Search

The evil God challenge argues that for every theodicy that justifies the existence of an omnibenevolent God in the face of evil, there is a mirror theodicy that can defend the existence of an omnimalevolent God in the face of good. People who invoke the evil God challenge further argue that because we find evil God theodicies to be implausible, we should find good God theodicies to be equally implausible. This article argues that in fact evil God theodicies are more reasonable than good God theodicies by expanding upon arguments offered by David Benatar regarding the nature of existence, and David Hume regarding the asymmetry in our sensations of pain and pleasure.

Contemporary philosopher David Benatar has advanced the self-evidently controversial claim that “coming into existence is always a harm.” Benatar’s argument turns on the basic asymmetry between pleasure and pain, an asymmetry he seeks to explain by the principle that those who never exist cannot be deprived. Benatar’s import is almost incredible: humans should cease to procreate immediately, thereby engendering the extinction of the species—a view known as “anti-natalism.” According to many of his readers, the ancient Hebrew sage Qoheleth expresses a pessimistic nihilism that runs as thick as Benatar’s.Prima faciegrounding for this assertion is that Qoheleth, like Benatar, raises the issue of whether coming into existence may be a harm—and gives an affirmative answer. In two passages, Eccl 6:1–6 and 4:1–3, Qoheleth declares that an unborn hypothetical person is “better off” than their existent counterpart. Yet the meaning and implication of these words is far from obvious. Does Qoheleth imply that the non-exister’s state, and non-existence in general, is universally superior to existence? Or is he instead speaking exceptionally, of particular persons in rare circumstances? By examining the two “better”-statements in their literary context, I will argue that Qoheleth intends these examples as exceptions. He does not go so far as to make the supremely nihilistic claim that coming into existence is always, or even generally, a net harm; yet, he does concede that in certain cases, it can be. Beyond this, I will explore how the two thinkers’ divergent conclusions can be traced to a deeper difference of philosophical method. This question concerning non-existence opens a window to Qoheleth’s broader scheme of values and therefore serves as a surprisingly useful entry point by which to engage his philosophy. The paper utilizes the methodology Jaco Gericke has recently termed “philosophical criticism,” but specifically applied to Qoheleth.

The so-called ‘Olympian’ proof in Plato's Republic contains one of the first explicit distinctions between the nature of intellectual and bodily pleasures. The argument for the superiority of the former rests on a) identifying pleasure and pain with certain kinds of filling and emptying (583b1–585a7), and b) differentiating between bodily and intellectual pleasures according to the kind of filling: (i)Bodily depletions differ from depletions of the soul in the kind of lack and, accordingly, in the kind of thing that fills the lack: hunger and thirst are bodily lacks which food and drink can cure, whereas ignorance and folly are cured by intelligence (585a8–b8).Thus, (ii), the kind of lack (belonging to the soul vs belonging to the body), together with the kind of filler (‘food’ for the soul vs food for the body), and derivatively the method of filling (eating vs learning) determine the kind of filling.(iii)Kinds of filling differ in truth: filling A is truer than filling B if and only if the kind of fillers used in A are more than the kind of fillers used in B and the kind of thing filled via A is more than the kind of thing filled via B (cf. 585d7–10).(iv)Fillers of the soul are more than bodily fillers (585b11–d4).(v)The soul is more than the body (585d5–6).Therefore, (vi), filling of the soul is truer than bodily filling, that is, filling of the soul is more really a filling (585d7–10).

Ben Bramble, Dan Haybron and others have endorsed the idea that there are unconscious, or unfelt, pleasures and pains. These would be sensory experiences that are genuine pleasures or pains, but experiences of which the subject is unaware. The idea that there are such things is worthy of attention in its own right; but I am interested in this alleged phenomenon for a further reason. I am attracted to an attitudinal theory of sensory pleasure and pain. Bramble has claimed that the existence of unconscious pleasures and pains reveals that attitudinal theories cannot be true. Chris Heathwood has offered a reply on behalf of attitudinalism. I think a better reply can be provided. In this article I explain why an attitudinal theory of pleasure and pain is consistent with whatever is plausible in the ‘unconscious pleasure and pain’ phenomenon.

