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Varieties of Hedonism in Feldman's Pleasure and the Good Life

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2007

ALASTAIR NORCROSS
ALASTAIR NORCROSS*
Affiliation:
University of Colorado, [email protected]
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Abstract

In these comments on Fred Feldman's Pleasure and the Good Life, I first challenge the dichotomy between sensory and attitudinal hedonisms as perhaps presenting a false dilemma. I suggest that there may be a form of hedonism that employs the concept of a ‘feel’ that is not purely sensory. Next, I raise some problems for several of the versions of hedonism explored in the book.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 19 , Issue 3 , September 2007 , pp. 388 - 397
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2007

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References

1 Fred, Feldman, Pleasure and the Good Life (Oxford, 2004)Google Scholar. All page references are to this book.

2 See, for example, Peter, Unger, Living High and Letting Die (Oxford, 1996)Google Scholar, for highly persuasive evidence of this.

3 See Douglas, Ehring, Causation and Persistence: A Theory of Causation (Oxford, 1997)Google Scholar.

4 See Michael, Stocker, Plural and Conflicting Values (Oxford, 1992)Google Scholar.

5 When he presented this material to a graduate seminar in Syracuse, we (the long-suffering members of his seminar) asked him who, on his account of monism, the monists were. He wouldn't give us names, but he claimed they lived in Australia!

6 At the Utilitarianism 2000 conference, in Wake Forest, North Carolina.

7 For an example of the kind of argument I have in mind applied to the justification of personal commitments to people and to principles, see Alastair, Norcross, ‘Consequentialism and Commitment’, The Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 78:4 (December 1997), pp. 380–403Google Scholar.