And the meaning which pessimism and optimism give to the categories of good and evil is not an ethical sense, but an economic or hedonistic sense.
Just because the hedonistic analysis is crude, it has to seize on something obvious.
I owe the suggestion of this mode of interpreting the hedonistic calculus of utilitarianism to Dr.
To overlook the Cyrenaic recognition of social obligation and the hedonistic value of altruistic emotion is a very common expedient of those who are opposed to all hedonistic theories of life.
But the difficulty is that there is no chance, upon the hedonistic psychology of desire, for this rational conviction to get in its work, even if it be intellectually entertained.
Whatever the errors arising from its hedonistic psychology, no other theory has been available for the social or political reformer, combining so much truth with such ready applicability.
Mill's statement, in other words, puts the problem which hedonistic utilitarianism has to solve.
Even in its revised version utilitarianism did not wholly escape from the rigid unreal separation between the selfhood of the agent and his social surroundings forced upon it by its hedonistic psychology.
Even the Epicureans, who developed further the hedonistic theory of life, emphasized the values of friendship as among the choicest and most refined sources of pleasure.
Only the preconceptions of hedonistic psychology would ever lead one to deny the existence of reactions and impulses called out by the sight of others' misery and joy and which tend to increase the latter and to relieve the former.
The utilitarians' explanation of the constraint of desire by the authority of right is framed to meet the peculiar difficulty in which theirhedonistic theory places them.
Bentham and Mill in the text; Watson, Hedonistic Theories from Aristippus to Spencer.
If among Plato's contemporaries who advocated the Hedonistic doctrine, there were any who laid their main stress upon these intense pleasures, he may be considered to have replied to them under the name of Philebus.
Yet the fact is, that those who affirm the pleasures attending the exercise of Intelligence to be better and greater, and the pains less, than those which attend other occupations, are really arguing upon the Hedonistic basis.
But not till we find some common measure for sound and colour and flavour and thought and affection, will it be possible to compare in any hedonistic scales the pleasures they produce.
When we have a hedonistic calculus with its senior wranglers," says Mr. Bain, "we shall begin to know whether society admits of being properly reconstructed.
But a still more important and fundamental objection to the hedonistic form of evolutionism was deduced from the nature of pleasure itself; for it can be modified indefinitely, and always follows in the wake of function.
He meets the hedonistic proposition that all desire is for personal pleasure, by the doctrine that no particular desire has pleasure as its end, since all pleasure presupposes a previous desire in the satisfaction of which it consists.
Yet it is through this assumption that an apparent harmony between Mr Spencer's hedonistic ethics and his view of the tendency of evolution is brought about.
When any further answer is attempted now to the question, it appears to be on hedonistic grounds.
It can readily be seen that all three of the writers cited are utilitarians, and the last two are what have been characterized as hedonistic utilitarians.
The hedonistic moralists made pleasure and pain the only ultimate reasonable stimulants to action.
Their only chance of discovering how to cure it is to vivisect the patient; and it is found, by the hedonistic calculus, that if they do so, a general preponderance of pleasure over pain will result.
Thus all the requirements of the hedonistic calculus are satisfied!
And then they pretend, and no doubt believe themselves, that they have been led to their conclusions by the hedonistic calculus.
Of course," said Parry, "the hedonistic calculus is difficult to apply.
It touches the notion of duty whether an exact hedonistic retribution is to be demanded for what is termed merit and guilt: so that without such supernatural remuneration virtue, perhaps, would be discredited and deprived of a motive.
A rejection of hedonistic psychology, therefore, by no means involves any opposition to eudæmonism in ethics.
It was to justify poetry against the attacks of Plato that Aristotle advanced a hedonistic view of poetry and propounded his theory of katharsis.
In view, however, of other pronouncements, such an endeavor to father upon him the hedonistic theory of the purpose of art seems strained and ineffective.
Spencer is involved in effect in most of the confusions and contradictions of hedonistic psychology.
In this aspect Christianity invites comparison with Stoicism, and indeed with pagan ethical philosophy generally, if we except the hedonistic schools.
Philosophy, in the Greek view, should be the art as well as the science of good life; and hedonistic philosophy would seem a bungling and uncertain art of pleasure, as pleasure is ordinarily conceived.
But certainly few modern moral philosophers would be found in the present day ready to defend the crudities ofhedonistic psychology as they appear in Bentham and Mill.
He accepted bodily without farther questioning the hedonistic psychology by which the Utilitarians sought to justify their theory while he rejected the theory itself.
The second confusion is the tacit assumption that the pleasure of the hedonist is necessarily or characteristically of a purely physical kind; this assumption is in the case of somehedonistic theories a pure perversion of the facts.
