Science of Pleasure I

Popular understanding too easily equates utilitarianism with instrumental rationality, a relentless logic of efficiency incapable of evaluating the ends it pursues.

On the other hand, an introductory course in ethics will insist that the concept of the end, pleasure, plays a central role in the evolution of utilitarian thought. Whereas Jeremy Bentham insisted that Halo is as good as Heidegger, Bentham’s successor John Stuart Mill retorted, “Better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.” On this story, Bentham thought all pleasures could be quantified and so compared, but Mill claimed that pleasures may be qualitatively different and so incomparable. For Mill, only one who has tasted the pleasures of port and the pleasures of beer can judge between them.

Still, what moral does the introductory ethics student draw from this story? I suspect that they may go further than Mill. Perhaps they conclude that there is no judging, not even within oneself, not between even comparable pleasures of beer and port. Perhaps they make every pleasure a potentially absolute pleasure relative to some potential hedonist for whom “man is the measure of all things.” And so we are delivered back into the hands of instrumental rationality, where we can no longer reason about ends, but only about means.

What would it mean to take utilitarianism seriously? That is, can we imagine paying closer attention to pleasure, to its natures? Does utilitarianism have some insight to offer us in thinking about ends?