In meditation there are the jhanas, which include states of intense physical pleasure (like a runner’s high). I learned how to do this, but the pleasure gets boring—though not less intense—after about 10 minutes or so and I feel tempted to go do something which is less pleasurable (and not less painful or offering greater future benefits). (And you’d think it would be habit forming, but in fact I have a hard time keeping up my meditation habit...)
What this taught me is that I don’t always want to maximize pleasure, even if I can do it with zero cost. I thus have a hard time making sense of what hedonists mean by “pleasure”.
If it’s just positive emotions and physical pleasure, then that means sometimes hedonists would want to force me to do things I don’t want to do, with no future benefit to me, which seems odd. (I guess a real bullet-biting hedonist could say that I have a kind of akrasia, but it’s not very persuasive.)
It also seems that, sometimes, hedonists who say “pleasure” mean some kind of more subtle multidimensional notion of subjective experiences of human flourishing. Giving a clear definition of this seems beyond anybody now living, but in principle it seems like a safer basis for hedonistic utilitarianism, and bothers me a lot less.
But now I’m not so sure, because I think most of your arguments here also go through even for a complicated, subtle notion of “pleasure” that reflects all our cherished human values.
In meditation there are the jhanas, which include states of intense physical pleasure (like a runner’s high). I learned how to do this, but the pleasure gets boring—though not less intense—after about 10 minutes or so and I feel tempted to go do something which is less pleasurable (and not less painful or offering greater future benefits). (And you’d think it would be habit forming, but in fact I have a hard time keeping up my meditation habit...)
What this taught me is that I don’t always want to maximize pleasure, even if I can do it with zero cost. I thus have a hard time making sense of what hedonists mean by “pleasure”.
If it’s just positive emotions and physical pleasure, then that means sometimes hedonists would want to force me to do things I don’t want to do, with no future benefit to me, which seems odd. (I guess a real bullet-biting hedonist could say that I have a kind of akrasia, but it’s not very persuasive.)
It also seems that, sometimes, hedonists who say “pleasure” mean some kind of more subtle multidimensional notion of subjective experiences of human flourishing. Giving a clear definition of this seems beyond anybody now living, but in principle it seems like a safer basis for hedonistic utilitarianism, and bothers me a lot less.
But now I’m not so sure, because I think most of your arguments here also go through even for a complicated, subtle notion of “pleasure” that reflects all our cherished human values.