![]() On the observe side you find people who hate easy gratification by e.g. There are no “solutions” to be found here, no reductions to simple pain/pleasure dichotomies. I think you can multiply instances of this self-inflicted pain or displeasure without any troubles. Take performance sports people, who punish their bodies for the purpose of achieving an Olympic medal or the ordeals of mountain climbers or the desire of religious people to flagellate themselves to please their divinity. The really more important issue is that gratification very often involves a great deal of pain which the pleasure seeker takes on board in order to achieve their goal. The colossal entertainment industry and the bulk of our industrial output which is designed to gratify consumers with mostly useless trinkets, serve those lukewarm desires. The general pleasure seeking or pleasure maximisation drive is nothing other than the cheap and easily acquired sense of being untroubled–not necessarily actual pleasure, but the absence of displeasure, discomfort, responsibility and so on. A masochist, for example, does not enjoy pain as such, but the gratification of having pain inflicted on them for all sorts of motives including the desire to be punished or dominated etc. But this depends on the person and what their sense of personal gratification involves. Pleasure on the whole (in general) is preferable to pain and on the whole humans will seek a pleasurable state of being in preference to a painful state of being. There are two issues embroiled in this that are not reducible in any such way. Who is being satisfied by such reductions of human impulses and motive to a common denominator I cannot say. ![]() They do not strike me as philosophical, but as templates for arguments about words and concepts, and they habitually leave the complexity of human reactions out of the picture in order to arrive at one “fundamental” criterion. ![]() I have to say that I dislike these hair-splitting arguments intensely. Now if the goal is to maximise pleasure and minimise unpleasure, the masochist is no longer a problem since for a masochist, pain is pleasure and not unpleasure. By definition then, one cannot like unpleasure. Unpleasure (opposite of the above): ‘The state or feeling of being unpleased or ungratified.’Īgain defined from the viewpoint of the subject or one experiencing the feeling, basically something he dislikes rather than likes. ![]() By definition it is impossible to hate pleasure. This is defined from the viewpoint of the subject or one experiencing the feeling, basically something he likes rather than dislikes. Pleasure (American Heritage Dictionary): ‘The state or feeling of being pleased or gratified.’ Rather than go into why pain is different, instead consider pain replaced with unpleasure which we can define as the exact opposite of pleasure. The word pain was chosen as the opposite of pleasure (like unhappiness compared to happiness, preferred to nonpreferred), but it is different in kind which causes the problem. I posed this problem to my philosophy professor and he sent me a long complicated reply based on a passage about masochism in Fred Feldman’s Pleasure and the Good Life.Īn alternative explanation, based on semantics, is much simpler. The hedonistic utilitarian goal is to maximise pleasure and minimise pain, but a masochist causes a problem since he equates pleasure with pain. The masochist problem in hedonistic utilitarianism.
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