Hedonism — An ethical doctrine holding that pleasure is the highest good and the only genuine end of human action. The word derives from the Greek hēdonē (“pleasure”). It is useful to distinguish psychological hedonism — the descriptive thesis that we always in fact pursue pleasure and avoid pain — from ethical or normative hedonism, which prescribes pleasure as that which we ought to seek because it alone is intrinsically good. The first hedonist school was the Cyrenaic, founded by Aristippus of Cyrene, who identified the good with the immediate, sensory, bodily pleasure of the present moment. Epicurus, though also a hedonist, gave pleasure a more sober meaning: he distinguished kinetic pleasures (active and intense, bound up with satisfying a desire) from katastematic ones (stable, defined by the absence of bodily pain — aponia — and of mental disturbance — ataraxia), privileging the latter as true happiness. In the modern era hedonism reappears in the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham, who makes pleasure and pain the basis of a moral “calculus” able to measure the amount of happiness produced by an action; John Stuart Mill refined this position by introducing a qualitative distinction between “higher” pleasures (intellectual and moral) and “lower” ones (sensory), refusing to reduce the value of pleasure to mere intensity. A classic problem tied to the doctrine is the so-called paradox of hedonism: those who pursue pleasure directly tend not to attain it, whereas it usually arises as a by-product of other activities. Hedonism stands opposed to asceticism and is closely related to the concept of eudaimonia (happiness or flourishing) discussed in Greek ethics.
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