Ethical quantitative hedonism

Hedonism is a school of philosophy which argues that pleasure has an ultimate importance and is the most important pursuit of humanity.

Ethical Quantitative hedonism seems to have a major fault. If an action is right if it leads to more pleasure than any other available action, it is also right that one must maximize the amount of pleasure of that action, since that leads to more pleasure than any other available action. There are two ways to maximize pleasure, time wise and intensity wise (see text down below in red). If one maximize pleasure time wise it does not follow that one has to participate in the specific joy we are talking about, endlessly. One could switch enjoyment if it meant just as much pleasure or more. But one can not go from one set of enjoyment to another, without a delay in time where pleasure is non-existing or lesser in intensity. It seems childish to bring this up, but since you must maximize the amount of pleasure, according to ethical hedonism, it leads to that we have to add something to the quantitative hedonistic view if it is right, and say:

An action is right if it leads to more pleasure than any other available action, unless one is going from one pleasure to another, and this other pleasure is equal to, or more pleasurable than the first.

Of course there is the question of how to measure pleasure even for a quantitative hedonist, and there has got to be equivalence between pleasures. It might be an impossibility to attain. This means that you have got to have a perception about what pleasure is, and how pleasurable the different activities you may engage are in the future, aside from the pleasure you are currently feeling.

Maximizing pleasure, intensity wise, could mean that one should inject heroin in ones vein, but the whole concept of ethical quantitative hedonism does the same by it self, and does not need any further intricacy. Every maximization of pleasure-intensity has a connection to the time wise maximization, and by that I mean that you can not maximize intensity, without a resulting effect on time and pleasure, since every intensity stretches over time. How can endless music listening, or endless video game playing, endless sex (if you could have it), be right? It would lead to chaos in society. But if qualitative hedonism where the right way to go about, for instance to learn mathematics, society would prevail. Higher pleasures must as far as I can see, be sensations. One must realize that even higher pleasures, like being satisfied over having studied and taken an exam, is a phenomenal feeling. How else could one be satisfied at all? It is the very meaning in the word satisfied that it is phenomenal, so even enjoying art is directly or indirectly phenomenal. There is not much that tops sex, evolutionary speaking, as a pleasure. But nature understands that we have to alter sensational feelings over the course of a day, to survive, even if it means that one lower the amount of pleasure one feels for the moment being. Also, pushpin for instance, can not be seen as an equivalent pleasure, to sex, or joy over being able to solve a mathematical enigma, since the latter things help our specie to survive. It is crucial to the qualitative hedonist´s position that he offers clear criteria explaining how to weight qualitatively different pleasures against each other. This criteria, I think, must be that of being able to survive as a specie and individual. Using ones brain, and having sex, are most important for our specie and our selves, so that must be qualitative. Yes, I said that sex is a qualitative occupation.

Etiketter: Ethical Quantitative Hedonism, filosofi, Hedonism, Philosophy, pleasure, qualitative occupation