Science of Pleasure II

The practice of undergraduates betrays their theoretical relativism. They do judge within themselves between things they like better than others. When they aren’t held captive by political politeness, they can even recognize that they believe their judgments have validity that others should recognize. They feel free to mock musical genres. They detest bad songs within a particular genre – this on matters presumably limited to “taste.”

Bentham, and even Mill, would agree that we must attend to and make judgments about our ends. Bentham asserted that all human aims could be gathered up under one word: pleasure. However, pleasure had many dimensions; every pleasure has a definite intensity and duration, purity and fecundity, and we anticipate it with more or less certainty in the proximate or remote future. Rarely does a contemporary utilitarian calculus work out the varying dimensions of pleasure, which is to say, it has stopped taking pleasure seriously. We say that pleasure is relative; but in reality it is too complex for our vocabularies and calculations. The difference is important for our future happiness.