Hedonism

The criterion of the good is read in nature before any reasoning: from birth every living thing seeks pleasure and flees pain, untaught. What the animal pursues spontaneously is therefore the first good in accordance with our nature, and no one proves it, any more than one proves that fire is hot. Yet the same argument turns against unbridled enjoyment: pleasure admits no degree beyond the removal of pain, so its summit is a stable state, the absence of bodily suffering and of mental disturbance (ataraxia), not the heaping-up of vivid sensations. Against the Stoics, who demote pleasure to an indifferent and reserve the title of good for virtue alone, Epicureanism holds pleasure to be the end itself, prudence being only the art of reckoning it.

Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus, 128-129 · Epicurus, Principal Doctrines, III

To fix what consequences ought to maximize, utilitarianism seeks the one thing desired for its own sake and never as a means: it is, the movement answers, happiness, that is pleasure and the absence of pain. Mill's argument is psychological, the only proof that something is desirable being that it is actually desired, and every desire reducing ultimately to happiness. This hedonist and welfarist thesis grounds the good in a fact of lived experience, not in an abstract perfection; Mill adds a qualitative hierarchy of higher and lower pleasures that brings the framework close to a eudaimonism without leaving it.

Mill, Utilitarianism, chapter 2 · Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation

Bentham starts from what he takes to be a fact of nature: pleasure and pain are the only two things we actually seek and shun as ends. Good and evil then have no separate content: to call a thing "good" says no more than that it tends to produce pleasure or ward off pain. Hence a hedonism at once psychological and moral, welding fact to norm through the same two sovereign masters and leaving no room for a flourishing or perfection distinct from the agreeable, against the objective goods of the Aristotelian tradition.

An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. I, §1

The criterion is drawn from the very nature of the living being: from birth, every creature pursues pleasure and shuns pain without any reasoning persuading it, which proves pleasure to be the first, connatural good. But Epicurus redefines what this pleasure is worth: its summit is not enjoyment in motion, which merely fills a lack, but the stable state in which, once the lack is filled, nothing remains to be added, the ataraxia of the soul and the aponia of the body. Pleasure therefore has a limit, the absence of all pain, which makes it fully attainable and turns back the objection that pleasure is insatiable. This is his break both with vulgar pleasure and with the intellectualist eudaimonism of Plato and Aristotle.

Letter to Menoeceus, 128-129 · Principal Doctrines, III and XVIII (the limits of pleasure)

The highest good is pleasure understood as peace, not as enjoyment: the end of the whole of physics is ataraxia, the state in which, the fears of the gods and of death dispelled, nothing more troubles the soul. Nature, says Lucretius, asks for only one thing, a body free of pain and a mind freed of care and dread. This definition of the sovereign good is taken over from Epicurus; Lucretius makes it the avowed aim of his poem and the famous image of the sage who, from the shore, watches the shipwrecked without peril.

On the Nature of Things, II, 1-61 (the proem: suave mari magno; nature asks for little)

Against the old objection that brands hedonism a doctrine fit for swine, Mill replies that it errs not about pleasure but about man: our higher faculties demand a happiness of another kind. Hence his break with Bentham's purely quantitative calculus: pleasures differ in quality as well, and those of the intellect, the feelings and the imagination intrinsically prevail, because whoever knows both would not consent for anything to sink to the lower. At the heart of the argument lies a sense of dignity that an existence confined to bodily satisfactions would wound, which tilts Mill's hedonism toward a flourishing close to eudaimonism.

Utilitarianism, ch. 2 (quality versus quantity of pleasures) · Utilitarianism, ch. 4 (happiness, the only thing desirable as an end)

Pressed to say what the good is, he flatly identifies the pleasant and the good: to live well is to feel as much pleasure as possible. This is not Epicurus's measured ataraxia but a hedonism of intensity. Cornered by Socrates, who makes him grant that even base pleasures count, he gives ground, but the opening thesis remains his own avowal.

Plato, Gorgias, 494e-495a (the pleasant and the good are one) · Plato, Gorgias, 495a-499b (the Socratic refutation)