Hedonism

Hedonism is the view that the good life involves getting as much pleasure out of life as you possibly can. This means acting for the sake of pleasure, not gaining pleasure from certain actions such as the achievement of a goal. The “good life” can be described as “the life high in individual welfare” (Fred Feldman: Pleasure and the Good Life: Concerning the Nature, Varieties, and Plausibility of Hedonism) so it is when you only care about how your actions maximize your utility by experiencing the life most worth living and achieving the greatest balance of pleasure over pain. At first thought, hedonism seems like a compelling view of the good life. However, this initial thought mirrors the hedonistic pleasure principle in its superficiality. Thus, I will argue that hedonism is not the ideal view of the “good life”.

The idea of instant gratification reflects the ways in which hedonism is ultimately unsatisfying. The constant longing for pleasure in actuality devalues the fulfillment of attaining pleasure in that it is a never-ending process that could become dull. The experience machine is an example of shallow gratification. It is defined as when one can experience whatever they may desire by plugging into the machine. However, whilst in this machine, because one will not know that they are not experiencing reality, given the choice, most people would not plug in to the machine. They would rather experience real life as opposed to experiences that would limit them to a man-made reality. As Robert Nozick argues, it would be a mistake to plug-in, as we do not want to do things simply to have had the experience of doing them. Instead, we prefer to go through the actions required to fulfill the experience, resulting in us developing our own individual character. However, plugging into the machine would prevent one from evolving into the type of person they aspire to be. (Nozick, Robert, (1974) "pp42-45" from Nozick, Robert, Anarchy, State and Utopia...