Against the Intrinsic Value of Pleasure

Abstract

Hedonists hold that pleasure is the only thing of intrinsic value and, thus, that a personÕs well-being is reducible to the amount of pleasure she experiences. 1 One way to challenge hedonism is to contest the claim that only pleasure is intrinsically valuable; a well-known argument of this form is found in Robert NozickÕs experience machine thought experiment, which suggests that other things matter to us in addition to ''how things feel on the inside.'' 2 A plausible reading of the notion of other things mattering to us is to understand this as a way of saying that other things besides pleasure, or how things feel, have intrinsic value. If this is correct, then hedonism is mistaken. What goes unchallenged with this kind of argument is the assumption that pleasure has intrinsic value. However, the view that pleasure is intrinsically valuable can be challenged by considering the evolutionary role of pleasure as an experiential signal that both tracks individual well-being enhancing activity and motivates an individual to pursue things which contribute to his or her well-being. These ideas should hold, mutatis mutandis, for pain. Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson have argued that evolutionary psychology provides grounds for rejecting psychological hedonism. 3 However, the argument we will consider is that reflecting upon an evolutionary account of the emergence of the capacity for pleasurable experiences provides a reminder of the important relationship pleasures, as a kind, have to other goods, and thus cannot have their value intrinsically. This is an argument against normative hedonism. If it is correct, then pleasure has value, but not intrinsic value, and thus is not the summum bonum. As a result, hedonism, in its normative sense, fails to provide a plausible conception of well-being.Let us consider two ways in which we might define ''intrinsic value.'' The first way, following Moore, is to claim that something is intrinsically valuable if and only if it is valuable for its own sake, or in itself, in virtue of its intrinsic properties, rather than because of its usefulness in attaining some other good. 4 On this conception, something has intrinsic value if its

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