The young Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) had perused many of the Epicurean writings of the French Enlightenment. According to Carlyle, such ‘Epicureanism’ consisted primarily in an emphasis upon pleasure and pain as the springs of human action, and a positing of self-interest as the foundation of sociability. However, Carlyle soon came to reject such notions, seeking salvation in the writings of Kant and Schiller, who stressed the possibility of disinterested virtue, and the importance of free, moral activity. Indeed, the Epicureanism debate continued to resonate in Carlyle's subsequent political writings, and particularly his notorious polemics againstlaissez-faireand ‘public opinion’. Finally, in Carlyle's last major work,Frederick the Great, he found himself faced with the unenviable task of painting an Epicurean into a patina of heroic virtue. Despite his best efforts, however, Carlyle's biography remained haunted by the spectre of Epicureanism. Nonetheless, as Carlyle's contemporaries recognized, his writings had done much not only to discredit the Epicureanism of the French eighteenth century, but also to shape the moral and political ideals of the British nineteenth.

This article responds to a new objection, due to Ben Bramble, against attitudinal theories of sensory pleasure and pain: the objection from unconscious pleasures and pains. According to the objection, attitudinal theories are unable to accommodate the fact that sometimes we experience pleasures and pains of which we are, at the time, unaware. In response, I distinguish two kinds of unawareness and argue that the subjects in the examples that support the objection are unaware of their sensations in only a weak sense, and this weak sort of unawareness of a sensation does not preclude its being an object of one's attitudes.

This article argues that Bentham was committed to attempting to measure the outcomes of rules by calculating the values of the pains and pleasures to which they gave rise. That pleasure was preferable to pain, and greater pleasure to less, were, for Bentham, foundational premises of rationality, whilst to abjure calculation was to abjure rationality. However, Bentham knew that the experience of pleasure and pain, the ‘simple’ entities which provided his objective moral standard, was not only subjective, and only indirectly accessible to the legislator, but also typically dependent on a complex of socially mediated beliefs and attitudes. All moral reasoning involved a process of inference from contingent ‘facts’ which was littered with possibilities for error. The Bentham who emerges is a more vulpine hedgehog than is usually allowed, whose core insistence is that, despite its imperfections, consequentialist analysis and decision-making remains the only viable route to a rational morality.

Some philosophers have claimed that pleasures and pains are characterized by their particular ‘feel’ or ‘hedonic tone’. Most contemporary writers reject this view: they hold that hedonic states have nothing in common except being liked or disliked (alternatively: pursued or avoided) for their own sake. In this article, I argue that the hedonic tone view has been dismissed too quickly: there is no clear introspective or scientific evidence that pleasures do not share a phenomenal quality. I also argue that analysing hedonic states in terms of liking or wanting is implausible. If it is correct that pleasures and pains are not united by any particular hedonic tone, we should instead simply conclude that there are several different hedonic tones. This pluralistic understanding of the hedonic tone view has generally been overlooked in the literature, but appears to be fairly plausible as a philosophical account of pleasure and pain.

The Principle of Universality asserts that a part retains its intrinsic value regardless of the whole in which it is a part or even whether it is part of a whole. The idea underlying this principle is that the intrinsic value of a thing supervenes on its intrinsic properties. Since the intrinsic properties remain unchanged so does the thing's intrinsic value. In this article, I argue that, properly understood, the Principle of Universality can handle seemingly troublesome intuitions about the relative intrinsic value of a vicious person having pain and his having pleasure. I specifically argue that the intuition that the former state is better is explained by the nature of the basic intrinsic-value states, which involve a person having a level of well-being and desert at a time. One implication of this is that given the nature of such basic intrinsic-value states, pleasure and pain are not value-bearing parts of virtuous and vicious attitudes.

From the nineteenth century onwards the stereotype of Haydn as cheerful and jesting has dominated the reception of his music. This study contributes to the recent scholarship that broadens this view, with a new approach: I set works by Haydn in the context of eighteenth-century ideas about melancholy, those of Edmund Burke, Francisco Goya, Henry Home (Lord Kames), Immanuel Kant and Johann Georg Zimmermann. Their conceptions of melancholy were dialectical, involving the interplay of such elements as pleasure and pain, freedom and fettering, and self-reflection and absorption. I consider the relevance of these dialectics to Haydn’s English songs, his dramatic cantata Arianna a Naxos and two late chamber works. Musical melancholy arises, I argue, when the protagonist of a work – be it the vocal character in a song or the ‘composer’s voice’ in an instrumental work – exhibits an ironic distance from his or her own pain. The musical dialectics in these works prompt listeners, for their part, to take a step back to contemplate the borders and limits of emotional experience and communication.