Hedonistic theories of conduct have been held from the earliest times, though they have been by no means of the same character.
Statics is concerned with the influence of individual utility-scales, or utility-scales and psychic cost-scales, hedonistic phenomena.
I may add that this equilibrium scheme is, in my judgment, equally useless as the basis of a hedonistic theory of welfare, since it is absolute amounts of utility that are significant there.
This is the ideal case of economic theory in which "moral distinctions are irrelevant," and the economic man is free, according to the myth, to perform his hedonistic calculations without thought of moral scruple.
So the institution of ownership is taken into the inquiry not as a factor of growth or an element subject to change, but as one of the primordial and immutable facts of the order of nature, underlying the hedonistic calculus.
Yet the proposition in the text remains true,--as true as hedonistic propositions commonly are.
The familiar practical maxim of "charging what the traffic will bear" rests on a principle of this kind, and affords one of the readiest practical illustrations of the working of the hedonistic calculus.
The canons of hedonistic calculus permit none but a quantitative difference in the response.
The hedonistic magnitudes vary from one situation to another, but, except for variations in the arithmetical details of the hedonistic balance, all situations are, in point of economic theory, substantially alike.
Or they are construed and interpreted into the rationalistic terms of the hedonistic calculus by resort to an ambiguous use of the hedonistic concepts.
In hedonistic theory, production of course means the production of utilities, and utility is of course utility to the consumer.
The nearest approach to this is obtained through the study of the most broadly developed, public spirited men, and such men do not work in accordance with hedonistic principles.
So that he already has a hedonisticdeterminant for his own conduct which is in harmony with the biological concepts of Aristotle.
Putnam himself and most of us; and is not it true that, though the ethical determinants of behaviour are not auspicious for the average sexual satisfactions of man, yet are they not themselves forms of hedonistic satisfactions?
Such differences as one can discern between the two interpretations seem small indeed--like many others to which idealism has been wont to point in disparagement of the hedonistic world view.
This is the province within which a hedonistic account of the economic motive holds good with a cogency that anti-hedonistic criticism has not been able to dissolve.
If this distinction in the foci of satisfaction is kept clear it must do away with a large amount of the hedonistic interpretations of satisfaction in which many critics have indulged.
And these outlays are so important in industry and commerce that the impression comes easily to prevail that all business undertaking, and then all consumption of finished goods, fall under the simple hedonistic type.
Hence its utilitarian or hedonistic side, and the pleasure and pain, which are, as it were, the practical echo of aesthetic values and disvalues, of the beautiful and of the ugly.
Hardly has this hedonistic conception of art been received by philosophers, who admit one or more spiritual values, of truth or of morality, than the following question must necessarily be asked: What should be done with art?
For the empiricists of Aesthetic, intellectualism and moralism represent progress; for the intellectualists, hedonistic and moralistic alike, agnosticism is progress and may be called Kant.
With the troubadours, we may find traces of the hedonistic view of art, and the rigoristic hypothesis finds in Tertullian and in certain Fathers of the Church staunch upholders.
Thus it happened that art, which, on the purely hedonistic hypothesis, had been treated as a beautiful courtezan, became in the hands of the moralist, a pedagogue.
The aesthetic-hedonistic point of view has been presented in several forms.
That is the hedonistic hypothesis, which has been dealt with and disproved in this book.
The objection made to the hedonistic method contains a truth, but includes with it an untruth.
And asserting this to be its assumption he proceeds to point out difficulties in the way of the hedonistic calculation; apparently for the purpose of implying that these difficulties tell against the hedonistic theory.
But the very indefiniteness of all hedonistic calculations, which was sufficiently shown in Book ii.
It may be replied that if these permanent sources of pleasure are consciously sought merely as a means to the hedonistic end, they will not afford the happiness for which they are sought.
It should be observed that neither Cumberland nor Shaftesbury uses the term "Good" (substantive) in a purely and exclusively hedonistic sense.
There are, however, objections urged against the Hedonistic method which go much deeper; and by some writers are pressed to the extreme of rejecting the method altogether.
I have certainly criticised this morality unsparingly: but I conceive myself to have exposed with equal unreserve the defects and difficulties of the hedonistic method (cf.
It may be said that by giving this extension to the notion, we considerably increase the scientific difficulties of the hedonistic comparison, which have already been pointed out (Book ii.
But then we are clearly introducing a non-hedonistic ground of preference: and if this is done, the method adopted is a perplexing mixture of Intuitionism and Hedonism.
Not that the pursuit of pleasure or the avoidance of pain can be the unbroken motive-force even of the most hedonistic among us.
