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The felicific calculus is an algorithm formulated by utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) for calculating the degree or amount of pleasure that a specific action is likely to induce. 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 ...
Additionally, hedonic psychology explores the circumstances that evoke these experiences, on both the biological and social levels. [108] It includes questions about psychological obstacles to pleasure, such as anhedonia , which is a reduced ability to experience pleasure, and hedonophobia , which is a fear or aversion to pleasure. [ 109 ]
The idea of a rational agent is important to the philosophy of utilitarianism, as detailed by philosopher Jeremy Bentham's theory of the felicific calculus, also known as the hedonistic calculus. The action a rational agent takes depends on: the preferences of the agent; the agent's information of its environment, which may come from past ...
Hedonic motivation refers to the influence of a person's pleasure and pain receptors on their willingness to move towards a goal or away from a threat. This is linked to the classic motivational principle that people approach pleasure and avoid pain, [1] and is gained from acting on certain behaviors that resulted from esthetic and emotional feelings such as: love, hate, fear, joy, etc. [2 ...
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 term when consciously pursuing pleasure interferes with experiencing it.
Harsanyi rejects hedonistic utilitarianism as being dependent on an outdated psychology saying that it is far from obvious that everything we do is motivated by a desire to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. He also rejects ideal utilitarianism because "it is certainly not true as an empirical observation that people's only purpose in life is ...
The Introduction also contains Bentham's famous discussion of the "felicific (or hedonic) calculus"—his proposed method for determining which future course of action would produce the greatest net amount of pleasure over pain. According to Bentham, seven factors should be considered in weighing the value of a pleasure or pain: its intensity ...
The use of the term in psychology entered English with the translation from German ("Valenz") in 1935 of works of Kurt Lewin.The original German word suggests "binding", and is commonly used in a grammatical context to describe the ability of one word to semantically and syntactically link another, especially the ability of a verb to require a number of additional terms (e.g. subject and ...