There is a tendency among those who identify themselves as subjectivists on the issue of defining criminal intent to dismiss or minimize the role of actual non-trivial harm in the determination of criminal liability and punishment. That is to say, they are those who argue that an individual’s subjective intent is a sufficient indication of potential dangerousness and culpability to justify punishment. In this essay, the author presents a view, based on Adam Smith’s recognition of the “irregularity of the sentiments,” that actual physical harm matters; that it reflects the negative component of the two great motivators, pleasure and pain; and that it can release the worst sort of emotional reactivity: retribution. The infliction of a non-trivial first order harm can invoke a deeply felt aesthetic reaction which, in turn, reflects our natural (and cognitively “irregular”) human sentiments. Trying to dispense with harm as a feature in our understanding of criminality seems prima facie absurd. Awareness of the sentiment, as Smith understood, helps temper the worst parts of our nature: that which hopes to crush the people and ideas we find threatening. Ironically, the existence of and need for harm as a necessary condition of criminality heightens our awareness of the limitations of reason in dealing with victims of crime. We are not simply cognitive creatures.

This paper examines Alvin Plantinga's defence of theistic belief in the light of Paul Draper's formulation of the problem of evil. Draper argues (a) that the facts concerning the distribution of pain and pleasure in the world are better explained by a hypothesis which does not include the existence of God than by a hypothesis which does; and (b) that this provides an epistemic challenge to theists. Plantinga counters that a theist could accept (a) yet still rationally maintain a belief in God. His defence of theism depends on the epistemic value of religious experience. I argue, however, that Plantinga's defence of theism is not successful.

How original was the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham? In John Stuart Mill's opinion, not very original at all. Bentham maintained that pleasure and pain should provide our chief criteria of the moral quality of actions, because they are important above all other things in making our lives go well or ill. But two thousand years before Bentham defended the doctrine of utility that ‘all things are good or evil, by virtue solely of the pain or pleasure which they produce”, a gentle and cultivated man had taught in a garden at Athens that the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain were the most fitting objectives in the life of the wise man. The name of this sage, who endeavoured to provide in his own career an exemplar of his doctrine, was Epicurus of Samos. On Mill's reading of history, utilitarianism and Epicureanism were in essential respects the same.

What if human joy (more technically, utility) went on endlessly? Suppose, for example, that each human generation were followed by another, or that the Western religions are right when they teach that each human being lives eternally after death. If any such possibility is true in the actual world, then an agent might sometimes be so situated that more than one course of action would produce an infinite amount of utility (or of disutility, or of both). Deciding whether to have a child born this year rather than next is a situation wherein an agent may face several alternatives whose effects could well ramify endlessly on such suppositions, for the child born this year would be a different person—one who preferred different things, performed different actions, and had different descendants—from a child born next year. It has recently been suggested that traditional utilitarianism stumbles on such cases of infinite utility. Specifically, utilitarianism seems to require, for its application, that all experience of pleasure and pain cease at some time in the future or asymptotically approach zero.2 If neither of these conditions holds, then the utility (and disutility) produced by each of two alternative actions may turn out to be infinite, and utilitarianism thus loses its ability to discriminate morally between them.

To update the view of human nature that undergirds eighteenth-century British/American political economy, this article reviews literature from diverse subfields of psychobiology. Findings on the structure, function, and evolution of the human brain confirm the duality between reason and passion that is at the core of the science of Hobbes. Contemporary findings across fields indicate that people become emotionally attached to objects, including verbal abstractions, through experiences with pleasure and pain. In contrast, human reasoning is essentially scientific. The duality between passionate motivation and humanity's unique capacity for reasoning makes political science important. By applying the scientific method to the subject of politics, people can design institutions that channel quasi-rational behavior toward outcomes that are mutually beneficial, rather than mutually destructive. Defining human nature correctly is the key to political science, and Smith's addition of the passion of sympathy to Hobbes's narrow definition of human motivation is essential.

Hume’s account of how the self enters the moral domain and comes to a consciousness of itself as a moral being is one which he superimposes upon his Treatise account of the constitution of the non-metaphysical self. This primordial self is for Hume constructed out of the passions of pride and humility which are themselves in tum constructed out of certain feelings of pain and pleasure, these feelings being worked on by memory and imagination, and converted back and forth into series of ideas and impressions. In presenting this account of the way in which we achieve a coherent self-awareness and self-knowledge such that we ‘know our own force’ (T 597), Hurne in fact employs a radical psychology which he must discard once the moral self comes into view. The use Hume makes of this psychology has gone unnoticed in the literature, but once we understand its implications we will be able to dispel the confusion that some have found in his story.

