that suffering was intrinsically bad and that its value could even be impersonal. This paper has two aims. It argues against what I call ‘Realism about the Value of Suffering’ by drawing from a broadly Nietzschean debunking of our evaluative attitudes, showing that a (...) recently influential response to the debunking challenge (the appeal to phenomenal introspection) fails. It also argues that a Nietzschean approach is well suited to support the challenge and is bolstered by the empirical literature. As strangers to ourselves, we cannot know whether suffering is really intrinsically bad for us. (shrink)

This study aims to provide a coherent new interpretation of the notorious anti-hedonism of Speusippus, Plato’s nephew and the second scholarch of the Academy, by reconsidering all the relevant sources concerning his attitude toward pleasure—sources that seem to be in tension or even incompatible with each other. By reassessing Speusippus’ anti-hedonism and Aristotle’s response, it also sheds new light on the Academic debate over pleasure in which he and Aristotle participated: This debate is not merely concerned with the truth and (...) credibility of the arguments for or against hedonism; there are also notable differences among the participants in their understanding of the practical significance of evaluating hedonic experiences. This new interpretation allows us to better understand Aristotle’s selective representation of the intra-school debate and some neglected features of his responses to different interlocutors. (shrink)

The concerns of each commentary are addressed in turn. I clarify and defend the claims of The Emotional Mind with regards to the plausibility of automatic responses to representational content, the distinction between emotions and bodily feelings, the influence of social contexts upon emotional responses, the complex issue of whether emotions are modular or form natural kinds, the nature of pain asymbolia, and the nature of emotional authenticity.

I develop and defend "metaethical experientialism," the thesis that phenomenal facts explain certain kinds of value facts. I argue, for example, that anyone who knows what it’s like to feel extreme pain is in a position to know that that kind of experience is bad. I argue that metaethical experientialism yields genuine counterexamples to the principle that no ethical conclusion can be derived from purely descriptive premises. I also discuss the prospects for a pluralistic metaethics, whereby different metaethical theories hold (...) for different classes of ethical facts. (shrink)

It is an important feature of creatures like us that our various motivations compete for control over our behaviour, including mental behaviour such as imagining and attending. In large part, this competition is adjudicated by the stimulation of affect — the intrinsically pleasant or unpleasant aspects of experience. In this paper I argue that the motivation-affect system controls a sub-type of attention called 'alerting attention' to bring various goals and stimuli to consciousness and thereby prioritize those contents for action. This (...) view allows me to flesh out the global workspace theory of consciousness, as well as some of the phenomenal characteristics of conscious experience. (shrink)

Some mental states have valence—they are pleasant or unpleasant. According to imperativism, valence depends on imperative content, while evaluativism tells us that it depends on evaluative content. We argue that if one considers valence’s informational profile, it becomes evident that imperativism is superior to evaluativism. More precisely, we show that if one applies the best available metasemantics to the role played by (un)pleasant mental states in our cognitive economy, then these states turn out to have imperative rather than evaluative content, (...) since: (i) they are much more informative about behaviour than they are about the world; and (ii) they occupy a stage in the information-processing chain that is closer to behaviour production than it is to the uptake of sensory information. This is our metasemantic argument for imperativism. (shrink)

Pains are unpleasant, universally unpleasant. What seems trivially true has been rejected by various pain scientists because of several phenomena which allegedly show that there can be pain which is not unpleasant. This rejection is partly based on the ambiguity of ‘pain unpleasantness’ which can be avoided by distinguishing between primary and secondary pain affect. As for the alleged counterexamples to the above, I will argue that experiences of episodic analgesia as well as the ‘pain’ experiences of some lobotomized and (...) morphine patients should not be construed as cases in which pain and unpleasantness come apart, but rather as cases in which nociceptive activity and pain dissociate. Regarding the notorious case of pain asymbolia, I will demonstrate that the behaviour of patients with this syndrome suggests that they do feel pain, and that their pain sensations are unpleasant, but much less unpleasant than the pains normal people would have if exposed to the same noxious stimuli. Adopting such an account of these phenomena allows us to retain the widely accepted IASP definition of pain, and thus avoids the issue of integrating non-unpleasant pains into a plausible definition of pain. (shrink)

Optimism and pessimism are two diametrically opposed views about the value of existence. Optimists maintain that existence is better than non-existence, while pessimists hold that it is worse. Arthur Schopenhauer put forward a variety of arguments against optimism and for pessimism. I will offer a synoptic reading of these arguments, which aims to show that while Schopenhauer’s case against optimism primarily focuses on the value or disvalue of life’s contents, his case for pessimism focuses on the ways in which life (...) as a whole is structurally defective. (shrink)

What is the best way to account for the badness of pain and what sort of theory of welfare is best suited to accommodate this view? I argue that unpleasant sensory experiences are prudentially bad in the absence of contrary attitudes, but good when the object of positive attitudes. Pain is bad unless it is liked, enjoyed, valued etc. Interestingly, this view is incompatible with either pure objectivist or pure subjectivist understandings of welfare. However, there is a kind of welfare (...) theory that can incorporate this view of the badness of pain and which is very, very close to being a form of subjectivism. Moreover, this hybrid account of welfare is entirely compatible with the deep motivations of subjectivism. I therefore argue that those who lean towards welfare subjectivism should adopt this account of pain, and that we should revise our understanding of subjectivism to count such theories as subjective. (shrink)

Why are pains bad for us? A natural answer is that it is just because of how they feel (or their felt-qualities). But this answer is cast into doubt by cases of people who are unbothered by certain pains of theirs. These pains retain their felt-qualities, but do not seem bad for the people in question. In this paper, I offer a new response to this problem. I argue that in such cases, the pains in question have become “just more (...) of the same,” and for this reason have ceased to be bad for the relevant individuals. It is because they (implicitly) recognise this that they are unbothered by such pains. (shrink)

