How is it possible to decide which are the best pleasures

Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics. Terence Irwin. Indianapolis: Hackett. Mill, John Stuart a. Robson ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 77— Originally published In John M. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, — Miller, Dale E. Cambridge: Polity. Riley, Jonathan Brink, David Zalta ed. Consequentialism by Shane Gronholz. Happiness by Kiki Berk. Download this essay in PDF. According to Kent Berridge and Morten Kringelbach [ 8 ]: ; see also [ 9 ]: 4; [ 10 ]: 2 :.

The experience of one pleasure often seems very different from another. Eating delicious foods, experiencing romantic or sexual pleasures, using addictive drugs, listening to music, or seeing a loved one: each feels unique. The only psychological feature in common would seem that all are pleasant. Those neural mechanisms may overlap to a surprising degree.

Pleasures of food, sex, addictive drugs, friends and loved ones, music, art, and even sustained states of happiness can produce strikingly similar patterns of brain activity. These shared reward networks include anatomical regions of prefrontal cortex, including portions of orbitofrontal, insula, and anterior cingulate cortices, as well as often subcortical limbic structures such as NAc, ventral pallidum VP , and amygdala ….

No significant disagreement with these claims is represented in recent neuroscientific literature, and last year Berridge received an award for Distinguished Scientific Contribution from the American Psychological Association.

Note also three further points. First, pleasure-responses in many different kinds of activity, including intellectual and bodily activities, often overlap, the most obvious response, of course, being the smile. This suggests that they are at least using the same output pathways, and that we might reasonably expect the system generating the pleasure to be the same in each case.

Second, and more significantly, evolutionary theory suggests that we should expect there to be substantial neural overlap between the circuits underlying both kinds of pleasure.

To date, no evidence has been found of divergent networks for processing a particular kind of pleasure, such as intellectual pleasure. Third, and relatedly, consider the commensuration of different kinds of pleasure. From a computational point of view, rather than having separate circuits, it would be far more efficient to have a common currency of pleasure, which could be used for the comparisons needed for decision-making.

In order effectively to allocate brain resources it is important for the brain at all times to try to optimize the energy spent on pursuing things allowing survival as individuals and as a species Kringelbach, Green, and Aziz [ 11 ]. We need to be able to decide when we can safely listen to Oberon or play basketball at the expense of looking after our progeny or staving off starvation. It might be objected that when making decisions we do not standardly compare actual pleasure or pleasures, that is, currently experienced pleasure or current pleasurable experiences, but representations.

This claim is, of course, true, but it remains the case that these representations are of pleasurable experiences, and that comparing two representations may be simpler if they are representations of the same thing.

Other things equal, if you ask me to rank in quality two pieces of fruit, my choice will be easier if you show me two pictures of two different apples than if you show me a picture of an apple and a picture of an orange. In other words, the most plausible hypothesis is that, though higher pleasures of course involve higher-level brain activity, especially cognitive activity, there is no good reason for thinking that the pleasure of higher pleasures does not correlate with the same neural networks as lower, sensory pleasures.

But it may now be argued that the combination of activating the pleasure-circuits and activating certain cognitive processes leads to an entirely different kind of experience , which is in a sense more than the sum of its parts. Further, one might claim that phenomenal consciousness is a feature of the whole brain see [ 12 ]: And of course it will be denied by no one that the neural substrate of intellectual pleasures differs from that of bodily pleasures, in so far as intellectual and bodily experiences correlate with different parts of the brain.

So it may well be that human conscious experience of pleasure is different not only in degree but also in kind from that of other animals, primarily because of the advanced cognitive abilities of the human brain. At this point, it should be noted first that humans are not particularly good at introspection. We have the ability to fool both others and ourselves about our subjective experiences and motives.

Nevertheless, activities combining sensory and social pleasures such as those involved in a dinner party could have a synergistic effect on the higher-order pleasures experienced in humans, which might be hard to find in other animals. But until we understand a lot more about the effects on phenomenal consciousness of the co-instantiation of different kinds of brain activity such as cognition and the activation of the pleasure-circuits , this question must remain largely one for introspection and a priori argument.

In our experience, the kind of pleasure we take in, say, drinking lemonade is pretty much exactly the same as that we take in listening to music. Those experiences as a whole are very different from one another, of course, but not in so far as they are pleasurable. Footnote 3 And this, as we have suggested above, explains why it is sometimes so easy to compare two very different kinds of pleasurable experience. Further, the parsimony-related arguments above apply also at the level of the whole brain.

If there is some phenomenal difference between intellectual and bodily pleasures which cannot be put down to the different neural correlates of cognition and sensory experience, that difference must correlate with certain physically realized relations between cognition and the pleasure-circuits on the one hand, or sensory experience and the pleasure-circuits on the other hand, that do not consist merely in co-existence.

