Hedonism: Humanist or Heresy?
When you hear the term “hedonist”, what is the first thing that leaps to mind? Is it the grim, dystopian landscapes of cyberpunk movies featuring sprawling ghettos filled with drugs, crime and corrupt officials? Or perhaps you are reminded instead of those extravagant scenes where billionaires squander their wealth on jewellery, women and luxury cars?
Whatever it is, it’s likely that two things characterise your mental image of a hedonist: indulgence and materialism. Yet this is only hedonism taken to its most extreme, for it is an umbrella term covering a multitude of different positions that disagree about a variety of issues ranging from the nature of pleasure to whether we ought to prescribe or describe human behaviour. So let us begin this article by first diving beneath the surface of the water to see the whole hedonist iceberg, rather than just the flashy tip.
The word “hedonism” comes from the greek term “hēdone”, which is simply translated into “delight” or “pleasure”1.
Indeed, the original form of hedonism as proposed by a group of ancient Greek philosophers known as the Cyrenaics declared the maximisation of human pleasure as the ultimate good, and furthermore that it is present pleasures and desires that ought to be satisfied, rather than deferred for the future (this is refered to as a lack of “future-concern”)2. This school naturally seems very odd to us today with our paradigm of weighing long-term and short-term benefits, but at the time and perhaps to some nowadays it made sense. After all, pleasures are only pleasurable if they are experienced in the present. Simply remembering some past pleasure or anticipating some future one rarely makes up for a lack of it in the present, and to someone who sees pleasure as an ultimate good in life it would be perfectly rational (albeit in a manner that hardly qualifies as altruistic) to simply care about making oneself happy in the here and now. This is the school our indulgent movie characters tend to cast their lot with.Of course, as time has progressed, our societal tastes have changed considerably from what the Greeks considered acceptable. At present, there are two main fields of hedonist philosophy: motivational hedonism and ethical hedonism.
Motivational hedonism is quite simple: it states that the driving force behind much of or even all of basic human nature is the pursuit of pleasures. This is a descriptive field, and it does seem rather more in the domain of the scientists to decipher this question rather than that of the philosopher – though it makes the author shudder to think of how exactly one would test this hypothesis. Instead of going to some ethical committee to ask about whether it is morally right to test the base nature of humans as being pleasure-pursuing, though, ethical hedonists proclaim themselves as the committee and prescribe that the highest ethical good is the pursuit of pleasure. If it makes you happy to put a bunch of children together on a deserted island to test what motivates their behaviour, who are we to stop you?
Except it’s not quite that simple, as always. Just like so many other schools of philosophy, the ethical hedonists split up based on a variety of debates into different factions. What sort of entity is pleasure? Is pleasure directional; in other words, does it have a specific nature for any specific clear cause or object? Or is pleasure a phenomenal entity, a singular nature existing in the medium of our feelings isolated from specific objects? Or is it something else entirely?
Yet the importance of all these questions pale in comparison to the central one that plagued hedonists since the Cyrenaics: should pleasure be measured as an individual’s pleasant experience in the present, or are there other factors that should be weighed? Should we not also consider the future, the pleasures of others, and values such as justice?
Indeed, the Cyrenaics are known nowadays as hedonist egoists, and their theories have been regarded as ‘repugnant’ by philosophers as they require one to consider no consequences save for those the actor would face. This would mean that someone who enjoys committing acts that are morally wrong by common societal standards would be obligated by this school of thought to commit such acts, given that they bring him great immediate joy even when they cause great suffering to others. Even when future suffering is concerned such as guilt after the act, our hypothetical hedonist egoist would have to carry through with the act as he would have no future-concern. Defenders of hedonist egoism would say that the fear of future guilt would make the experience displeasurable, yet detractors simply rebut that this simply requires hedonist egoists to desensitise themselves to such guilt through whatever means possible. A rather heretical position, even to some rather extreme and cruel modern schools of philosophy.
Yet as time went on, the hedonist philosophy was tempered with altruistic concern as well. Hedonist philosophers became concerned with maximising the sum-total of human pleasures, rather than that of one individual person at a time, and this meant sacrificing some present pleasures. This also paved the way to future-concern in hedonism given that an action now could have a negative impact on someone else’s pleasure in the future, which would go against the aim of maximising the sum of all human pleasures.
This may sound rather familiar to some of our readers. Is this not quite similar to the utilitarian ideal of maximising the sum total of human happiness, substituting the word pleasure instead? An astute observation indeed, dear readers. Hedonist utilitarianism is the name of this school of thought.
Of course, this is subject to the standard objects to utilitarianism. Why should we be prioritising pleasure over values such as justice or truth? For instance, if a murderer was to be released from jail without the victim’s family ever knowing of it, this would increase the pleasure of the murderer while having no impact whatsoever on the pleasure (or lack thereof) of the family. In fact, if they are then deceived into thinking the murderer has been executed, they may be pleased that justice is supposedly done. This maximises the pleasure of all parties involved, yet there is clearly something morally dubious about this whole scenario, to put it gently.
In the present day, this argument against hedonism has gained fuel as humanism dominates global philosophical discourse, especially amongst laypeople. Defined by Merriam-Webster as “a doctrine, attitude, or way of life centered on human interests or values”3, humanism appears vaguely on the surface to support some form of hedonism. Given that human interests are assumed to be largely pleasure-driven (at least for motivational hedonists), it stands to reason that for humanists, what is ethical should be to pursue such pleasures. It is surely tempting to follow this train of thought. Since humanists supposedly define the meaning of life as doing what gives me pleasure, it’s certainly a seductive notion that what is good in life is also what happens to make me feel good, and that humanism intrinsically contains hedonism.
A watertight argument indeed, if one ignores the fact that it’s circular.
Apart from having to use a hedonist premise that may be flawed to inject hedonism into humanism, it’s apparent on deeper thought that humanism not only doesn’t intrinsically support hedonism, but in fact could even be against it. A closer look reveals that humanism doesn’t just espouse human interests but also human values as the acme of life with great intrinsic value. You know, truth, justice and all those things that hedonism rejects in every one of its forms. To a hedonist, such things are simply means to the end of pleasure. If values contradict pleasure, discard them in favour of means that don’t. To a humanist, such values are ends in themselves, and between values and pleasure, values should come out on top.
In the beginning of this article, the author invited you on a tour along the whole depth of the hedonist iceberg, rather than just the top. That was perhaps a bit of a lie; we have hardly brushed the surface of this fascinating ethical system. Over the course of the article we have momentarily skimmed over some pertinent questions regarding the nature of pleasure that baffle philosophers and psychologists alike, and entirely skipped over a very fruitful period of hedonist philosophical development that occurred in the 19th century with philosophers such as Bentham and Mill. Yet nonetheless, the author hopes that you have come away with a deeper understanding of hedonism beyond the movie scenes and can now appreciate the truths and even more so the flaws in the hedonist worldview. Now is a good time to start thinking a little more about what exactly it is we want for ourselves in life, what really motivates us and why regard that which is moral as such. Preferably not before bedtime (though I question the life choices of our dear reader to be on a philosophical article at night to begin with).
Keep thinking, and see you in the next article.
Etymonline. “Hedonism | Etymology of Hedonism by Etymonline,” n.d. https://www.etymonline.com/word/hedonism.
“Cyrenaics | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy,” n.d. https://iep.utm.edu/cyrenaics/#SSH3b.ii.
“Humanism.” In Merriam-Webster Dictionary, February 3, 2024. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/humanism.