DM e-mails:
“Pleasure is pleasure”, you write. If “pleasure” is univocal, then I’m inclined to agree. (Tautologies have that effect on me.) I suspect, however, that there may be some equivocation at work in our discussion. When I, on behalf of the hedonist, deny that all pleasures are equal, I’m not denying that pleasure is pleasure, but making a distinction between pleasure-instances and pleasure per se. Instances of the former include a taste of chicken marsala (hint, hint), the pangs of first love, the thrill of victory, the excitement of intellectual discovery, an experience of aesthetic rapture and so on. Pig pleasures – the sorts of pleasure instances suitable for porcines –are fine, but intellectual pleasures – the sorts of pleasure instances brought about through various cognitive activities – are better; that is, they produce pleasure that is greater in quality or quantity than that provided by their carnal counterparts. (N.B. By “greater in quality” I don’t mean “better” in a normative, non-hedonistic sense. What I have in mind is that the pleasure is more intense, or affects its bearer in more aspects of her mental life, or leads her to believe her life more worth living, etc.) Put differently, pleasure, when referring in a shorthand way to pleasurable states or events, is a determinable whose determinates are capable of varying in intensity, magnitude and duration (and possibly along other axes as well).
Please see the set-up for this response. Pollo alla marsala is on the way, but first I want to test my recipe once more before publishing it -- my new 'no dinner' diet makes that difficult. (Cutting out dinner 4-6 nights/week does lead to rapid weight loss; I'm down 20 lbs and fast approaching ideal weight.) Now if all you are saying is that pleasures come in different flavors and degrees of intensity, longevity, etc., then we have nothing to disagree about. Disagreement starts only if you say that A's being more intense (long-lasting, etc.) than B makes A better than B.
It seems to me that this maneuver shouldn’t be particularly controversial. Suppose a chess player says that combinative excellence is what makes for beauty in the game; the combinatively excellent is the beautiful. If the parallel is with the pleasurable is the good, then the application of your argument implies that some sequence of moves cannot better exemplify combinative excellence than another. Or if we say that the harmonious is the beautiful, then we should conclude that one artwork or musical arrangement cannot be more harmonious than another. But both parallel conclusions seem false, and it seems to me false in the case of pleasure as well.
Interesting analogy. So suppose beauty in chess = combinative excellence. (False, by the way: although subtle combinations are beautiful, there is chessic beauty that does not involve combinations, as I think you'll agree. But suppose the identity holds.) Now of course I grant that some combinations are more intricate, harder to see, more counterintuitive, etc. than others. So perhaps you are arguing as follows:
a. Beauty = combinative intricacy.
b. There are degrees of combinative intricacy.
Therefore
c. There are degrees of beauty.
Fine, as long as you don't say that one degree of beauty ought to be preferred over another. And similalry with pleasure and goodness. If goodness reduces to pleasure, then, given that there are degrees of pleasure, it follows that there are degrees of goodness. No problem --as long as one doesn't go on to say that one degree of goodness ought to be preferred over another.
Returning to Mill, what he wants to say is that some pleasures are superior to others, better, preferable (in the normative sense of more worthy of being chosen). My point -- which of course is not original with me -- is that if pleasure is the measure of the good, then no pleasure can be better than any other. A may be a more intense than B, a more intense degree of goodness if you will, but it cannot be a better degree of goodness.
So if all you are saying is that, for the hedonist, there can be degrees of goodness, then I agree, as long as you do not add to that the claim that some degrees are to be preferred over others.
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