PyramidHead
Contributor
Hedonism is the school of thought that says, do what feels good. Obvious counterexamples are when you should be doing something that doesn't feel good, but helps somebody in need. But if you decide to do that, you're choosing it over something else, presumably (primarily?) on grounds related to how you feel about doing it. Is there a sort of meta-hedonism at play, where people who don't always take the direct route to feeling good are nonetheless always doing things that are instrumental to that goal? Is it even possible in principle to voluntarily do something you don't want to do, compared to the alternatives? That's my main question, and I don't expect to get a complete answer, it's just something I've been mulling over.
More fundamentally, though, I am exploring the implications of a philosophy that suggests the following: maximize activities wherein you feel good about doing them, feel good while doing them, and feel good after doing them (with the upper end of each scale representing activities that are more worth doing by this metric). Supposing one could achieve a measure of success in this philosophy by doing things that harm others, but the negative consequences of harming others are vastly outweighed by the good feelings about/during/after whatever he does, is there really any point in condemning him? If all behavior is hedonistic in the way I suggested in the first paragraph, meaning everybody is just doing what they feel good about doing in the end, all I can reasonably do is try to distance myself from someone like that, or try to convince him of the feel-good side of altruism--both of which would, again, be self-serving endeavors on my part--but I don't see how I can consistently denounce him.
More fundamentally, though, I am exploring the implications of a philosophy that suggests the following: maximize activities wherein you feel good about doing them, feel good while doing them, and feel good after doing them (with the upper end of each scale representing activities that are more worth doing by this metric). Supposing one could achieve a measure of success in this philosophy by doing things that harm others, but the negative consequences of harming others are vastly outweighed by the good feelings about/during/after whatever he does, is there really any point in condemning him? If all behavior is hedonistic in the way I suggested in the first paragraph, meaning everybody is just doing what they feel good about doing in the end, all I can reasonably do is try to distance myself from someone like that, or try to convince him of the feel-good side of altruism--both of which would, again, be self-serving endeavors on my part--but I don't see how I can consistently denounce him.