Higher and Lower Pleasures Essay

to the point where some compare the ideals to Epicureanism because the only thing that mattered in life was blind pleasure and avoidance of pain. I find this misleading because both Mill and Epicureans defend their ideals by distinguishing between higher and lower pleasures. Mill thinks that intellectual pleasures like philosophy, music, and art have more value than sensual pleasures like gluttonous eating of desserts and sweets. This move towards a more quality over quantity type of hedonism…

Categorical Imperative concentrates more on our intentions. According to Mill’s Principle, Pat should not tell Chris that she cheated, because it would create more pain than pleasure. The pain that Chris would feel after finding out he was cheated on and the pain Pat would feel after being broken up with outweighs the happiness/pleasures of them both, so according to Mill, telling Chris would not be a morally permissible action. According to Kant’s Categorical Imperative,…

objects of people’s desire are either means to happiness, or included in the definition of happiness (Cahn & Markie, 2009). Mill describes happiness as pleasure and the absence of pain, and the only desirable end, the final good (Cahn & Markie, 2009). Every other desirable thing exists either for the pleasure they provide, or as a means to pleasure…

value pleasure, along with the avoidance of pain. The reason pleasure was the ultimate conclusion is that pleasure cannot be traded away. Bentham is a utilitarian, so he believes in the meaning of the consequences rather than the meaning of the actions. These trades adding up have a net consequence. Therefore, Bentham established the utilitarian maximus, in which humans must act to create the most total pleasure for a net positive consequence. Bentham’s primary thought of maximizing pleasure…

means to reach an end and how that end results in pleasure. Mill explains the importance and advantages of utilitarianism while also responding to misunderstandings about it. He believes in the greatest happiness principle and that if a society benefits from the impairment or disappointment of another because of a lack in obtaining a higher faculty, then this is okay because it is hedonic, in that it maximizes pleasure. Mill believes that pleasure drives human actions and that everyone has the…

Morality of Famine Famine or any natural disaster that happens, brings unimaginable pain and suffering upon the people that it affects. The main question to be analyzed in this paper is whether or not people from far away land should help ease the suffering of the people affected by famine. To help answer this question, I will compare two ethical approaches on how to dealing with this problem. The approaches used are John Stuart Mills and Peter Singer’s utilitarian perspective and Immanuel Kant…

utilitarian is seemingly only concerned with overall happiness, as dictated by the principle of utility, there are checks on the doctrine that Mill introduces to maintain its plausibility. First, while Mill does acknowledge the superiority of intellectual pleasures, suggesting that the above example should hold, the assault on the human dignity of the slaves, a component of happiness which Mill considers to be indispensable, actually elevates their pain to more than what an animal is capable of…

As humans, we typically live under two extremes in life, pain being the extreme we least desire, and pleasure being the extreme we most desire. Utilitarianism is considered to be a consequential and technological theory that holds the notion, that all actions should be judged in terms of his need in promoting the great is good for the greatest number of people. “Jeremy Bentham believe that you are Utilitarianism could be divided into three parts, he believe that humans was driven by the…

Here in Mill’s initial claim he is stating that happiness is the only thing that is intrinsically good, as he states “that pleasure, and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends;” (EL, 18) a claim that can be viewed as a support to Hedonism. However, Mill’s was strongly against how Epicurus defined his claim of happiness. Epicurus believed “that sex and money…

Ethics is the standards of right and wrong that advise what humans must do. Epicurus is one of the philosophers who taught about these ethics. Epicurus believed that the purpose of life was to attain pleasure. He believed that by attaining pleasure, one can live a good, happy life. Although this was his view on life, other philosophers such as his contemporary, Aristotle, had different views of what the purpose of life was. Epicurus was one of the major philosophers during his time. He was an…