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Ethical or normative hedonism is the thesis that the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain are the highest moral principles of human behavior. [ c ] It implies that other moral considerations, like duty , justice , or virtue , are relevant only to the extent that they influence pleasure and pain.
It is also the root of the English word "hedonism". In Greek mythology, Hedone is personified as a goddess of pleasure, enjoyment, and delight, as the daughter born from the union of Eros (personification of love) and Psyche (personification of the soul). [1] She was associated more specifically with sensual pleasure.
[31] [32] Aesthetic hedonism makes this relation part of the definition of beauty by holding that there is a necessary connection between pleasure and beauty, e.g. that for an object to be beautiful is for it to cause pleasure or that the experience of beauty is always accompanied by pleasure.
For the hedonist, constant pleasure-seeking may not yield the most actual pleasure or happiness in the long term when consciously pursuing pleasure interferes with experiencing it. The utilitarian philosopher Henry Sidgwick was first to note in The Methods of Ethics that the paradox of hedonism is that pleasure cannot be acquired directly. [1]
Achievement and Hedonism – self-centered satisfaction; Hedonism and Stimulation – a desire for affectively pleasant arousal; Stimulation and Self-direction – intrinsic interest in novelty and mastery; Self-direction and Universalism – reliance upon one's own judgement and comfort with the diversity of existence
Hedonism is subdivided into egoistic hedonism, which only takes the agent's own well-being into account, and universal hedonism or utilitarianism, which is concerned with everyone's well-being. [46] [43] Intuitionism holds that we have intuitive, i.e. non-inferential, knowledge of moral principles, which are self-evident to the knower. [46]
Bentham, an ethical hedonist, believed the moral rightness or wrongness of an action to be a function of the amount of pleasure or pain that it produced. The felicific calculus could in principle, at least, determine the moral status of any considered act.
Epicureanism bases its ethics on a hedonistic set of values, seeing pleasure as the chief good in life. [35] [36] Hence, Epicurus advocated living in such a way as to derive the greatest amount of pleasure possible during one's lifetime, yet doing so moderately in order to avoid the suffering incurred by overindulgence in such pleasure. [35]