Hedonism is a way of life that is rooted in a person’s experiences or states of consciousness that can be pleasant or unpleasant. The ethical egoist would state that a person should maximize his or her pleasant states of consciousness in order to lead the best life. Act Utilitarian on the other hand would state that these enjoyable states of consciousness should be maximized by one’s actions for everyone in order to attain the most utility. On the surface, this appears to be a good way to live, however, as Nozick states through his example of the experience machine that living life as a hedonist can be detrimental. It is a hollow existence that will ultimately be unsatisfactory because of the lack of making real decisions and relationships which are important to living a fulfilling life.
Nozick‘s experience machine creates experiences based on selections made by human beings themselves for their own individual. Every two years they are required to make this selection whilst feeling some distress (in reality they exist in a floating tank). Then they submerge into a fake world for another two years and so on (Timmons, 122-123). He believes that rational humans would choose not to plug into the experience machine because they would want the actual experience of life instead of a virtual existence. It is a shallow reality that they are provided which will not satisfy them for long. Especially because it does not allow them to develop their own person, or personality, it strips away their human qualities and turns each of them into an “indeterminate blob” (Timmons, 123). In fact, this is a man-made world that provides nothing but a selection of experiences to choose from, it is not an actual experience an individual can have. It is ...
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... making actual decisions, not selecting favourable experiences (which remain unchanged over the course of two years). In reality, relationships provide richness to pleasure, heightening it further than any fake pleasure could have been. There is always the challenge of trying, learning, failing and finally achieving. This achievement provides greater pleasure as well because one is able to distinguish between the lowest level (failure) and the overcoming of it at its highest level (achievement). Hedonists should see that it is important to be in tune with the entirety of reality, instead of just experiencing certain aspects of it.
Works Cited
Timmons, Mark. Conduct and Character: Readings in Moral Theory. Boston, MA: Wadsworth, 2012. Print.
"Allegory of the Cave." UW Faculty Web Server. Web. 19 Feb. 2012. .
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In determining what is the foundation of happiness, hedonism claims that it is pleasure with the absence of pain that is the only intrinsic good. An intrinsic good can be described as something that is good in and of itself. It is good not because it leads to something else, it is good for its own sake; as compared to an instrumental good, which is a means to an end. Pleasure describes the broad class of mental states that humans experience as positive, enjoyable, or worth seeking. Qualitative hedonists believe that there can be different levels of pleasure, meaning that some will be better than others. John Stuart Mill would be considered as a qualitative hedonist, which makes up part of his theory of Utilitarianism. In order to determine what is happiness, Mill establishes his Greatest Happiness Principle, which introduces the adoption of Hedonism. Mill’s argument for qualitative distinction of pleasures is inconsistent and problematic for hedonism, which brings about more problems than it solves for Utilitarianism.
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A moral theory should be one’s guide when deciding whether an action is either good or bad, wrong or right. There are many types of moral theories to choose from, but we will only focus on two: utilitarianism and ancient hedonism. These theories meet in their pursuit of something greater, for hedonism it’s personal pleasure while for utilitarianism it is happiness for the greater number of people. In this work, the differences and the similarities of utilitarianism and hedonism will be pointed out after explaining them separately.