Hedonism and Alienation
I was, for a time (due in no small part to reading Henry Sidgwick, whom I still regard as one of the greatest ethicists), a proponent of Hedonism, according to which (a) pleasure is intrinsically good, (b) pain is intrinsically bad, and (c) claims (a) and (b) exhaust the facts about intrinsic value.
I had my reasons. For one thing, as a monist theory of value, Hedonism is elegantly simple, and all else being equal, I think that simplicity is a good-making feature of a theory (“Do not multiply entities beyond necessity”, as William of Ockham admonished).
Additionally, value monists are able to avoid the difficult questions, which plague value pluralists, concerning, for example, how to weight the various goods relative to one another (and, in turn, how to explain the basis on which the weighting is done at all).
Furthermore, I have always found something plausible about the idea that one is directly acquainted, phenomenologically, with the goodness of pleasure and the badness of pain – but not with any other sources of value (admittedly, I’ve always been more skeptical about the goodness of pleasure; I really want to know how some instance of pleasure came about before deciding that it’s good – though I used to be skeptical of this desire).
But over time, I grew disenchanted with Hedonism, for a number of reasons - most of them unoriginal and not worth mentioning here. But the one that moved me the most is, I think, worth mentioning because it doesn’t seem to receive much, and that’s the fact that Hedonism is an alienating theory of value.
I’ll try to explain what I mean. Hedonism implies that nothing we do is valuable in itself, but only instrumentally, insofar as what we do is conducive to the promotion of pleasure. This means that when we pursue ends that seem to be good in themselves – knowledge, wisdom, virtue, athletic excellence, musical proficiency, friendship, etc. – this seeming goodness is merely illusory; if we could derive more pleasure from downing “pleasure pills” than pursuing such things, that would be the only sensible thing to do, according to Hedonism.
At this point, of course, the hedonist will rush to point out that the goods I have named really are good; far from holding otherwise, Hedonism merely explains why knowledge, friendship, and the like are good (namely, by virtue of producing pleasure!).
But that, by my lights, is simply to miss the point: what’s valuable in knowledge is knowing; what’s valuable in a friendship is the relationship; what’s valuable in running a marathon is the completion of a difficult feat. At least, that’s how it appears to me – and if Hedonism is true, then how it appears to me is wrong; indeed I am totally deluded about the actual nature of value. In that sense, I’m alienated from my actions insofar as they are aimed at things I conceive as intrinsically valuable but in fact are not.
On the other hand, were I to break free of my delusions and begin pursuing the one intrinsic good, pleasure, I would thereby be alienated from most of actions in another sense, given that very few of them are, in the ordinary course of things, aimed narrowly at attaining or promoting pleasure. Thus, to live consistently with Hedonism, I would have to either consciously act as though it were false (perhaps deceiving myself into think that it is in fact false) or else radically alter my own psychology do as to bring into alignment with the the idea pleasure is the only intrinsic good.
Were I to break free of both forms of alienation identified above and consciously pursue pleasure alone, then, ironically, I would surely find very little of it (the well-known Paradox of Hedonism; studying formal logic can be highly rewarding if one conceives of knowledge itself as valuable; not so much if one is only after pleasure).
I find it hard to believe that the best theory of value would leave one either in a state of profound alienation or else unable to act effectively on the theory.