John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism contains noble sentiments and impressive trains of thought, but readers have generally not found it coherent. Mill at one point states, 'nothing is a good to human beings but in so far as it is either itself pleasurable, or a means of attaining pleasure or averting pain' 1 at another, 'the utilitarian standard of what is right in conduct, is not the agent's own happiness, but that of all concerned'.2 How can he possibly reconcile these two statements? My thesis in this paper is that almost from the beginning there has been a misunderstanding regarding what Mill means by quantity of pleasure and pain. Further, that with this misunderstanding cleared up, and with his conception of quality properly explicated, Mill's theory of utility will stand forth as a coherent teaching. Mill believes, in short, that there is no ultimate incompatibility between the greatest happiness of each, and the greatest happiness of all.

satisfactory as illiberal speech. Orwell recognized this point when he noticed in his review of Hitler's Mein Kampf that the liberal "hedonistic attitude to life" fails to satisfy some of the irrepressible longings of the human soul, and leaves room for the kind of appeal made by Hitler.' There is an inherent weakness in liberal rhetoric which cuts it off from some of the sources of political conviction and community. This weakness can be understood by contrasting the teachings of that founding father or grandfather of liberalism, Thomas Hobbes, with the doctrines of his classical opposite, Aristotle. In a familiar passage in the first book of the Politics, Aristotle argues that what makes human beings political, in contrast to other gregarious species, is the natural fact that human beings alone have logos- thoughtful, selective reason and speech- which, unlike the mere vocal power of indicating pleasure and pain, is used for indicating the advantageous and the harmful, and therefore also the just and the unjust. Aristotle accepts this as a fact of life and tries to make the best of it. He sees that political conflicts arise out of conflicting opinions about what is advantageous and just. 1 The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed. A. Orwell and I. Angus, 4 vols. (London, 1968), II: 29, cf. II: p. 168: "The energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions - racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of war - which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off as anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed so completely in themselves as to have lost all power of action."

When characterizing ta pathē in the Eudemian Ethics Aristotle claims that they are usually accompanied by perceptual pleasure or pain. He says:λέγω δ πάθη μν τ τοιατα, θυμν ϕόβον αἰδ πιθυμίαν, ὂλως οἶς ἒπεται ώς π τ πολὺ αἰσθητικ ήδον ἢ λύπη καθ' αὑτά.By affections I mean such things as anger, fear, shame, desire – in general anything which, as such, gives rise usually to perceptual pleasure and pain. (translation by Woods)

Why do we dislike and wish to avoid pain and suffering? Why do we prefer pleasure to pain? There are three answers to be considered. (1) We have a reason for wanting pleasure and for shunning pain. Our normal attitudes are guided by some rational insight about the nature of pleasurable and painful experiences. (2) Pleasure and pain do not in themselves provide any reason for wanting the one and shunning the other. It is just a brute contingent fact about our constitution that we are disposed to want and seek pleasure and dislike and avoid pain. (3) That pleasure is wanted and pain unwanted is a simple tautology. The attitudes towards the experience enter into the definition of 'pleasure' and 'pain'. A 'pleasant' experience is defined as a wanted experience and a 'painful' experience is defined as an unwanted one. We will be discussing philosophers who have held the second and third positions. I defend the first position.

The term "value" has a wide range of current usage in philospohy and the sciences. Descriptively, a man's "values" may refer to all his attitudes for-oragainst anything. His values include his perferences and avoidances, his desireobjects and aversion-objects, his pleasure and pain tendencies, his goals, ideals, interests and disinterests, what he takes to be right and wrong, good and evil, beautiful and ugly, useful and useless, his approvals and disapprovals, his criteria of taste and standards of judgment, and so forth. Parallel to this descriptive usage lies the realm of normative usage. Men not merely have values; they also make value judgments assessing their values. For in every self-conscious choice that the individual makes, in every creative act as well as every criticism, whether economic, moral, aesthetic, or any other, there are assumptions about what is desirable as well as desired, preferable as well as preferred, appropriate standards as well as functioning standards, and so forth. The same is true of social decisions, even as embedded in the normal functioning of social institutions and agencies.

