Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T04:34:37.416Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Value, Reason and Hedonism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 2008

ALISON HILLS
ALISON HILLS*
Affiliation:
St John's College, [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

It is widely believed that we always have reason to maximize the good. Utilitarianism and other consequentialist theories depend on this ‘teleological’ conception of value. Scanlon has argued that this view of value is not generally correct, but that it is most plausible with regard to the value of pleasure, and may even be true at least of that. But there are reasons to think that even the value of pleasure is not teleological.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , March 2008 , pp. 50 - 58
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Scanlon, T. M., What We Owe To Each Other (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), p. 80.Google Scholar

2 Scanlon, What We Owe To Each Other, p. 87.

3 Scanlon, What We Owe To Each Other, p. 82.

4 Scanlon, What We Owe To each Other, p. 100.

5 Timmermann, Jens, ‘Too Much of a Good Thing? Another Paradox of Hedonism’, Analysis 65.2 (2005), pp. 144–6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Timmermann, ‘Hedonism’, p. 146.

7 Timmermann, ‘Hedonism’, p. 144.

8 Timmermann, ‘Hedonism’, p. 144.

9 Timmermann considers a response to the new paradox which denies that we have reason to maximize pleasure, on the basis that we are not capable of appreciating goodness under all circumstances. He rejects this response, questioning whether it is right to separate the theory of value from the theory of what we ought to do; and whether it makes sense to say that pleasure is good, independently of its being the kind of experience that we appreciate. By contrast, if we deny that we have reason to maximize pleasure because pleasure is not a teleological value, we do not separate the theory of value from the theory of what we ought to do; and we do not claim that the value of pleasure is independent of our appreciation of it.

10 Timmermann, ‘Hedonism’, p. 144.