And these physical substrates would themselves have to be of different kinds, to explain the difference at the phenomenal level. But we would expect evolution not to produce such physical substrates unless they are necessary.

And as far as we can see, there is no reason to think that mere co-existence as described by the bolt-on view would not be functionally sufficient. Further, important phenomenal differences, if they correlate with the lack of any common neural currency, might be expected to make comparisons of pleasures more difficult than they appear to be, and themselves more costly in terms of expenditure of evolutionary energy.

This does not mean that it may not emerge when and if new brain imaging technologies and methodologies of interpreting images emerge. For passionate emotions of all sorts, and for everything which has been said or written in exaltation of them, he professed the greatest contempt.

He regarded them as a form of madness. If I am asked, what I mean by difference of quality in pleasures, or what makes one pleasure more valuable than another, merely as a pleasure , except its being greater in amount, there is but one possible answer If one of the two is, by those who are competently acquainted with both, placed so far above the other that they prefer it And if a majority of people acquainted with these pleasures agree, we are comforted in our inference.

As Mill puts it, we are justified in ascribing to the preferred enjoyment a superiority in quality. By the testimony of those who are acquainted with both. There is no other tribunal. Michael Sandel, for example, writes that:. The only basis for judging one experience better or worse than another is [for Bentham] the intensity and duration of the pleasure or pain it produces Bentham recognizes no qualitative distinction among pleasures.

In choosing between alternatives, quantity of pleasure is [for Bentham] the only criterion. Let us look back a little It is to be observed, then, that for the sake of accuracy, it was necessary, instead of the word quantity to make use of the less perspicuous term value.

For the word quantity will not properly include the circumstances But, why should we suppose that he did not discern quality or, that while seeing it, he refused to take it into account? Maybe he was just concentrating on the measurable properties of lots of pain and pleasure as the title of the chapter suggests. It may be of use, in this place, to recapitulate the several circumstances, which, in establishing the proportion betwixt punishments and offenses, are to be attended to.

These seem to be as follows … The magnitude of the punishment: composed of its intensity and duration ;. The quality of the punishment A seventh property, therefore, to be wished for in a mode of punishment, is that of subserviency to reformation , or reforming tendency. Now any punishment is subservient to reformation in proportion to its quantity : since the greater the punishment a man has experienced, the stronger is the tendency it has to create in him an aversion towards the offense which was the cause of it: and that with respect to all offenses alike.

But there are certain punishments which, with regard to certain offenses, have a particular tendency to produce that effect by reason of their quality. It would be pedantic and wearisome for a writer in philosophy or politics to always use technical words, as is done in geometry, for example.

This simply means that when evaluating something, we should take only its value into account. For clearness' sake then, I will identify the sense in which some these words are used here. Nothing else is meant by this word. No psychological theory is implied. The expression un lot de is more common in French. Larousse gives the following definition:.

Ensemble d'articles, d'objets assortis, de marchandises vendues ensemble : Un lot de chaussures, de ferraille. We use it here in the more restrictive acceptation of Locke, Hartley and the two Mills, reserving it to indicate those states of mind whose immediate antecedent is a state of body:.

Feelings are of four sorts: Sensations, Thoughts, Emotions, and Volitions … A mind does not, indeed, like a body, excite sensations, but it may excite thoughts or emotions. In Utilitarianism , Mill uses the word in a different and less extensive sense, indicating by it those feelings of appeasement that follow the fulfilment of our desires and inclinations, and indicate that that we have had enough , that we do not desire more , that we are sated or satiated. In this sense, to be satisfied is a synonym of being content to have obtained what we desired.

Whoever supposes that this preference takes place at a sacrifice of happiness — that the superior being, in anything like equal circumstances, is not happier than the inferior — confounds the two very different ideas , of happiness, and content. Bowring edition, Edinburgh, Tait, , vol. This has led us to mistake association for identity.

The mistake also betrays a false view of human nature, which sees our intellectual or spiritual aspects as being what truly makes us human, and our bodies as embarrassing vehicles to carry them.

When we learn how to take pleasure in bodily things in ways that engage our hearts and minds as well as our five senses, we give up the illusion that we are souls trapped in mortal coils, and we learn how to be fully human. We are neither angels above bodily pleasures nor crude beasts slavishly following them, but psychosomatic wholes who bring heart, mind, body and soul to everything we do.

Gentle medicine could radically transform medical practice. Jacob Stegenga. Childhood and adolescence. For a child, being carefree is intrinsic to a well-lived life. Luara Ferracioli. Meaning and the good life. Sooner or later we all face death. Will a sense of meaning help us? Warren Ward. Philosophy of mind. Kristopher Nielsen. Rituals and celebrations. We need highly formal rituals in order to make life more democratic.