LocKE'S writings have lately received some extensive coverage at the hands of Cambridge University Press and Allen and Unwinl-extensive rather than comprehensive if only because his epistemological theory is largely, though certainly not entirely, ignored. The emphasis lies rather upon his educational, economic, and political contributions. When one considers the enormous amount of extant literature concerned exclusively with the Essay, such emphasis seems not untimely. One of the more original contributions to the general corpus is contained in the collection of essays edited by John Yolton. In this paper,2 Hans Aarsleff devotes some careful attention to the problem of how knowledge of natural law is achieved-a problem to some extent highlighted in recent years by the publication of the hitherto unknown Essays on the Law of Nature. In the fourth of these essays, Locke had maintained that the law of nature could be perceived by means of the light of nature which, in turn, amounted to the combined functioning of reason and the senses. But this turned out to be far more complex than the terminology suggested: our senses provide us with knowledge of the world, sufficient in itself to warrant the inference to a designer, which is God; and our knowledge of the content of natural law is parasitic upon prior knowledge of God's intentions. This was both a cumbersome and an intellectualist account, and for that reason obviously not capable of explaining how 'most men' (and all men in principle) come by their knowledge of natural law. Aarsleff argues that the ultimate answer to this epistemological difficulty is to be found, in its most complete form, in the second edition of the Essay, and more particularly in Locke's hedonism. The truth of the matter is, if Aarsleff is correct, that our experience of, and reflection upon, pleasure and pain (forms of punishment and reward) provide us more directly with the requisite knowledge; for pleasure and pain have the effect of inducing and inhibiting certain forms of action respectively. This view also requires the religious hypothesis, since only in a Godordered world can one take pleasure and pain to be the infallible guides they are claimed to be; but this interpretation of Locke does have the merit of rendering natural law more readily and universally accessible. There is in fact a reference to this function of pleasure and pain in the fourth of the Essays on the Law of Nature, but it appears to be an isolated occurrence and suggests that at this stage Locke had not fully developed this line of thought. It remains remarkable, certainly, that the whole matter receives no explicit mention in the Second Treatise (where one would perhaps most expect to see the argument deployed), but here one can only suppose that he has taken it for granted. At any rate, Aarsleff's carefully documented analysis is persuasive, and leaves little room for doubt as to what Locke's intentions were. It is noticeable that there is no acknowledgement of the connection between Locke's hedonism and the knowability of natural law in Professor Seliger's equally scholarly work; and, perhaps as a result, Seliger spends much time defending the claim that for Locke natural law was at least partially knowable by all men. The defence is primarily directed against Richard R. Cox and Leo Strauss both of whom suggest that Locke is not convinced of the knowability of natural law. 3 There is no doubt that

The concepts of pleasure and good, both separately and in their relation to one another, have for centuries been a favourite and fruitful subject of philosophical discussion. The contrasting concepts of pain and evil, however, though by no means entirely neglected, have been, and still are, less popular among philosophers. The reason for this disparity is not altogether clear. The title of a recent autobiography, “Philosophers lead sheltered lives,” might support the explanation that philosophers are (no doubt very properly) reluctant to write on matters of which they have little or no first-hand knowledge. Pleasure and good, it may be said, form part of their own personal experience: but their academic seclusion has little place for either pain or evil. A more serious reason is the assumption, often made but rarely defended, that, since pain and pleasure, evil and good, are in some sense pairs of “opposites,” a full discussion of all four concepts is unnecessary. The nature of pain, it is thought, can easily be inferred from the nature of pleasure, and that of evil from that of good. But even if this were true, it ought not to be taken for granted; the belief (it is more often implicit than explicit) that these concepts are symmetrically disposed opposites ought to be held (if at all) only after an investigation into all of them. And in fact the belief is not true. It does not need profound insight or observation to see that we cannot (as some of the utilitarians once thought) construct a simple hedonic scale on which pleasure appears as a plus, and pain as a minus quantity. Contemporary hedonists have often paid more attention to the psychological complexities involved in this problem than did their classical predecessors. A. L. Hilliard, for example, distinguishes carefully between pain and unpleasantness. Pain he describes as a sensitivity, “correlated with the excitation of specific receptors in the nervous system”: unpleasantness is an affectivity (i.e. roughly, an emotion) to which physiological correlates, though they must be assumed to exist, have not yet been discovered.