PRACTICAL ETHICS  & HEDONISM  

What is Practical Ethics?

• Practical ethics are meant to concern substantive moral issues facing many of us each day, such as abortion or climate change. The subject of normative or theoretical ethics is the more abstract principles that might enable us to make decisions about these practical issues.

  What Ethics Is Not ,                                                                                                                                              

Ethics is not based on whether we feel something is right or wrong. Sometimes, our feelings signal to us that we are facing an ethical dilemma, and we want to “do the right thing,” but feelings also may prevent us from behaving ethically, perhaps out of fear or conflicting desires. Ethics is also not solely the purview of a religion or religious beliefs. Although most religions incorporate an ethical code of conduct into their belief system, religious faith is not required to be ethical and ethical principles apply to everyone regardless of religious affiliation. Being ethical does not always entail abiding by the letter of the law, although most laws articulate ethical standards generally accepted by the citizenry.

   HEDONISM  

•  Hedonism, in ethics, a general term for all theories of conduct in which the criterion is pleasure of one kind or another.
• Hedonism is closely associated with utilitarianism. Where utilitarianism says ethical actions are ones that maximize the overall good of a society, hedonism takes it a step further by defining ‘good’ as pleasure. As a theory of value, hedonism states that all and only pleasure is intrinsically valuable and all and only pain is intrinsically not valuable. Hedonists usually define pleasure and pain broadly, such that both physical and mental phenomena are included. Thus, a gentle massage and recalling a fond memory are both considered to cause pleasure and stubbing a toe and hearing about the death of a loved one are both considered to cause pain. With pleasure and pain so defined, hedonism as a theory about what is valuable for us is intuitively appealing. Indeed, its appeal is evidenced by the fact that nearly all historical and contemporary treatments of wellbeing allocate at least some space for discussion of hedonism. Unfortunately for hedonism, the discussions rarely endorse it and some even deplore its focus on pleasure.

   The Attractions of Hedonism                                                                                                                                           

• That there are many kinds of good life’s (what makes you happy might not make me happy), personal authority concerning well-being (choosing how to be happy is our personal choice), that misery is clearly bad for us and happiness clearly improves our lives, the limits of explanation (Why go through painful exercise? To be healthy. Why be healthy? To be happy. Why be happy? The explanation stops here, because the intrinsic value of happiness seems so self-evident, and everything else seems to lead to happiness), can justify many rules of good life (e.g., make good friends, find an interesting job, etc.), and that happiness is what we want for our loved ones.

   The Paradox of Hedonism                                                                                                                                                 

• The paradox of hedonism, also called the pleasure paradox, refers to the practical difficulties encountered in the pursuit of pleasure. For the hedonist, constant pleasure-seeking may not yield the most actual pleasure or happiness in the long run—or even in the short run, when consciously pursuing pleasure interferes with experiencing it.

• Hedonism has always had its fans. And, as we have seen, there are many good reasons for its popularity. It explains why there are many paths to a good life. It strikes a balance between a view that imposes just one blueprint of a good life, and a view that allows anything to be valuable so long as you think it is. It provides a ready explanation for why misery so clearly damages a life, and why happiness so clearly improves it. Hedonism off errs a natural stopping point for explaining what is intrinsically valuable. And happiness is what we want for our loved ones what better evidence that happiness truly contributes to a good life? I think that hedonists have good replies to the paradox of hedonism, the worry about evil pleasures, and Ross’s Two Worlds objections. But things become trickier when we consider the value of a happiness that is based on false beliefs. They can’t make sense of the idea that, of two lives containing the same amount of happiness, the one that continually shows improvement is better than the one that has gone steadily downhill. Perhaps happiness is not, aft err all, the key to our well-being. Let’s now consider an alternative approach one that tells us that getting what you want is the measure of a good life.

      Morality [or ethics] is not a subject; it is a life put to the test in dozens of moments.     

                                                                                                                      - Paul Tillich