According to Schopenhauer’s compensation argument for pessimism, the non-existence of the world is preferable to its existence because no goods can ever compensate for the mere existence of evil. Standard interpretations take this argument to be based on Schopenhauer’s thesis that all goods are merely the negation of evils, from which they assume it follows that the apparent goods in life are in fact empty and without value. This article develops a non-standard variant of the standard interpretation, which accepts the (...) relevance of the negativity thesis but rejects that the argument assumes that life’s goods are all empty and valueless. Instead, it argues that whatever value negative goods might possess, they do not have the kind of value to compensate for positive evils. This involves additional development of the negativity thesis and a defence of it against objections from Byron Simmons (2021). (shrink)

A collection, edited by David Bain, Michael Brady, and Jennifer Corns, originating in our Value of Suffering Project. Table of Contents: Michael Wheeler - ‘How should affective phenomena be studied?’; Julien Deonna & Fabrice Teroni – ‘Pleasures, unpleasures, and emotions’; Hilla Jacobson – ‘The attitudinal representational theory of painfulness fleshed out’; Tim Schroeder – ‘What we represent when we represent the badness of getting hurt’; Hagit Benbaji – ‘A defence of the inner view of pain’; Olivier Massin – ‘Suffering pain’; (...) Frederique de Vignemont – ‘The value of threat’; Colin Leach – ‘Bad feelings can be good and good feelings can be bad’; Tasia Scrutton – ‘Mental suffering and the experience of beauty’; Brock Bastian – ‘From suffering to satisfaction: why we need pain to feel pleasure’; Marilyn McCord Adams – ‘Pain and moral agency’; Jennifer Corns – ‘Hedonic rationality’; Jonathan Cohen & Matthew Fulkerson – ‘Suffering and rationality’; Tom McClelland – ‘Suffering invites understanding’; Michael Brady – ‘Suffering as a virtue’; Glen Pettigrove TBA. Further authors TBA. (shrink)

Over recent decades pain has received increasing attention as philosophers, psychologists and neuroscientists try to answer deep and difficult questions about it. What is pain? What makes pain unpleasant? How is pain related to the emotions? This volume provides a rich and wide-ranging exploration of these questions and important new insights into the philosophy of pain. Divided into three clear sections - pain and motivation; pain and emotion; and deviant pain - the collection covers fundamental topics in the philosophy and (...) psychology of pain. These include pain and sensory affect, the neuroscience of pain, pain and rationality, placebos, and pain and consciousness. Philosophy of Pain: Unpleasantness, Emotion, and Devianceis essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, cognitive and behavioral psychology as well as those in health and medicine researching conceptual issues in pain. (shrink)

Phenomenal consciousness appears to be particularly normatively significant. For this reason, sentience-based conceptions of ethics are widespread. In the field of animal ethics, knowing which animals are sentient appears to be essential to decide the moral status of these animals. I argue that, given that materialism is true of the mind, phenomenal consciousness is probably not particularly normatively significant. We should face up to this probable insignificance of phenomenal consciousness and move towards an ethic without sentience.

Beyza Şen and Ali Tacar's interview with Masahiro Morioka on painless civilization and his recent works. "In our contemporary civilization we can experience pleasure, pleasantness, and comfort, and can avoid pain and suffering, albeit at the sacrifice of joy of life, which is indispensable for acquiring our life without regret. Of course we have a lot of pain and suffering in our society, so our lives are not painless at all, but I cannot help feeling that our contemporary scientific civilization (...) is progressing in the direction of eliminating pain and suffering irreversibly. ...". (shrink)

In the Philebus, Socrates argues that pleasures can be false in the same way that beliefs can be false. On the basis of Socrates' analysis of malicious pleasure, a mixed pleasure of the soul and a passion, I defend the view that, according to Socrates, pleasures can be false when they represent as pleasant something that is not worthy of our enjoyment, where that means that they represent as pleasant something that is not pleasant in its own right because it (...) is not fine. Since these pleasures misrepresent the value of their objects, they involve an evaluative error. In contrast, a pleasure is true when it correctly represents the actual value of things. (shrink)

Future-bias is preferring some lesser future good to a greater past good because it is in the future, or preferring some greater past pain to some lesser future pain because it is in the past. Most of us think that this bias is rational. I argue that no agents have future-biased preferences that are rationally evaluable—that is, evaluable as rational or irrational. Given certain plausible assumptions about rational evaluability, either we must find a new conception of future-bias that avoids the (...) difficulties I raise, or we must conclude that future-biased preferences are not subject to rational evaluation. (shrink)

I argue that pleasure is not only necessarily good, but also essentially so. Part of the nature of pleasure is to be (personally, finally) good.

Prudential hedonism is a school of thought in the philosophy of welfare that says that only pleasure is good for us in itself and only pain is bad for us in itself. This dissertation concerns an especially austere form of prudential hedonism: basic prudential hedonism (BPH). BPH claims that all pleasure is good for us in itself, and all pain is bad for us in itself, without exception; that all pleasures feel fundamentally alike, as do all pains; and that the (...) amount of welfare in a person’s life can (in principle) be calculated just by adding up the amount of pleasure it contains and subtracting the amount of pain. The dissertation presents a positive argument for the claim that pleasures and pains are defined by common phenomenal properties, defends BPH against a battery of objections, and outlines an argument for accepting BPH on the grounds that it is simpler than competing views. (shrink)