“It is a mistake...to suppose that the public wants the environment protected or their lives saved and that they will be grateful to any idealist who will fight for such ends. What the public wants is their own individual comfort.”
— Isaac Asimov, The Gods Themselves
By Merriam-Webster dictionary’s definition, a hedonist is a person who is devoted to the pursuit of pleasure. Nevertheless, this “pleasure” is misrepresented to connote only sensual pleasure, obtained under indulgence.
Hedonism was founded by the Ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus (341 BC-270 BC). The philosophy equates happiness with “pleasure and the absence of pain” and unhappiness with “pain and the privation of pleasure” (Mill, Utilitarianism, 1863). Specifically, pleasure is “the only thing desirable as ends' ' as well as “the sole end of human action. Hence, the hedonists’ actions are not bound by any moral doctrines nor the consideration for the community, but solely to accumulate the most and the best pleasure.
(From left to right: Epicurus, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill)
The philosophy bifurcated into two sects on the kind of pleasure hedonists ought to attain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), an English social reformer and the founder of modern utilitarian philosophy, maintains pleasure as quantitive only. Namely, there is no qualitative difference between different types of pleasure and one only strives to accumulate the most pleasure possible. On the other hand, John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) separates pleasure into two categories: lower, more base pleasure and higher, more noble pleasure. The lower pleasure can be experienced by base animals like pigs while the higher pleasure can only be appropriated by intellectual human beings. Moreover, "a beast's pleasure (lower pleasure) does not satisfy a human being's conception of happiness (constituted of higher pleasure)" (Mill, Utilitarianism, 1863). In sum, Bentham's version of hedonism encourages people to accumulate the most pleasure, regardless of kind, while Mill's version encourages people to pursue higher pleasure.
“All Desirable things...are desirable either for the pleasure inherent in themselves, or as means to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain.”
Mill, Utilitarianism, 1863
In response to hedonism’s negative connotation nowadays, the philosophy advocates moderation enforced by reason, rather than indulgence. For instance, hedonists would enjoy a small portion of Halloween candies because consuming too many sweets would cause a sugar crash in the short-term and bad teeth in the long run—both are pains that ought to be avoided.
To learn more about hedonism, check out this video on Epicurus, The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, and explore on Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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