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Is the esse of intrinsic value percipi?: pleasure, pain and value

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

T. L. S. Sprigge
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Extract

In this paper I shall speak sympathetically of a hedonistic theory of intrinsic value which, ignoring any other such theories, I shall simply call the hedonistic theory of value. How far I am finally committed to it will partly appear at the end.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 47 , September 2000 , pp. 119 - 140
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2000

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References

1 The suffix ‘able’ of course has no normative force such as it has in ‘desirable’, nor does it imply merely what can be pleasant on analogy with ‘visible’.

2 Santayana defined ‘beauty’ as ‘pleasure objectified’ in Santayana, George, The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1896CrossRefGoogle Scholar), chapter 1, §11. Santayana, of course, was no idealist.

3 A painting as presented to vision is a component in an experience, but it would be unnatural to call it an experience, though an idealist sounding language in which everything is called an experience is strangely current (e.g. the millennium-dome experience).

4 Moore, G. E., Principia Ethica (Cambridge University Press, 1954, first published 1903), pp. 83–4Google Scholar.

5 On looking up a point just recently in Moritz Schlick's The Problems of Ethics I realised that I have probably been to some considerable extent influenced by him in the development of the suggestions in what follows about pleasure and pain, as values and motivators. See Moritz, Schlick, trans. David, Rynin, Problems of Ethics (New York: Dover Publications, 1962Google Scholar, being the 1939 translation of Fragen der Ethic first published 1930).

6 Royce, Josiah, The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (Gloucester, Mass:Peter Smith, 1965), pp. 156–62Google Scholar.

7 The astute reader may realise that, as a panpsychist (see below) I hesitate as to whether all forms of consciousness allow of any such ability to learn at all. Maybe there is learning in the so-called inanimate world, but maybe, as I suppose science suggests, there is not. But even if not I should suggest that there is some kind of necessary movement towards the pleasurable and away from the painful as they occur and that this is the noumenal grounding of the laws of nature.

8 I am inclined to say that consciousness can only be causally linked to an organism in a way which allows this tendency to prompt to activity which has been hedonically valuable in the way indicated.

9 See my The Vindication of Absolute Idealism (Edinburgh University Press, 1983)Google Scholar, especially chapters 3 and 4.

10 ibid., chapter 4.

11 A return to the introspective investigation of mental phenomena (such as ‘ideas’) is certainly called for. Why is it that I at least can imagine sounds so much more adequately than colours?

12 Lewis, C. I., The Ground and Nature of the Right (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), p. 43Google Scholar.

13 Although I did not use the expression there, Part Two of my The Rational Foundations of Ethics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1988)Google Scholar is, in effect, a defence of way-of-life utilitarianism.

14 For example, even when a cost/benefit analysis may favour vivisection, way of life utilitarianism may condemn it as incompatible with the spirit of the best form of life possible for us.

15 Bentham, Jeremy, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, chapter IVGoogle Scholar.

16 There is a difficulty, however, in the idea that probability figures in ultimate truth rather than in human thought.

17 For more detail see my (Rational Foundations), chapter VII.

18 Much of G. E. Moore's classic critique of J. S. Mill's hedonism turns on this conception of pleasure. See Moore, Principia Ethica, §§ 47–8.

19 See my (Rational Foundations), pp. 235–238.

20 There is certainly a real world which determines facts about what sensations are available, but it is more the availability of the sensations, than the real world causing them, which constitutes the truth of ordinary physical object statements.

21 Moore, G. E., Philosophical Studies (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd, 1922), chapter VIIIGoogle Scholar.

22 See my (Vindication) chapters 5 and 6 or (Foundations) chapter X.

23 For an important discussion of the utilitarian tendency of ethics based on process metaphysics see Palmer, Clare, Environmental Ethics and Process Thinking (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.