A theory of Justice: Revised Edition

Five Types of Ethical Theory
(London, Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1930), pp. 186f.
22. 
The Methods of Ethics,
7th ed. (London, Macmillan, 1907), pp. 405–407, 479.
487
84. Hedonism as a Method of Choice

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feeling. Since it leads to the more familiar interpretations, the thesis that
the pursuit of pleasure provides the only rational method of deliberation
seems to be the fundamental idea of hedonism.
It seems obvious that hedonism fails to define a reasonable dominant
end. We need only note that once pleasure is conceived, as it must be, in a
sufficiently definite way so that its intensity and duration can enter into
the agent’s calculations, then it is no longer plausible that it should be
taken as the sole rational aim.
23
Surely the preference for a certain attrib-
ute of feeling or sensation above all else is as unbalanced and inhuman as
an overriding desire to maximize one’s power over others or one’s mate-
rial wealth. No doubt it is for this reason that Sidgwick is reluctant to
grant that pleasantness is a particular quality of feeling; yet he must
concede this if pleasure is to serve, as he wants it to, as the ultimate
criterion to weigh ideal values such as knowledge, beauty, and friendship
against one another.
24
And then too there is the fact that there are different sorts of agreeable
feelings themselves incomparable, as well as the quantitative dimensions
of pleasure, intensity and duration. How are we to balance these when
they conflict? Are we to choose a brief but intense pleasant experience of
one kind of feeling over a less intense but longer pleasant experience of
another? Aristotle says that the good man if necessary lays down his life
for his friends, since he prefers a short period of intense pleasure to a long
one of mild enjoyment, a twelvemonth of noble life to many years of
humdrum existence.
25
But how does he decide this? Further, as Santayana
observes, we must settle the relative worth of pleasure and pain. When
Petrarch says that a thousand pleasures are not worth one pain, he adopts
a standard for comparing them that is more basic than either. The person
himself must make this decision, taking into account the full range of his
inclinations and desires, present and future. Clearly we have made no
advance beyond deliberative rationality. The problem of a plurality of
ends arises all over again within the class of subjective feelings.
26
23. As Broad observes in 
Five Types of Ethical Theory,
p. 187.
24. In 
Methods of Ethics,
p. 127, Sidgwick denies that pleasure is a measurable quality of feeling
independent of its relation from volition. This is the view of some writers, he says, but one he cannot
accept. He defines pleasure “as a feeling which, when experienced by intelligent beings, is at least
apprehended as desirable or—in cases of comparison—preferable.” It would seem that the view he
here rejects is the one he relies upon later as the final criterion to introduce coherence among ends.
See pp. 405–407, 479. Otherwise the hedonist method of choice no longer provides instructions that
can be followed.
25. 
Nicomachean Ethics,
1169a17–26.
26. 
The Life of Reason in Common Sense
(New York, Charles Scribner, 1905), pp. 237f.
488
The Good of Justice

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It may be objected that in economics and decision theory these prob-
lems are overcome. But this contention is based on a misunderstanding.
In the theory of demand, for example, it is assumed that the consumer’s
preferences satisfy various postulates: they define a complete ordering
over the set of alternatives and exhibit the properties of convexity and
continuity, and the like. Given these assumptions, it can be shown that a
utility function exists which matches these preferences in the sense that
one alternative is chosen over another if and only if the value of the
function for the selected alternative is greater. This function characterizes
the individual’s choices, what he in fact prefers, granted that his prefer-
ences meet certain stipulations. It asserts nothing at all about how a
person arranges his decisions in such a coherent order to begin with, nor
clearly can it claim to be a first-person procedure of choice that someone
might reasonably follow, since it only records the outcome of his delib-
erations. At best the principles that economists have supposed the choices
of rational individuals to satisfy can be presented as guidelines for us to
consider when we make our decisions. But so understood, these criteria
are just the principles of rational choice (or their analogues) and we are
back once again with deliberative rationality.
27
It seems indisputable, then, that there is no dominant end the pursuit of
which accords with our considered judgments of value. The inclusive end
of realizing a rational plan of life is an entirely different thing. But the
failure of hedonism to provide a rational procedure of choice should
occasion no surprise. Wittgenstein showed that it is a mistake to postulate
certain special experiences to explain how we distinguish memories from
imaginings, beliefs from suppositions, and so on for other mental acts.
Similarly, it is antecedently unlikely that certain kinds of agreeable feel-
ing can define a unit of account the use of which explains the possibility
of rational deliberation. Neither pleasure nor any other determinate end
can play the role that the hedonist would assign it.
28
27. Thus to the objection that price theory must fail because it seeks to predict the unpredictable,
the decisions of persons with free will, Walras says: “Actually, we have never attempted to predict
decisions made under conditions of perfect freedom; we have only tried to express the effects of such
decisions in terms of mathematics. In our theory each trader may be assumed to determine his utility
or want curves as he pleases.”