Saturday, January 20, 2018
Hedonism
After doing some further research on Mill, I found out that Utilitarianism is a derivative from Hedonism. A hedonist strives to achieve the highest amount, or net, amount of pleasure. Once the net pleaure is achived, the person will exprience stationary happiness. Utiltarianism os obviously derived from this philosophy, but what set the two thought apart is that utiltarianism, to some extent, acknowledges the notion of pain.
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I think it's also interesting to compare to another specific type of hedonistic philosophy that we've talked about, namely Epicureanism. If you can remember back to my presentation on Roman philosophies (how could you forget???), Epicureanism was one of the most important ancient schools of philosophy. Like other forms of hedonism, it essentially states that happiness should be the goal of a good life. However, many ancient Epicureans viewed pleasure differently from many Utilitarians. Utilitarians define happiness merely as pleasure or contentment and the lack of pain. Epicureans often thought of happiness and pleasure stemming from a particular lifestyle. For example, Epicurus thought the ideal life was a content one spent living in the country, surrounded by friends, and studying philosophy. In many ways, this is very different from Utilitarians who felt that we had an ethical obligation to act as would bring the most pleasure to the most people. It's interesting how these philosophies based in many of the same principles lead to such divergent answers on how one should live life.
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