Ethical hedonism: is pleasure — desirable consciousness — the only thing good in itself?

Henry Sidgwick, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

I looked for what is good in itself — not good as a means, not good because it leads to something else, but good as an ultimate end — and after examining the candidates I could find only one that answers: desirable consciousness, or pleasure understood in the widest sense as agreeable feeling.1 When I ask why knowledge, or virtue, or beauty is good, I can always intelligibly answer in terms of the satisfaction, the enrichment of consciousness, they afford; but when I ask why an agreeable state of consciousness is good, the question loses its hold — the desirability is there in the feeling itself, and no further reason is needed or possible.2

I do not say, as the vulgar hedonist does, that we always in fact pursue pleasure; psychological hedonism I reject, for we plainly desire many things for themselves. My claim is normative: pleasure alone is worth pursuing as an end. And I grant the paradox that the direct pursuit of pleasure often defeats itself — that happiness comes most surely to those absorbed in something other than their own happiness.

This is a truth about the means, not a refutation of the end. The ultimate good is the quality of conscious life; everything else we call good is good for its contribution to that.3

Sources

  1. As regards the first argument, to me at least it seems clear that these objective relations of the conscious subject, when distinguished in reflective analysis from the consciousness accompanying and resulting from them, are not ultimately and intrinsically desirable, any more than material or other objects are, when considered out of relation to conscious existence altogether.
    Lectures on the Ethics of Green, Spencer and Martineau, pp. 127–128
  2. The affirmative answer to this question was strongly supported in Greek philosophical discussion: but it is a paradox from which a modern thinker would recoil: he would hardly venture to assert that the portion of life spent by a martyr in tortures was in itself desirable,--though it might be his duty to suffer the pain with a view to the good of others, and even his interest to suffer it with a view to his own…
    The Methods of Ethics
  3. For what Green here refers to is an earlier passage in my book x — where I say that ' as rational beings we are manifestly bound to aim at good generally, not merely at this or that part of it; we can only evade the conviction of this obligation by denying that there is any such universal good. Now Green quotes only part of this passage, and his reference runs as follows: [Mr.
    Lectures on the Ethics of Green, Spencer and Martineau, pp. 128–130

Where the argument is made

  • The Methods of Ethics, Book I Chapter IV and Book III Chapter XIV (the examination of the ultimate good and the argument that it is desirable consciousness, i.e. pleasure broadly understood)
  • Book II (egoistic hedonism and the method of empirical hedonism, the measurement and comparison of pleasures)
  • the distinction of psychological hedonism (rejected) from ethical hedonism (defended), and the 'paradox of hedonism' (that pleasure is often best got by not aiming at it)

How the argument was received

Sidgwick's value theory and the foundation of his utilitarianism. It was directly challenged by his student G.E. Moore, whose Principia Ethica (1903) argued for "ideal utilitarianism" — that goods are plural and include knowledge, beauty, and personal affection as intrinsic goods irreducible to pleasure. Robert Nozick's experience-machine thought experiment (Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 1974) is the best-known modern argument against all mental-state theories of well-being: that we want to do things, not merely to have the experience of doing them. The contemporary three-way debate among hedonist, desire-satisfaction, and objective-list theories of well-being descends directly from this dispute. Singer and de Lazari-Radek defend a broadly Sidgwickian hedonism; most contemporary well-being theorists reject it.